In August 1895, they bought Roebuck's half of the company for $75,000 ($2.6 million today), and that month the company was reincorporated in Illinois with a capital stock of $150,000 ($5.3 million today). Sears offered Roebuck's half of the company to Chicago businessman Aaron Nusbaum, who in turn brought in his brother-in-law Julius Rosenwald, to whom Sears owed money. Roebuck decided to quit, returning later in a publicity role. By 1896, dolls, stoves, and groceries were added to the catalog.ĭespite 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. 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 1895, the company was producing a 532-page catalog.
Sears built an opposite business model by offering in their catalogs a larger selection of products at published prices.īy 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 ). Prices were negotiated and relied on the storekeeper's estimate of a customer's creditworthiness. and began to diversify the product lines offered in their catalogs.īefore 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. On September 16, 1893, they renamed the company Sears, Roebuck, and Co. 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. In 1889, Sears sold his business for $100,000 ($3 million in 2021 dollars) and relocated to Iowa, planning to be a rural banker. 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. That year, he met Alvah Curtis Roebuck, a watch repairman. He started a mail-order watch business in Minneapolis in 1886, calling it the R.W. Sears purchased them and sold them at a low price to the station agents, making a profit. While he was in North Redwood, a jeweler refused delivery on a shipment of watches. Sears moved across the state to work as a railroad station agent in North Redwood, then Minneapolis. In 1879, his father died shortly after losing the family fortune in a speculative stock deal. Richard Warren Sears was born in 1863 in Stewartville, Minnesota, to a wealthy family which moved to nearby Spring Valley. Īs of May 31, 2023, there were 16 full-line Sears stores, Sears Appliance & Mattress, and Sears Home & Life stores remaining. On December 12, 2022, Sears Authorized Hometown Stores, LLC, and affiliated debtor Sears Hometown, Inc., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and on December 26 announced the liquidation of the 115 largely owner-operated Hometown stores. Sears announced in 2021 that it would be selling its Hoffman Estates headquarters complex. Sears was based in the Sears Tower in Chicago from 1973 until 1995, and is currently headquartered in Hoffman Estates, Illinois. It announced on January 16, 2019, that it had won its bankruptcy auction, and that a reduced number of 425 stores would remain open, including 223 Sears stores. After several years of declining sales, Sears's parent company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on October 15, 2018. Through the 1980s, Sears was the largest retailer in the United States. In 2005, the company was bought by the management of the American big box discount chain Kmart, which upon completion of the merger, formed Sears Holdings. ( / s ɪər z/ SEERZ), 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, with what began as a mail ordering catalog company migrating to opening retail locations in 1925, the first in Chicago.
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