Sears History Company10/14/2021
From its start as a 19th-century mail-order firm, to its heyday on Main Street and in suburban malls, and from its late 20th-century reorientation toward credit and financial products to its attempted return to its original retail identity, Sears has mirrored the ups and downs of the American economy. The growth of the catalog format is an early indicator of the vision of the company, and the success it would achieve through a dedication to meeting customers’ needs with quality. Opened its first retail store and catalog center on Chicago’s west side. In 1925, Sears, Roebuck & Co. Began as a watch store in 1893.Chicago landmark designation ordinance passed by City Council. As with all Sears products, Craftsman tools were not manufactured by Sears during that company's ownership, but made under contract by various other companies.The final district boundary and description would be defined in a. For better and for worse, Sears is a symbol of American capitalism.Sears, Roebuck and Co.,3 commonly known as Sears, is an American chain of department stores founded by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck in.Craftsman is a line of tools, lawn and garden equipment, and work wear.Originally a house brand established by Sears, the brand is now owned by Stanley Black & Decker. It played a key role in the diffusion of mass consumer culture and commercial values. It helped atomize the industrial economy through manufacturer outsourcing in the 1970s and 1980s. It drove the suburbanizing wedge of postwar shopping malls.It educated millions of shoppers about mail-order procedures, such as shipping, cash payment, substitutions and returns. Titled the Book of Bargains and later, The Great Price Maker, the famous Sears catalog expanded in the 1890s from featuring watches and jewelry to including everything from buggies and bicycles to sporting goods and sewing machines. Government regulation also aided the company's growth, with the Rural Free Delivery Act of 1896 underwriting its distribution chain by expanding mail routes in rural areas.In an era when print media reigned supreme, Sears dominated the rural retail market through its huge catalog, an amazing work of product advertising, consumer education, and corporate branding. Mail-order firms like Sears were able to penetrate underserved rural areas by leaning on new infrastructure, such as the railroads that linked far-flung regions of the country. Julius Rosenwald, a Chicago clothing merchant who became a partner in the firm in 1895, directed its rapid growth, expanding into new products and ever-broader territory. The company was founded as a modest mail-order retailer of watches in the 1880s by Richard W.
Sears History Company How To Run AAny customer could see how his merchandise was received and held, how his orders were filled and shipped out, and where the catalog itself was published. A full-page illustration of the plant, in all its bright redbrick glory, graced the back of the Sears catalog. The company built a massive Chicago distribution complex in 1906, which occupied three million square feet of floor space. Cutting costs and tightly controlling distribution fueled its rise to power. Sears taught Americans how to shop.Sears also demonstrated how to run a business. “We solicit honest criticism more than orders," the 1908 catalog stated, emphasizing customer satisfaction above all else.![]() By 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression, it operated more than 300 department stores.Growth continued even during the economic downturn, because Sears wisely championed an aesthetic of thrift. Wood, who had formerly worked with mail-order competitor Montgomery Ward, Sears initiated a rapid expansion outside of urban centers. Under the managerial leadership of Gen. Sears navigated the challenge brilliantly when it opened its first department store in Chicago in 1925. Similarly, mail-order firms like Sears faced potential loss of their markets as the nation urbanized 100 years ago and entered the automobile age. Bricks-and-mortar retailers today have to contend with new consumer habits brought about by e-commerce. In the United States, the number of Sears stores passed 700 by the mid-1950s. By the end of the Depression decade, the number of stores had almost doubled.After World War II, still under Wood’s leadership, Sears continued to open new stores across North America, in the bustling new shopping centers populating the expanding suburban landscape. Sears outlets were spare, catering to customers who were interested in finding good value, to meet practical needs. As big box stores began to dominate the country, the department store industry responded through mergers, reorganization and experimentation with the department store category itself. The market became bifurcated as prosperous upper-middle class shoppers turned to more luxurious traditional department stores, while bargain seekers found lower prices at the discounters than at Sears.In 1991, Walmart overtook Sears as the nation’s largest retailer. Skyrocketing inflation meant low-price retailers such as Target, Kmart and Walmart, all founded in 1962, lured new customers. Together, the two chains, along with Montgomery Ward, captured 43 percent of all department store sales by 1975.Sears wouldn't really lose any footing until the 1970s, when new challenges emerged. Penney, it became a standard shopping mall anchor. Sears benefited from being a pioneer chain in a landscape of largely independent department stores. Many times, the firm’s management pushed back against forces that benefited workers. But Sears embodied many of the uglier aspects of American capitalism, too. In 2003, however, it tried returning to its retail core, selling its credit and financial business to Citigroup for $32 billion.There is a tendency to look at Sears’s decline, and the potential loss of a grand icon of American business, with fond nostalgia. Its credit card business, for example, accounted for 60 percent of its profits at the turn of the 21 st century. Sears moved into insurance and financial services. African-American boycotts against Sears in the 1930s, for example, exposed racist hiring practices in the late 1960s, welfare-rights activists revealed the firm’s discriminatory credit policies. Like other department stores, Sears contributed both to structural and daily acts of racism, against customers and workers. Company leaders resisted 20 th-century progressive social movements that sought economic equality for African Americans and women. Best app uninstaller macThe author of the award-winning From Main Street to Mall: The Rise and Fall of the American Department Store (Penn Press, 2015), she comments on American and UK retail on Twitter at She wrote this for Zócalo Public Square. For historians like myself, who see business as a social institution through which to view and critique the past, the end of Sears will mean more than just one less place to buy my socks.Vicki Howard is a Visiting Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Essex.
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