Sears was, unsurprisingly, the founder of Sears, Roebuck and Company Complex. He expanded the concept of mail-order, in which families would be delivered items by mail. He started by founding the R. W. Sears Watch Company, creating a mail-order company that sold watches. Sears would write personal advertisements that would persuade Americans to buy the watches from the company by mail order. His company expanded to selling jewelery and diamonds, even offering a money-back guarantee.
Sears had found a partner, Roebuck, to start his new business, the Sears, Roebuck and Company. He sold his previous company for $100,000 and moved to Chicago. In 1893, their catalog had 193 pages, and by 1894, it had expanded to 504 pages. Sears wrote most of the catalogs, as well as most of the advertisements that he used to appeal to the rural families that would buy his goods. The catalogs contained a huge variety of items, from bikes to instruments to sewing machines. His catalog was so popular, it became known as the “Consumers' Bible.”
Although mail orders had not been a new concept, Sears expanded the idea and brought it to many Americans. Sears built the Sears, Roebuck and Company Complex as the headquarters of Sears until the building of the Sears Tower. In 1907, the company had annual sales totalling $50 million, which is around $1.3 billion today. Sears would then retire a year earlier due to declining health.
Sears was the lead up to mass consumerism in the form of supermarkets, and even ideas today such as online shopping. Amazon, the obvious controller of online shopping, is a clear superseding of the Sears Company. Both with its modern mail order concept, as well as the idea of no-questions-asked return policy, Amazon is the modern version in similar magnitude of Sears.
The Sears Tower, now known as the Willis Tower, was not built in Sears’s lifetime, but at its completion, 1973, it was the tallest building in the world. It is currently the third tallest building in the United States.
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It was very interesting to hear about the inception of these would be modern mail order companies. My family has been using Amazon since 2006, but one interesting to note is that our use of Amazon has quite literally grown exponentially. From one item purchased in 2006, we have purchased hundreds of items in 2019. We have even seen the expansion of Amazon Prime to supermarkets like whole foods. I don't think we're truly picturing how massive Amazon is. It's reported that 64 percent of us households have Amazon Prime which is close to 80 million people. The founding of sears has truly expanded into an online mail order based society.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.forbes.com/sites/shephyken/2017/06/17/sixty-four-percent-of-u-s-households-have-amazon-prime/#6c7b4e2a4586
I enjoyed reading your blog post as it expanded on the rise of consumerism discussed in class. I did some more research on the Sears Company and it turns out that their mail-order system was successful because it attracted the rural population. Due to the Second Industrial Revolution, new infrastructure such as railroad lines were in place and made it really easy for goods to be distributed in rural areas. In addition, Sears made their mail-order system simple and elegant allowing people unfamiliar with this new system to be able to quickly get the hang of it. Of course, none of these things would've done any good if they hadn't sold a wide variety of products that appealed to just about every group of people!
ReplyDeleteSource: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/rise-and-fall-sears-180964181/