Behold — the Amazon.com of 1902!
Here is the cover of a replica version of the 1902 Sears-Roebuck catalog that I fished out of the dumpster at our North Boulevard quadplex circa 2001. It had belonged to an old lady who lived across the hall who was in the process of settling her affairs on this earth; I remember talking to her one time at the dumpster, where we frequently met, and she was greatly disturbed because “It’s a Grand Old Flag” was blasting itself into her mind and she wanted to know if I could hear it, too. I could not.
I guess this was the world she had grown up in. She was a small town Texan, probably born around 1915, and so her upbringing would have far more resembled the oe this catalog catered for than the world of 2002. I sometimes wonder if the world I was born into in 1970 had more in common with 1902 than 2022.
TV, but only four channels. No VCR. No cable. No computer. No microwave. Everybody smoking everywhere. Lead paint and gas. DDT and acid rain. Radio still a powerful medium. People still wrote letters, knew cursive handwriting.
Yes, the automobile had come along and changed everything, from eliminating jobs like wagonmaster, blacksmith, and livery boy, to drastically altering the urban landscape, but did the car change the planet as much as the Internet had? It might still be too soon to tell, but I am beginning to believe the ‘net has been the more profound of the two changes.
And yet there’s this paradox — Amazon destroyed Sears just as Sears destroyed a great many small town merchants by doing the same exact thing: mailing things to people who wanted certain things not locally available. Sears simply forgot how to do what made them an icon of American capitalism.
Anyway, this book is a hoot, a window into the old and weird America that was weirder than we ever thought. And I didn’t realize until I began work on this post, like Amazon, Sears had no brick and mortar stores until decades into its status as world dominators on the mail-in trade. I’d assumed that the company had begun with a beloved department store in Chicago, but nope, it had its origins in Richard Sears’s mail-order watch sales and repair business. Sears added more and more products to his mail-in line, and realized there was a vast market out there in the American hinterlands that was tired of trundling into town in their wagons only to be fleeced by local merchants on everything from rifles and desks to picture frames to gaslights. (Or in the case of African-American customers, humiliated and fleeced.) Sears would often them these same goods at low prices that generally didn’t require an installment plan, nor skin of a certain shade to come through the front door.
It was 20 odd years into the golden age of the catalog that Sears — by then under the direction of late-arriving junior partner Julius Rosenwald — realized that they should go brick and mortar. It was the 1920s, and by then America was approaching a balance between its urban and rural populations. Rosenwald saw that that America’s rural heritage was rapidly becoming a thing of the past, so for Sears, the future was in bringing in as much of that treasure-ripping catalog as possible and offering it for sale under one roof.
As would be common with Sears, there was a slight departure from conventional thinking: even in the 1920s, and forever after, Sears put these department stores in whatever passed for the suburbs in those days. Downtown Houston proper has never had a Sears*. Midtown was always the closest, and just thinking of that place, I am instantly slammed with the smell of popcorn and chocolate from the candy counter near the escalators.
Business boomed. Roebuck faded from the scene, his place taken by Rosenwald, whose name, by rights, should be the one by which we know the company today. It was Rosenwald who ushered the business into the 20th Century via urbanizing and adding vast new product lines, and who also bailed the company out of a near-fatal liquidity crisis in 1921, and then spent all his spare time building schoolhouses in the South for Black children. There is one such Rosenwald School in West Columbia:
Rosenwald sold off the pile below for an even bigger facility….
So by the 1940s Sears had you coming or going, rural or urban. Or suburban — a huge chunk of their postwar business was as an outfitter to the suburban lifestyle — lawnmowers, patio furniture, barbecue pits, croquet sets, car repair, tools. Maybe even your very house itself — from 1908 to 1940, you could purchase ready-to-assemble kits:
You could get almost anything from the Sears catalog, even in this 1902 edition.
Wanna gun? There are 40 pages of entries including shotguns, rifles, pistols, ammo, and then various accessories including bandoliers to rifle sheaths and holsters. This was amid the big hoop-wheeled bicycle craze and there are pages and pages of them, too. (And of course a purpose built bicycle rifle — a sort of folding stock carbine.)
