Shoppers, workers have fond memories of Sears
Reminiscing galore as retailer files for Chapter 11 protection
When Pat Metzger learned a couple months ago that a local Sears in Billings, Montana, was shutting down, he had to stop by.
“When I think of Sears, I always think of meeting my wife there,” says Metzger, 54, who was a radio disc jockey doing a remote broadcast from the store when his wife-to-be, Geri, walked in 25 years ago. “I thought, ‘I will just check it out one more time’ and I could see that they were selling everything down to the fixtures. ... It was a little bit sad.”
With Sears filing for bankruptcy protection, many who’ve worked and shopped there are reminiscing about what the iconic retailer has meant in their lives.
It was a place where you could buy everything from a doll to a washing machine to a tombstone. But beyond being a shopper’s cornucopia, it was also, in many instances, the place where people fell in love, found lasting friendships and earned their first paycheck.
Karen Bovee, 67, worked for the company in Chicago in the late 1960s. “I worked in every department of Sears except for tombstones,” she says. “One of the best jobs I ever had was working in the toy department at Christmas. ... To see the faces on the kids – it was just heartwarming.”
She also met her husband, Dave, there. “I was his second choice,” Bovee says, recalling that he came in one day to meet another woman he wanted to date. “She wasn’t interested in him. In fact, she said ... ‘Well why don’t you talk to Karen?’ ”
They’ve been married for 48 years.
Sears also gave Bovee a gift that she’s never forgotten. “I went to probably 30 banks in the Chicago area, and I could not get a student loan,” she says. “So then I decided to go to the Sears bank. The only reason I got my student loan to go to the University of Illinois was because I worked at Sears.’’
Ellen Woodyard’s parents met while working in the iconic Sears Tower in Chicago after World War II. Her mother was an editor who would write letters to customers who were disappointed with a purchase, while her father was a junior ad writer.
Based on her parents’ stories, “it was a very happening place,” says Woodyard, 61, a special education teacher who lives in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. “They had a very highly educated staff. ... My mother was a classical musician, and she would start whistling some obscure classical piece, and someone over the divider would finish it for her.”
Woodyard also has vivid memories of her own. “We just loved the catalog,” she said of the book that was once a fixture in virtually every American home. “I would circle all the toys that I wanted.”
As recently as a couple of years ago, a trip to Sears still gave Woodyard a special feeling. “I always enjoyed going in with my fiancé and felt very grown up,” she says.
And while Amazon may now be the place where shoppers can get virtually any item, from books to furniture, Woodyard says its just not the same. Sears, she says, was “sort of an old-fashioned general store.”
James Frey, 31, who worked at a Sears home services store in the Chicago area from 2006 to 2009, remembers the caliber of his colleagues as well as that of the products they sold.
“The one thing that I loved about Sears was the quality of the people that you worked with,” says Frey, who recalled how Sears stood out for offering benefits to even part-time employees.
He also remembers how loyal the customers were. “Folks would go there for … brands they built,” Frey says. “Kenmore. Craftsman. And they had a variety of products that were reliable and stood the test of time.”
Mayra Samalea says that her first job was wrapping holiday gifts at a Sears in her hometown of Detroit when she was 17. When she moved to Florida in the mid 1970s and had a home of her own, she con- tinued to be a devoted customer. “Most of the appliances I have in my house, I bought there,” she says.
But when Samalea visited a Sears near Miami roughly one year ago, the difference between what she encountered and the stores of her youth was stark.
“Sears let that place go down,” she says. “I think people stopped going because they cut back on the employees, and the service that they were known for and also the merchandise. They were not keeping up with the trends.”
Noah Weisling, 21, a student at Indiana University, recalls regular visits to a Sears in Evansville with his father. “It was his favorite store,” he says, adding that his father’s family would go to Sears or Kmart to buy their new clothes for the year. “His family was from a small, rural farming community, and that’s all they could really afford.”
But while Weisling believes that “Sears made retail what it is today,” he isn’t sad to see it go. “I am an adamant believer in capitalism,” he says. “It lost.”
Still, even if the company ultimately closes its stores and fades away, many are unlikely to forget it.
John Bacon, a 43-year-old stay at home dad in Cicero, says that when his father died in 2013, “one of the few things I wanted were his Craftsman tools from Sears....He always talked about the fact that if (they) broke, he could walk into any Sears and replace it, no questions asked.”