What Happened To The Sears Store? | When One Store Sold You Everything

Описание: What Happened To The Sears Store? | When One Store Sold You Everything

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In 1886, a twenty-two year old railroad agent in Minnesota bought a box of watches nobody wanted. He sold them along the train line, quit his job, moved to Chicago, and started a mail order catalog that would grow into the largest retail operation the world had ever seen. At its peak, Sears had three hundred and fifty thousand employees, stores in every mall in America, and a skyscraper in Chicago that was the tallest building on earth. You could buy socks, tools, tires, insurance, and an actual house from the same company. A full house, shipped to your door in thirty thousand pieces with seven hundred and fifty pounds of nails.

For Black families in the Jim Crow South, the Sears catalog was more than shopping. Nobody at Sears knew your skin color. You ordered what you wanted, paid the same price as everyone else, and it showed up at your door. White store owners were so threatened they organized public bonfires of the catalogs. Meanwhile, Sears president Julius Rosenwald funded over five thousand schools for Black children across fifteen Southern states.

Then Walmart, Kmart, and Target showed up. Sears diversified into financial services instead of fighting back. In 1993, they killed the catalog after a hundred and five years. One year later, Jeff Bezos started Amazon. In 2005, hedge fund manager Eddie Lampert took over and systematically stripped the company for parts. Sold Craftsman. Sold DieHard. Sold Lands' End. Spun off the real estate. Let the stores rot. In 2018, Sears filed for bankruptcy. Today, five stores are left. None of them are profitable. Lampert lives on a thirty-eight million dollar estate in Florida. The ninety thousand former employees whose pensions he threatened don't have yachts. The company that invented selling everything to everyone, delivered to your door, walked away from its own idea just as the entire world was about to adopt it.

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