Posted on 10/15/2018 7:50:59 AM PDT by Borges
Sears was once the nation's largest retailer and its largest employer. In its heyday, it was both the Walmart and Amazon of its time.
Formed in 1886 by railroad station agent Richard Sears, the company started as a watch business in North Redwood, Minnesota. Sears moved to Chicago in 1887, and he hired watchmaker Alvah Roebuck as his partner. The first Sears Roebuck catalog, which sold watches and jewelry, was printed in 1896.
The Sears catalog was the way many Americans first started to buy mass-produced goods. That was an enormous shift for people who lived on farms and in small towns and made many of the goods they needed on their own, including clothes and furniture.
Sears' stores helped reshape America, drawing shoppers away from the traditional Main Street merchants. Sears brought people into malls, contributing to the suburbanization of America in the post-World War II era. Its Kenmore appliances introduced many American homes to labor-saving devices that changed family dynamics. Its Craftsman tools and their lifetime guarantees were a mainstay of middle-class America. Sears truly changed America.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
They had such images in their catalogs! Gasp! Why, I never noticed! I’m shocked ... shocked! that they could expose young men coming of age, such as I was, to such amazingly hypnotic .... I mean lewd pictures!
Yep. My mom had a Sears card and I wouldn’t have been caught dead shopping there. lol
When I was just a sprout, that and National Geographic were my two go-to publications for my entrance to puberty ...
Target should be next
**********
May happen as things do change but Target second-quarter profits
rose 19.1 percent to $799 million from $671 million a year earlier.
“If they had vision they might have been in the role Amazon is in today.”
I have no clue how the publisher of the biggest distribution of catalogs in the WORLD could see the internet and say “Nah. Not for us.”
Year after year. They could have owned online retailing from 1991. They ignored it. They even ignored it 20 some odd years later when others were doing it.
I’ve never liked Target and always hated our Walmarts. I won’t shop at either. I do a Walmart online order once a month for household goods but it’s all delivered right to my door.
When I go to visit my cousins in Oklahoma and Arkansas I’m always surprised at the difference in their Walmarts. They’re cleaner, less busy, and you aren’t afraid of their parking lots. You can actually park and run in for just 1 or 2 items. They do almost all of their shopping there. The difference between their Walmarts and ours are night and day.
Most of the technology you use today, email, network adapters, windows based OS and OOP was invented at Xerox. Look at them now....
One can only pray that the pervert company will soon be gone, maybe then joined by it’s partner in perversion Sonic driveby.
“Loved the Sears catalog.”
I remember the early catalogs well. They made half way decent toilet paper for the outhouse until they switched to glossy paper, then - not so much...
Heh heh, me too ;)
I can still recall the smell of the classic 1970’s catalogs as I turned the pages, especially the enormous toys section.
In their hay day, their top execs could not imagine today’s news.
Walmart, Amazon, Google, Facebook — you are forewarned.
At the beginning of the internet era, people didn’t know how Internet retailing would take off as it has .
Then again, once it became clear how profitable internet sales would be, retailers had to know that development of their internet presence would be a key to success.
That wasn't really the company's fault - their mower engine supplier (Tecumseh) began having problems when it was forced to change designs to comply with EPA regs. Tecumseh eventually moved entirely out of North America in search of cheaper labor, and I believe it finally shut down a year or two later. Their older engines were actually very good, though - Toro used them as well.
Sears finally switched most of the mower line to Briggs & Stratton engines around ten years ago. Maybe a few top-end models with Honda engines.
Wow. Those women’s underwear ads are quite revealing and the undergarments are quite form fitting aren’t they?
pages stuck together?
I remember Tecumseh. My dad gave me a gas powered Sears brand walk behind edger with a Tecumseh engine. My wife called it “the beast”. When I’d fire it up on the side walk, little kids playing on my street would run home screaming and hide. lol
Craftsman tools were fine for the consumer but were definitely not commercial quality.
I don’t know what you’re reading, but earnings are strong and the stock is near an all time high with a solid P/E and a good dividend (3%).
Target is doing just fine.
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