Sears

Based on Wikipedia: Sears

The Company That Brought America to Your Doorstep

In 2011, Sears operated 2,705 stores across America. As of December 2025, five remain.

That single fact tells you everything about one of the most dramatic corporate collapses in American history. But to understand the fall, you first need to understand just how completely Sears once dominated American retail and reshaped how an entire nation shopped.

Before Amazon. Before Walmart. Before shopping malls became the cathedrals of American consumerism. There was Sears, Roebuck and Company, and for nearly a century, it was synonymous with American retail itself.

A Watch Salesman's Gamble

The story begins in 1879 with a family tragedy. Richard Warren Sears was sixteen years old when his father died, shortly after losing the family fortune in a bad stock deal. The comfortable life the Sears family had known in rural Minnesota evaporated overnight.

Young Richard needed work. He found it as a railroad station agent, first in North Redwood, then Minneapolis. It was unglamorous employment, but railroad stations in the 1880s were nodes in a vast commercial network. Goods flowed through them constantly. And one day, a shipment of watches arrived that would change everything.

A local jeweler refused to accept delivery. Perhaps he had overordered. Perhaps he simply changed his mind. Whatever the reason, Richard Sears saw opportunity where others saw inconvenience. He purchased the watches himself and sold them at discounted prices to other station agents along the railroad line.

He made a profit. More importantly, he discovered something about himself: he had a gift for selling.

By 1886, at just twenty-three years old, Sears had started the R.W. Sears Watch Company in Minneapolis. That same year, he met Alvah Curtis Roebuck, a watchmaker who could repair the timepieces Sears was selling. The partnership that would reshape American commerce had begun.

The Catalog That Changed Everything

In 1887, Sears and Roebuck relocated to Chicago and published their first mail-order catalog. It offered watches, diamonds, and jewelry. Nothing revolutionary there. But Sears understood something profound about rural America in the late nineteenth century.

Farmers and small-town residents were geographically isolated but not economically unimportant. They had money to spend but limited options for spending it. The local general store charged whatever it pleased because there was no competition. City dwellers could browse department stores and compare prices. Rural Americans were captive customers.

The mail-order catalog changed that equation entirely.

After a brief detour—Sears sold the business in 1889 for one hundred thousand dollars, roughly three million in today's currency, intending to become a rural banker in Iowa—he returned to Chicago in 1892 and established a new mail-order firm. On September 16, 1893, they renamed it Sears, Roebuck, and Company.

Then the catalog began to grow.

By 1894, it had expanded to 322 pages. By 1895, 532 pages. The product range exploded: sewing machines, bicycles, sporting goods, even automobiles. Dolls, stoves, groceries. If a farm family needed it, Sears probably sold it.

Surviving the Panic

Success, however, created its own problems. The Panic of 1893 triggered a severe economic depression that squeezed the company's cash flow and left warehouses full of unsold merchandise. Roebuck, perhaps more cautious by temperament than his partner, decided he'd had enough. He sold his half of the business.

This turned out to be a pivotal moment, though not in the way Roebuck might have imagined. His departure brought in new blood: first Aaron Nusbaum, a Chicago businessman, and then Julius Rosenwald, Nusbaum's brother-in-law. Sears actually owed Rosenwald money, which tells you something about the tangled web of nineteenth-century business relationships.

Rosenwald would prove to be exactly what the company needed. Where Richard Sears was a natural salesman, Rosenwald was a systems thinker. He brought rational management philosophy to a company that had grown somewhat chaotically. He diversified the product lines methodically: dry goods, consumer durables, drugs, hardware, furniture. If a farm household could desire it, Sears would sell it.

The partnership worked. Sears and Rosenwald got along well—though neither could tolerate Nusbaum, whom they bought out in 1903 for 1.3 million dollars.

Going Public

By 1906, the company had grown so large that Sears and Rosenwald decided to take it public. The initial public offering raised forty million dollars, equivalent to roughly one billion dollars today. To accomplish this, they had to incorporate a new company—Sears, Roebuck and Company, legally known as Sears, Roebuck and Co.—in New York State.

This IPO deserves special attention. It was the first major retail initial public offering in American financial history. Before this, the consumer sector wasn't considered serious enough for major stock market investment. Banks and railroads were where serious money went. Sears changed that perception. The company would trade under the ticker symbol S and join the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1924, remaining there for seventy-five years.

