Sears (Johnsonverse)

Sears, Roebuck and Co., commonly known as Sears, is an American chain of department stores founded in 1892 by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck and reincorporated in 1906 by Richard Sears and Julius Rosenwald. What began as a mail ordering catalog company migrated to opening retail locations in 1925, the first in Chicago, Illinois. Through the 1980s, Sears was the largest retailer in the United States. In 1998, Sears was purchased by Johnson Industries. Since then, it has continued to be a prominent retailer worldwide.
Sears has been headquartered at the Sears Tower in Chicago from 1973 to 1993 and again since 1999.
== History ==
=== Beginnings ===
Richard Warren Sears was born in 1863 in Stewartville, Minnesota to a wealthy family which moved to nearby Spring Valley. In 1879, his father died shortly after losing the family fortune in a speculative stock deal. Sears moved across the state to work as a railroad station agent in North Redwood, then Minneapolis.
While he was in North Redwood, a jeweler refused delivery on a shipment of watches. Sears purchased them and sold them at a low price to the station agents, making a profit. He started a mail-order watch business in Minneapolis in 1886, calling it the R.W. Sears Watch Company. That year, he met Alvah Curtis Roebuck, a watch repairman. In 1887, Sears and Roebuck relocated the business to Chicago, and the company published Richard Sears's first mail-order catalog, offering watches, diamonds, and jewelry.
In 1889, Sears sold his business for $100,000 ($3 million in 2021 dollars) and relocated to Iowa, planning to be a rural banker. He returned to Chicago in 1892 and established a new mail-order firm, again selling watches and jewelry, with Roebuck as his partner, operating as the A. C. Roebuck watch company. In 1893, they renamed the company Sears, Roebuck, and Co. and began to diversify the product lines offered in their catalogs.
Before the Sears catalog, farmers near small rural towns usually purchased supplies, often at high prices and on credit, from local general stores with narrow selections of goods. Prices were negotiated and relied on the storekeeper's estimate of a customer's creditworthiness. Sears built an opposite business model by offering in their catalogs a larger selection of products at published prices.
By 1894, the Sears catalog had grown to 322 pages, including many new items, such as sewing machines, bicycles, sporting goods and automobiles (later produced, from 1905 to 1915, by Lincoln Motor Car Works of Chicago [no relation to the current Ford line]). By 1895, the company was producing a 532-page catalog. Sales were over $400,000 ($12 million in 2021 dollars) in 1893 and over $750,000 ($20 million in 2021 dollars) two years later. By 1896, dolls, stoves, and groceries were added to the catalog.
Despite the strong and growing sales, the national Panic of 1893 led to a full-scale recession, causing a cash squeeze and large quantities of unsold merchandise by 1895. Roebuck decided to quit, returning later in a publicity role. Sears offered Roebuck's half of the company to Chicago businessman Aaron Nusbaum, who in turn brought in his brother-in-law Julius Rosenwald, whom Sears owed money. In August 1895, they bought Roebuck's half of the company for $75,000 ($2.4 million today), and that month the company was reincorporated in Illinois with a capital stock of $150,000 ($4.9 million today). The transaction was handled by Albert Henry Loeb of Chicago law firm Loeb & Adler (now Arnstein & Lehr); copies of the transaction are still displayed on the firm's walls.
=== Early 20th century ===
Sears and Rosenwald got along well with each other, but not with Nusbaum; they bought him out for $1.3 million in 1903 ($39.2 million today). Rosenwald brought to the mail-order firm a rational management philosophy and diversified product lines: dry goods, consumer durables, drugs, hardware, furniture, and nearly anything else a farm household could desire.
Sales continued to proliferate, and the prosperity of the company and their vision for more significant expansion led Sears and Rosenwald to take the company public in 1906, with a stock placement of $40 million ($1.2 billion today). They had to incorporate a new company to bring the operation public; Sears and Rosenwald established Sears, Roebuck and Company with the legal name Sears, Roebuck and Co., in the state of New York, which effectively replaced the original company. The current company inherits the history of the old company, celebrating the original 1892 incorporation, rather than the 1906 revision, as the start of the company.
Sears's successful 1906 initial public offering (IPO) marks the first major retail IPO in American financial history and represented a coming of age, financially, of the consumer sector. The company traded under the ticker symbol S and was a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average from 1924 to 1999.
In 1906, Sears opened its catalog plant and the Sears Merchandise Building Tower in Chicago's West Side. The building was the anchor of what would become the massive 40-acre (16 ha) Sears, Roebuck and Company Complex of offices, laboratories, and mail-order operations at Homan Avenue and Arthington Street. The complex served as corporate headquarters until 1973 when the Sears Tower was completed and served as the base of the mail-order catalog business until 1995.
