“After The Bible, What Book Did Americans Rate As Their Favourite In 1933?”
TITANSOFTRIVIA.COM
QUESTION OF THE DAY
January 11, 2021
The answer is the Sears Roebuck catalog. The U.S. Sears, Roebuck & Company – commonly known as just Sears – is one of the great stories of American business. Founded in the 1886 by Richard W. Sears and Alvah C. Roebuck, the company began as a small mail-order watch company. Over the next 100 years, the company would grow, thrive, and navigate some the dramatic economic and culture changes of the cetury. It became the anchor of countless American malls, the largest retailer, and the namesake of the country’s largest building.
Fun Facts about Sears
1. The Company was founded in Minneapolis – not Chicago
Sears is famous for operating out of the iconic Sears Tower in downtown Chicago before eventually moving to its headquarter in Hoffman Estates, a Chicago suburb. But the company was not started in Chicagoland. It was founded by Richard Sears in Minneapolis, Minnesota. However, the very next year, in 1887, he moved to Chicago where he met Alvah Roebuck. Roebuck was able to repair watches, and they added the mail-order component to the business .
2. Mail-order was a retail innovation
Prior to the late-1800s, it was difficult to get around the United States. Everyday household products were typically made locally because it was difficult and costly to transport them anywhere else. This all changed with the advent of the railroad. With the rails, both people and products could easily move from one part of the country to another. With this, the U.S. Postal Service also began using the rails and expanding its coverage with mail trucks, beginning free rural delivery in 1896. Consumers in rural areas that had formerly been serviced only be a single general store and post office could now order products through the mail and have them delivered to their front door steps. The products could be made hundreds or even thousands of miles away, sent by rail to the nearest city, and then delivered. This a was an absolutely huge innovation not unlike the rise of ecommerce.
Sears & Roebuck were pioneers in mail-order marketing. They chose watches as their intitial focus, but it soon became clear that it wasn’t their expertise in watches that would make them great. It was their ability to sell anywhere in the country through the U.S. Mail.
3. Sears revolutionized how we buy through…. catalogues
In 1895, a wealthy Chicago clothier named Julius Rosenwald saw the success that Sears & Roebuck was beginning to have. He bought out Roebuck’s stake, reorganized the business, and created the first catalogue. Prior to this, consumers found the watch or other Sears product they wanted by either speaking with a phone customer service representative or by looking at a black & white product listing sheet. Rosenwald made the products come alive.
The catalogue allowed him to describe the products and include pictures. Not only did it save the company time because consumes were educated before calling, but it became a marketing vehicle. By incurring an upfront cost to create the content, print the catalogue, and mail it, he was taking a risk. But the payoff was huge. Consumers received the catalogues and placed orders in droves. Sears grew exponentially, and the Sears catalogue became a familar site in homes around the United States. In 1909, Rosenwald became the president of Sears.
4. Sears revolutionized how we buy through…malls
As if revolutionizing American retail with the catalogue was not enough, there was another even bigger innovation in store for Sears. In 1925, Sears opened its first physical store. The automobile had started to climb in popularity, and Americans were able to go to larger stores that may not be in their neighbordhood. Sears was selling many, many goods and needed fairly large stores (by the standards of the day), and it was considered very unconventional to open stores at the time that were not in downtown areas. But the strength of the brand, the variety of products, and the rise of the automobile made Sears retail store strategy a huge success. It only took six years for the sales from its physical retail stores to surpass its mail order sales. By the time suburban sprawl began in the late 1940s, Sears was perfectly positioned to open even larger stores and became one of the primary tenets in malls througout America.
4. Sears revolutionized how we buy…insurance
In 1931, Sears was making money – lots of money – and wanted to diversify outside of just retail sales. It opened a new subsidiary called Allstate Insurance and began positioning insurance salesmen within the stores. It was sort of an early day kiosk, and this was at a time when buying insurance was a farily time intensive process. Consumers had to make an appointment with a local agent, travel to his or her office, and take a meeting. Allstate made it “one-stop-shopping” to pick up insurance along with your sheets and dish towels. The success of Allstate was the begining of Sears diversification strategy that would see them create other brands in reatail such as Kenmore, Craftsman, DieHard, Silvertone, Supertone, Toughskins, Dean Witter and other brands outside of retail such as Coldwell Banker real estate, Prodigy, and the Discover credit card. Even with the multiple downsizings and bankruptcies in recent years, Sears and the companies it has spun off still employee nearly 150,000 people in the Chicago area.
5. Sears revolutionized how we buy…homes
It seems crazy to think about today, but as Sears diversified into more and more products, there goal was simply to be the company that US consumers could shop at to fill the vast majority of their homes. That only left one product to conquer- the home itself.
Between 1908 and 1940, Sears Modern Homes sold and constructed approximately 75,000 such homes across the country. These homes were purchased via mail order – yes, mail order! The gradual diversifThe company’s first 44-page Book of Modern Homes and Building Plans, issued in 1908, was met with rave reviews. Eventually, there would be over 447 different designs to choose from based upon the customizable features of each home. These were extremely well-built homes that have stood the test of time
6. Sears was the largest US retailer until the 1980s
For most of the 20th century, Sears was the largest US retailer. It wasn’t until the 1980s that it was surpassed by Kmart. By the early 1990s, Walmart had surpassed both and had more sales than any retailer in the world – or any company for that matter. Has anyone ever rejected the grammy? Yes, it has happened a couple of times. In 1991, Sinead O’Connor was awarded for Best Alternative Album for her album Not Want What I Haven’t Got. Her absence from the program, in combination with her letter passionately detailing why she wouldn’t participate in the ceremony, is still controversial cocktail conversation. By maintaining her absence, she protested against the ‘extreme’ commercialism of the Grammy Awards. Kanye West also skipped the ceremony when he earned multiple grammys, but he didn’t reject them. He just…had other places to be.