That same year, Sears opened its massive complex in Chicago's West Side—a forty-acre campus of offices, laboratories, and mail-order operations at Homan Avenue and Arthington Street. This wasn't just a warehouse. It was the nerve center of a retail empire, processing orders from millions of customers across the continent. The complex would serve as corporate headquarters until 1973.

The Retail Revolution

For decades, Sears remained primarily a mail-order business. But in 1925, the company made a decision that would transform American retail: it opened its first department store.

The location was unconventional. Rather than situating the store in downtown Chicago, where all the other department stores clustered, Sears built within its own complex in North Lawndale, on the city's outskirts. Industry experts thought this was foolish. Shopping happened downtown. Everyone knew that.

Everyone was wrong.

The store succeeded wildly, and Sears began opening more locations across the country. But these weren't ordinary department stores. They broke conventions in three crucial ways.

First, location. Sears stores appeared in lower-middle-class and working-class neighborhoods, far from traditional shopping districts. They were built for customers who owned automobiles—a growing demographic in 1920s America. While other retailers worried about foot traffic from streetcars, Sears provided ample free parking.

Second, design. The stores were designed by architect George C. Nimmons, who prioritized merchandising needs over external appearance. This made them excellent examples of modernist architecture, functional and efficient. By the 1930s, Sears was building fully air-conditioned, windowless stores with open floor plans—a radical departure from the compartmentalized layouts of traditional department stores.

Third, the products and customers. Sears stores catered to both men and women, which was unusual for the era. They sold hardware and building materials alongside clothing. They de-emphasized the latest fashions in favor of practical, durable goods. And they let customers browse and select merchandise without hovering salespeople—a novel concept at the time.

The Consumers' Bible

While the stores grew, the catalog remained central to Sears's identity. By the mid-twentieth century, it had earned a nickname: "the Consumers' Bible."

The catalog's influence extended beyond commerce. During World War Two, American soldiers stationed abroad left behind Sears catalogs, and locals in the Philippines, Greenland, and elsewhere began placing orders. The company found itself with an unexpected international customer base.

Novelists and storytellers frequently depicted the catalog's emotional importance to rural Americans. For isolated farm families, it was a window to a larger world, a promise that modern conveniences weren't reserved exclusively for city dwellers.

For many rural African-Americans living under Jim Crow segregation, the catalog served an even more vital function. White-owned local stores frequently denied Black customers fair access to merchandise—refusing to let them try on clothes, making them wait until all white customers had been served, or simply refusing service altogether. The Sears catalog bypassed all of that. Your money was as good as anyone else's when you ordered by mail.

The catalog also entered American vernacular in a more humble way: as a euphemism for toilet paper. In the days before indoor plumbing became universal, many rural outhouses kept a Sears catalog handy. Its pages served a practical secondary purpose.

In 1933, Sears began publishing a separate Christmas catalog called the Wishbook, featuring toys and gifts. For generations of American children, circling items in the Wishbook was an essential part of the holiday season.

The House That Sears Built

Between 1908 and 1940, Sears sold something remarkable: houses. Complete houses, shipped in pieces, ready for assembly.

These weren't crude shacks. Sears Catalog Homes came in dozens of styles, from modest bungalows to elaborate Colonials. The kits included pre-cut lumber, nails, shingles, windows, doors, paint, and detailed instructions. Some estimates suggest that Sears sold between seventy thousand and seventy-five thousand homes during this period.

Many of these houses still stand today, prized by architectural historians and homeowners alike for their quality construction. You might be living in one without knowing it.

Pinnacle

Sears reached its zenith in the 1970s. The company was so dominant, so confident in its future, that it built the tallest building in the world to house its headquarters.

The Sears Tower rose 110 stories above Chicago, claiming the title from the Twin Towers in New York. It was a statement of corporate ambition that few companies have matched before or since. The building remained the world's tallest for nearly twenty-five years.

At this point, Sears wasn't just a retailer. It was an ecosystem. The company had created major national brands that became household names: Kenmore appliances, Craftsman tools, DieHard batteries. It owned Allstate Insurance, which it had created in 1931. Sears credit cards were ubiquitous.