By 1907, under Rosenwald's leadership as vice president and treasurer, annual sales of the company climbed to roughly $50 million ($1.5 billion today). Sears resigned from the presidency in 1908 due to declining health, with Rosenwald named president and chairman of the board and taking on full control.
In 1910, Sears acquired the David Bradley Plow company. This acquisition would lead to the manufacturing of riding mowers, chainsaws, tillers, etc., in the Bradley Illinois factory.
The company was badly hurt during 1919–21 as a severe depression hit the nation's farms after farmers had over-expanded their holdings. To bail out the company, Rosenwald pledged $21 million ($319 million today) of his personal wealth in 1921. By 1922, Sears regained financial stability.
=== Boom years ===
==== Brick and mortar ====
Rosenwald decided to shift emphasis to urban America and brought in Robert E. Wood to take charge. Rosenwald oversaw the design and construction of the firm's first department store, built on land within the Sears, Roebuck, and Company Complex. The store opened in 1925. In 1924, Rosenwald resigned the presidency but remained as chair until he died in 1932; his goal was to devote more time to philanthropy.
The first store opened on February 2, 1925, as an experiment in the North Lawndale Sears, Roebuck and Company Complex. Despite its remote location on the outskirts of Chicago, its success led to dozens of further openings across the country, many in conjunction with the company's mail-order offices, typically in lower-middle-class and working-class neighborhoods, far from the main downtown shopping district. This was considered highly unconventional at a time when shopping was concentrated in city centers, but through World War II, there was an extensive streetcar network in Chicago and other US cities. However, rapidly increasing car ownership and the brand's huge popularity helped attract customers.
Sears retail stores were pioneering and broke the conventions of the time in three ways: their location away from central shopping districts, innovative store design, and unconventional product mix and retailing practices. Many stores at this time were designed by architect George C. Nimmons and his firms. The architecture was driven by merchandising needs rather than the desired outer appearance. This made the stores excellent examples of the modern architecture of the time – styles made famous by Bertram Goodhue and Eliel Saarinen.
Its stores were oriented to motorists. Set apart from existing business districts amid residential areas occupied by their target audience, they had ample, free, off-street parking and communicated a clear corporate identity. In the 1930s, the company designed fully air-conditioned, "windowless" stores, such as Sears-Pico in Los Angeles, which was the first to have an open plan selling floor (instead of breaking up the floor into discrete sections).
Sears was also a pioneer in creating department stores that catered to men and women. The stores included hardware and building materials. It de-emphasized the latest clothing fashions in favor of practical and durable clothing and allowed customers to select goods without the aid of a clerk. In 1933, Sears issued the first of its Christmas catalogs known as the "Sears Wishbook", a catalog featuring toys and gifts, separate from the annual Christmas Catalog. From 1908 to 1940, it included ready-to-assemble Sears Catalog Home kit houses.
Sears opened its first store in Mexico City in 1947.
From the 1920s to the 1950s, Sears built many urban department stores in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico (apart from, but not far from, existing central business districts), and they overshadowed the mail-order business. Following World War II, the company expanded into suburban markets and malls. In 1959, it had formed the Homart Development Company for developing malls. Many of the company's stores have undergone major renovations or replacements since the 1980s. Sears began to diversify in the 1930s, creating Allstate Insurance Company in 1931 and placing Allstate representatives in its stores in 1934 (Allstate was also used as a house brand on a range of motorized vehicles sold by Sears). Over the decades, it established major national brands, such as Kenmore, Craftsman, DieHard, Silvertone, Supertone, and Toughskins.
The success of Sears outdoor products raised the attention of the Federal Government and the antitrust laws. Sears purchased David Bradley to manufacture farm and lawn equipment. Its success was broken up in 1962 as they sold more plows than John Deere. Sears sold 1/2 of the David Bradley factory in Bradley, Il. to the Newark Ohio Company that was shortly acquired by Roper Industries.
Sears reached its pinnacle in the 1970s. In 1974, Sears completed the 110-story Sears Tower in Chicago, which became the world's tallest building, a title it took from the former Twin Towers in New York. Upon moving out of Chicago, Sears sold the Sears Tower to future owner Johnson Industries in 1988. In the sale contract of the tower, Sears has retained its naming rights to the building ever since. Sears moved to the new Prairie Stone Business Park in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, between 1993 and 1995. The Sears Centre is a 10,001-seat multi-purpose arena located in Hoffman Estates adjacent to the Prairie Stone campus. Sears moved back to the Sears Tower in 1999, retaining the Prairie Stone campus for administrative purposes.
