Sears

In 1886 Richard W. Sears founded the R.W. Sears Watch Company in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to sell watches by mail order. He relocated his business to Chicago in 1887, hired Alvah C. Roebuck to repair watches, and established a mail-order business for watches and jewelry. The company’s first catalog was offered the same year. In 1889 Sears sold his business but a few years later founded, with Roebuck, another mail-order operation, which in 1893 came to be known as Sears, Roebuck and Company. In 1895 Julius Rosenwald, a wealthy clothing manufacturer, bought out Roebuck’s interest, and he reorganized the mail-order business. Sears meanwhile wrote the company’s soon-to-be-famous catalogs. The company grew phenomenally by selling a range of merchandise at low prices to farms and villages that had no other convenient access to retail outlets. The initiation of rural free delivery (1896) and of parcel post (1913) by the U.S. Postal Service enabled Sears to send its merchandise to even the most isolated customers. Rosenwald succeeded Sears as president of the company in 1909.

Between 1920 and 1943 Sears owned Encyclopædia Britannica, which it sold through the catalog. In 1924 Gen. Robert E. Wood joined the company and became its guiding genius for the next 30 years. Wood noted that the automobile was making retail outlets in urban centres more accessible to consumers in outlying suburbs and rural areas. To exploit this opportunity, he opened the first Sears retail store (in Chicago) in 1925, and the number of stores increased so rapidly that by 1931 retail sales had topped mail-order sales. The company flourished in the economic boom after World War II and was not seriously challenged as America’s largest retailer until the 1980s, when the Kmart Corporation surpassed it in total sales. Wal-Mart eventually surpassed both and became, before the end of the 20th century, the largest retailer in the world.

In the 1980s Sears diversified into such businesses as real estate and financial services, but by 1992 Sears began selling off some subsidiaries in order to concentrate on its lagging core retail operations. It discontinued its general catalog in 1993, and in 1995 it spun off its largest subsidiary, the Allstate Corporation, an insurance company founded by Sears in 1931. In addition to selling household goods, hardware, and clothing, Sears provided repair services for automobiles and for household items such as appliances, electronic equipment, and home heating and cooling systems.

In 2002 Sears purchased the retailer Lands’ End for nearly $2 billion. Three years later Sears was acquired by Kmart for some $12 billion, and both became subsidiaries of the newly formed Sears Holdings Corporation, the third largest retailer in the United States. Edward S. Lampert controlled nearly 40 percent of the corporation. Although Sears Holdings remained prosperous, sales at Kmart and Sears stores continued to decline. Lampert subsequently initiated a series of controversial moves, including the buyback of stocks, which some insiders claimed weakened Sears Holdings by leaving it low on cash. In addition, the corporation began selling various assets, and in 2014 it spun off Lands’ End. That year Lampert bought a controlling stake in Sears Canada, but it closed in 2018. During this time various Sears stores in the United States were shuttered, and in October 2018 Sears Holdings filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. In February 2019 a federal judge approved the sale of the holding company to Lampert’s hedge fund, ESL Investments, for $5.2 billion.