The company's influence touched nearly every aspect of American consumer life. Through the 1980s, Sears was the largest retailer in the United States. No competitor came close.

Diversification and Distraction

Then something went wrong.

In the 1980s, Sears began diversifying into non-retail businesses. It acquired Dean Witter, a brokerage firm, and Coldwell Banker, a real estate company. In 1984, it launched Prodigy, an early online service, as a joint venture with IBM and CBS. In 1985, it introduced the Discover credit card.

On paper, these moves made a certain kind of sense. Sears had millions of customer relationships. Why not sell those customers financial services alongside refrigerators and socket wrenches?

In practice, the diversification proved catastrophic. Management attention fragmented. While Sears executives focused on building a financial services conglomerate, competitors in the core retail business gained ground. Walmart, founded in 1962 by Sam Walton, had been growing steadily in smaller markets that Sears had neglected. In 1990, Walmart surpassed Sears as the largest retailer in the United States.

Sears never reclaimed the top position.

The Catalog Dies

By the early 1990s, the once-mighty catalog business had become a liability. Distribution costs had grown prohibitive. Sales and profits were declining. Rural America, the catalog's original customer base, represented a shrinking share of national purchasing power. Urban and suburban customers could simply drive to a store.

In 1993, Sears discontinued its general merchandise catalog. Fifty thousand workers who had processed orders lost their jobs. The Consumers' Bible had published its final edition.

The previous year, Sears had posted a loss of 3.9 billion dollars—the largest loss ever recorded by a North American retailer at that time.

Slow Decline

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Sears struggled to find its footing. The company divested its financial services businesses. It sold the Sears Tower in 1988 and eventually moved its headquarters to suburban Hoffman Estates, Illinois. It tried various strategies—acquiring hardware chain Orchard Supply Hardware, launching home improvement stores called The Great Indoors—but none reversed the fundamental decline.

In 2005, hedge fund manager Eddie Lampert engineered a merger between Sears and Kmart, another struggling retailer. The theory was that combining two weak companies might create one strong one. The math never quite worked out that way.

Under Lampert's leadership, Sears Holdings focused increasingly on extracting value from existing assets—selling off real estate, spinning off brands—rather than investing in stores or customer experience. Critics argued this was a slow-motion liquidation disguised as a turnaround strategy.

Bankruptcy and Beyond

On October 15, 2018, Sears Holdings filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company that had once defined American retail, that had built the world's tallest building as a monument to its own success, could no longer pay its bills.

Lampert's hedge fund purchased the remaining assets out of bankruptcy, but the trajectory was clear. Stores continued closing. As of December 2025, only five Sears locations remain open in the entire United States.

The Sears Tower—renamed Willis Tower in 2009—still dominates Chicago's skyline. The Craftsman tools and Kenmore appliances still exist as brands, though they're now sold through other retailers. And scattered across America, sturdy Sears Catalog Homes still shelter families, built to last longer than the company that sold them.

What Sears Means Now

The story of Sears is often told as a cautionary tale about disruption. The company that revolutionized retail by selling through catalogs failed to adapt when retail moved online. There's some truth to this narrative—Sears arguably had all the infrastructure and customer relationships needed to become Amazon before Amazon existed.

But the deeper lesson may be about the difficulty of maintaining excellence across generations. Richard Sears was a brilliant salesman. Julius Rosenwald was a brilliant manager. Robert Wood, who expanded the retail stores, was a brilliant strategist. Each era of the company's success depended on leaders who understood their moment.

The executives who diversified into financial services weren't stupid. They were responding to the conventional wisdom of their era, which held that conglomerates could create value through synergy. The strategy failed, but it wasn't obviously foolish at the time.

What's remarkable about Sears isn't ultimately its failure. It's how thoroughly, for how long, a single company shaped how Americans bought things. From the 1890s through the 1980s—nearly a century—Sears was there, a constant presence in American commercial life. The catalog in the farmhouse. The store in the suburb. The tower in the city.

Five stores remain. But the company's influence on American retail, on American architecture, on American culture itself, far outlasts any store count. Every retailer that ships goods directly to customers, every store that provides free parking and lets customers browse without pressure, every brand that built trust through consistency—all of them are, in some sense, Sears's descendants.

The company that brought America to your doorstep changed what it meant to shop. That change proved permanent, even when the company didn't.