==== Mail order ====
The Sears catalog became known in the industry as "the Consumers' Bible". The company sold to foreign customers, such as after the American occupation of Greenland in World War II, Philippines, among others, when locals ordered from catalogs left by soldiers. Novelists and story writers often portrayed the importance of the catalog in the emotional lives of rural folk. The catalog also entered the language, particularly of rural dwellers, as a euphemism for toilet paper, as its pages could be torn out and used as such. In addition, for many rural African-Americans, especially in areas dominated by Jim Crow racial segregation, the Sears catalog was a vital retail alternative to local white-population-dominated stores, bypassing the stores' frequent intention to deny them fair access to their merchandise.
However, as the nation urbanized, Sears's catalog business faced competition from city department stores. Rural America's population was slow-growing and possessed far less spending power than urban America.
=== Decline ===
In the 1980s, the company began to diversify into non-retail entities such as buying Dean Witter and Coldwell Banker in 1981. In 1984, Prodigy was launched as a joint venture with IBM, and the Discover credit card was introduced in 1985. However, these actions have been said to have distracted management's attention from the core retail business and allowed competing retailers to gain significant ground, culminating with Wal-Mart surpassing Sears as the largest retailer in the United States in 1990.
In the 1990s, the company began divesting itself of many non-retail entities, which were detrimental to its bottom line. Sears spun off its financial services arm, which included brokerage business Dean Witter Reynolds and Discover Card. It sold its mall building subsidiary Homart to General Growth Properties in 1995. Sears later acquired hardware chain Orchard Supply Hardware in 1996 and started home improvement store The Great Indoors in 1997.
The cost of distributing the once highly influential general merchandise catalog became prohibitive; sales and profits had declined. The company discontinued the catalog in 1993. It dismissed 50,000 workers who had filled the orders.
In 1992, California successfully sued the company for falsely finding things wrong with automobiles in for repair for other reasons. In 1997, criminal charges were made. In 1997, Sears sold 85% of its Mexico affiliate to Grupo Carso.
=== Johnson era ===
In 1998, Sears was acquired by Johnson Industries for $2.5 billion. After buying Sears, Johnson started making major changes to the company, such as restarting the Sears catalog, re-acquiring the Mexico affiliate, and making moves to rehabilitate Sears' image. By 2000, TBA. 
== Corporate affairs ==
===Logo===
File:Sears, Robuck & Co. letterhead 1907.jpg|Logo used in 1907
File:Sears Logo 1966.svg|Logo used from 1966 to 1984
File:Sears Logo 1984.png|Logo used from 1984 to 1994
File:Sears Logo 1994.svg|Logo used since 1994
=== Sponsorships ===
Sears has sponsored many entertainment and sporting events.
Since 2006, it has had the naming rights to an 11,000-seat multi-purpose family entertainment, cultural and sports center in Hoffman Estates known as the Sears Centre.
The company sponsored the television series Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. The company also underwrote the PBS television series Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, under the name The Sears-Roebuck Foundation, from the show's premiere in 1968 until 1992.
Through the Sears Auto Centers, the company sponsored the Formula Drift Darren McNamara Sears/Falken Saturn Sky drift car. It has sponsored the NASCAR Truck Series, using the Craftsman brand as the title sponsor, since the series' inception in the 1995 NASCAR SuperTruck Series presented by Craftsman. It sponsored the #10 Gillett Evernham Motorsports car of Scott Riggs for the September 2, 2007, running of the Sharp AQUOS 500 at California Speedway through its Sears Auto Center branch. However, Riggs failed to qualify for the event. In 2016, Craftsman became the title sponsor of the World Racing Group, World of Outlaws Sprint car racing series.
=== Employee relations ===
==Gallery==
File:Sears PDN.jpg|Mall entrance to the Sears store at Plaza del Norte in Hatillo, Puerto Rico in 2011.
File:1.8.09ParamusParkMallByLuigiNovi3.jpg|Mall entrance to the Sears at Paramus Park in Paramus, New Jersey in 2009.
File:Sears, Roebuck and Company Warehouse and Service Center -- Houston, Texas.jpg|Sears, Roebuck and Company Warehouse and Service Center in Houston] in August 2020. On the National Register of Historic Places
File:Sears Coral Gables (Miami, Florida) still open 19 March 2022 - 23.jpg|Inside a Sears Store at Coral Gables in Miami in 2022.
Category:Johnsonverse