There were racy pics of women modeling their unmentionables and even an instructional sex manual for sale. Turns out sex was not invented at Woodstock….
In those devil-may-care days prior to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration, we have the “White Ribbon Secret Liquor Cure” with which the spouses of alcoholics were encouraged to adulterate their suffering partners’ food and drink because it was “worth it to try to save them” and, unusually for the time, the claim was made that “drunkenness is a disease.”
The whole medicine section kicks off with a full page ad for a snake oil cure-all called Vin Vitae — in the small print, we discover this “wine of life” contained both Port wine and crushed coca leaves; it probably would sell well today, if only the Man would allow it.
I seem to recall there being alcohol-based “cures'“ for addicts of morphine and morphine-based cures for booze hounds. (Since obtaining this book my ability to read its smaller print without readers is nil; and I can’t find my readers right now.)A product from the Princess company promised women it would both add length to hair and volume to busts — it was just sort of a medicine that made some things, but not others, grow.
Rosenwald’s hybridized mail-order / brick and mortar model of Sears continued its run of dominance until the 1970s. In 1931 they diversified into insurance, with Allstate agents in every store and policies arranged through the catalog, and created an array of in-house brands that became touchstones for the white picket fence American dream life: Kenmore and Craftsman; DieHard and Toughskins. You could take your car in for a tune-up while you stalked the aisles in search of a replacement lawnmower or upgraded TV set; junior’s school clothes or a top of the line washing machine.
Looking back, it seems as if the formal opening of the Sears Tower — then the world’s tallest building - marked the moment it all started going to shit.
What seemed like good ideas, even in retrospect — an attempt to diversify via stakes in Coldwell Banker real estate, Prodigy computers (in a joint venture with IBM), the launching of the Discover Card — all turned out to be disasters. Business historians believe Sears simply took its eye off the ball, forgot what they were good at - selling quality merchandise at reasonable prices. Walmart passed them by in sales in 1990. The catalog went away forever in 1993, taking with it 50,000 fulfillment jobs.
The decline has been slow and agonizing, my trips there fewer and fewer, with each time vastly more depressing than the last. On one final failed mission, I’d hoped to buy a simple lawnmower, but could not find either the mower or an employee…. I don’t know where one might be open as I type this. I seem to remember one in Clute or Lake Jackson; nope I was wrong: the last two Sears in Texas are in El Paso and the Rio Grande Valley town of Pharr.
The company’s honchos departed from the Sears Tower long ago, and there is not a single Sears left in the state of Illinois. They’ve suffered the indignities of being bought out by KMart — KMart! — and a Chapter 11 bankruptcy. They are slated to depart their corporate campus in a place called Hoffman Estates, Illinois, as well, when and if they can sell the sprawling property.
Meanwhile, Amazon has slithered into that void with its Internet age version of pretty much the exact same business model Sears once had — bringing a larger array of goods to a greater number of people via mail order. And like Sears, Amazon is now deeply invested in brick and mortar establishments.
It’s as if it is in the process of writing Ozymandias while Sears wears those same boasts as its epitaph.
“My name is Amazon, king of kings! Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
And meanwhile….
“Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Chicago Trib has a cool timeline here.
* Correction: Houston historian Mike Vance chips in the truth on the early days of Houston’s Sears: “Sears did have a downtown Houston location, then had the big store at Studemont and Allen Parkway that flooded in 1935, forcing them to move to Midtown. The empty Sears became the first location for Baylor Med when Houston lured it away from Dallas.”
We always bought our appliances there, the last being a stackable washer/dryer set in 2020…..but those were the first non-Kenmore items as we knew a repair may be looking for a warranty! Sad really, the older stuff was very well made, 2 fridges lasted over 20 years each…..will miss the opportunity to turn in old Craftsman tools for new!
In the mid 90s we had an art show (invitational) in the appliance area (The Refrigerator Magnet Show) which was a trip b/c there were all these artiste types mixing with the regular customers of the Midtown Sears. After Walmart came along, I began to realize how much I missed Sears. I went to Walmart to get a battery and they said it would be three hours so I left and went to Sears and it took 15 minutes.