What the Register Never Rang Up
In 1969, one company's sales equaled roughly one percent of the country's entire economy. It filed for bankruptcy in 2018.
The Corner of the Mall That Had Its Own Entrance
The store filled an entire anchor wing. It had its own door from the parking lot, its own auto center with a row of garage bays, and a catalog desk where a clerk could order anything the floor did not carry.
Inside, the departments stretched for what felt like a city block. Tools along one wall, appliances along another, lawnmowers near the garden door.
If you needed a washing machine, a socket set, a winter coat, and a car battery, you left with all four in the same cart.
Your parents had a credit card with the store's name on it. So did most of the neighborhood.
The store was Sears.
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The Store Was Only the Beginning
Sears, Roebuck and Co. was incorporated in Chicago in 1893. It had started seven years earlier as a mail-order watch business in Minnesota.
The first general merchandise catalog followed in the mid-1890s. Within a decade, it reached millions of rural homes that had no department store for miles. In parts of the country, it was known simply as the Consumer Bible.
Sears built house brands it owned outright. Kenmore appliances, Craftsman tools, DieHard batteries.
It wrote the specifications and contracted the manufacturing. The producers changed over the years. The labels never did.
But the deeper business lived further from the sales floor than anyone browsing the tool aisle would have guessed. In 1931, Sears created Allstate Insurance.
In 1981, it acquired brokerage firm Dean Witter and real estate company Coldwell Banker. In 1985, it launched the Discover Card.
A family could buy a house, insure it, invest their savings, furnish every room, and charge it all to a card with the company's name on it.
The register was the smallest part of the operation.
A Country Ran Its Household Through One Name
By 1969, Sears accounted for roughly one percent of the country's economy. Two-thirds of American consumers visited a Sears store at least once a quarter. Half of all households carried a Sears credit card.
At its peak, the company employed about 460,000 people and operated more than 800 department stores alongside over a thousand smaller specialty locations. Total revenue, including the financial units, approached $56 billion. The Sears Tower, completed in 1973, stood as the tallest building in the world.
The name on it was earned.
Specialists Took the Store Apart One Aisle at a Time
The model depended on being the only store a middle-class family needed. By the 1980s, specialists arrived and dismantled it department by department.
Home Depot sold tools in warehouses that dwarfed the Sears hardware aisle. Walmart sold everyday goods for less. Each competitor claimed a single section of the floor and did it better or cheaper.
Merchandising profits fell from more than $700 million in 1986 to $257 million by 1990. That same year, the financial divisions contributed the bulk of the company's earnings.
Sears responded by shedding the parts that actually made money. It spun off Dean Witter and the Discover Card in 1993 and completed the separation of Allstate by 1995. What remained was a retail operation that had been starving itself for over a decade.
The Tower Changed Names
Walmart passed Sears as the nation's largest retailer in 1990. The company that once towered over American retail spent the next two decades shrinking.
In 2005, hedge fund manager Eddie Lampert merged Sears with Kmart, combining roughly 3,500 stores under one holding company. The merger did not revive either chain.
Stores closed by the hundreds. The Craftsman brand was sold to Stanley Black and Decker for about $900 million in 2017.
Sears Holdings filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on October 15, 2018, with 687 stores and about 68,000 employees remaining.
What the Name Left Behind
Allstate remains one of the largest property insurers in the country. Discover processes billions in transactions each year.
Craftsman tools sell in new packaging at a competitor's hardware store.
The name came off the tower.
The brands never left the shelf.
