Sears was the Amazon.com of the 20th century
CHICAGO — For decades, one of the most recognizable return addresses in America was 925 S. Homan Ave. in Chicago, and it’s no wonder.
From 1906 to 1987, Sears, Roebuck and Co. shipped the ingredients of a middle-class life from a sprawling distribution center there. One building alone was a block wide and a quartermile long, and every inch of that space was needed. As the Chicago Tribune reported July 4, 1906, Sears was receiving 75,000 letters a day. In response, the mail-order company sent its 6 million customers everything from the prosaic (clothing, shoes, furniture) to the exotic (Brown’s Vegetable Cure For Female Weakness or a Giant Power Heidelberg Electric Belt for would-be he-men).
It offered kits to build a two-bedroom home, a fully assembled Sears Motor Buggy and white leghorn chickens. Many of Sears’ early customers were farmers, and as stores were few in rural America, the prices there were often exorbitant — until the Sears catalog provided an alternative. Its cover proclaimed Sears the “Cheapest Supply House On Earth.”
“The poor dirt farmer ain’t got but three friends on this earth: God almighty, Sears Roebuck, and Gene Talmadge,” observed Eugene Talmadge, Georgia’s populist governor in the 1930s and ‘40s.
Sears dubbed its 1933 Christmas catalog a “Wish Book,” an honorific customers extended to its basic catalog, which could run to more than 700 pages. Reportedly President Franklin Roosevelt said he’d like to give every Soviet citizen a Sears catalog. It was an encyclopedia of the American dream.
Sears’ role in that dream is fast fading. Sales are plummeting and stores are closing. Its recent annual report confessed doubts about the company’s “ability to continue as a going concern.” Its death might occur just as retailing has come full circle to where it was when Sears built its massive plant in what is now Chicago’s Homan Square neighborhood.
Today’s flourishing internet business is a 21st-century update on Sears’ 20th-century mailorder model. Ironically, Sears shifted to brickand-mortar retailing, which now seems as antiquated as the buggy whips and corsets on the yellowing pages of its catalogs.
On Chicago’s West Side, the beginning of the end for Sears came on March 2, 1987. On their lunch break, 1,800 workers were told that the distribution center was closing, because the “facility was worn out.” Many lived nearby, in an impoverished black neighborhood,
“I guess they just wanted to have the damn computers do everything,” Kevin Brown, who worked there 12 years, told a Tribune reporter.
“I really was wishing I could have made 40 (years with Sears),” said Lorraine Anderson. “That would have come in October.”
Their co-workers felt blindsided by the news. The distribution center had been a part of life in the North Lawndale community for as long as they could remember.
“It marked the first major structure built by a still-young retailer that had plans to become the nation’s biggest,” the Tribune noted.
Sears’ story began on April 1, 1887, when Alvah Roebuck answered a want ad in a Chicago newspaper: “Watchmaker wanted who can furnish tools, State age, experience, and salary required. Address T 39.” Two days later, he got a letter from Richard Sears, who was selling watches by mail.
Sears and Roebuck became partners, established their firm in Chicago and revolutionized the mail-order business by offering a moneyback guarantee if customers weren’t satisfied with their merchandise. “We Can’t Afford To Lose A Customer,” the firm’s mantra, appeared in its catalog.
From watches, the partners branched out to jewelry, silverware and eventually a cornucopia of goodies. According to Kenan Heise, a former Tribune reporter and Chicago historian, Sears’ success so threatened storekeepers that some filched the catalog from neighboring mailboxes.
In 1897, Roebuck sold his interest in the company, as the Tribune noted when he gave a talk to the West Side Historical Society in 1940. Hit hard by the stock market crash of 1929, he returned to the company in 1933. He was working in the publicity department when he recounted the company’s past for West Side history buffs.
Sears was a talented salesman, but that virtue was offset by his inattention to detail. Railroad cars of wholesalers’ products sat unloaded. Customers’ orders went missing or were belatedly filled. By contrast, Julius Rosenwald, whom Sears brought into the firm in 1895, was orderly to a fault and made no bones about it.
“It’s with pardonable pride that I confess to being one of the first to introduce scientific management in business with the hope of effecting comprehensive economics for the benefit of the consumer,” Rosenwald told the Tribune in 1911.
That insistence on rational planning was embedded in the blueprints for Sears’ corporate headquarters on Homan Avenue. The distribution center was only one part of an enormous complex that covered 40 acres, The various buildings offered more than 3 million square feet for corporate offices, presses to print the catalogs, storage for goods — which arrived at a built-in railroad depot — and kitchens that prepared meals for 9,290 employees.
In 1911, a Scientific Laboratory was added, so Sears could test the products it sold. The lab was known as “the watchdog of the catalog,” and promoted as a means to “give our customers the service they have a right to expect.”
The centerpiece of the complex was a 250-foot tower. Then the tallest building outside the Loop, and Sears’ corporate signature, it appeared on the catalog’s cover. Beginning in 1924, it housed a radio station on its 11th floor. Its call letters, WLS, stood for “World’s Largest Store.” Reflecting Sears’ customer base, its motto was: “Bringing The World To The Farm.” It signed on and off the air with a train whistle.
Rosenwald was not only a businessman but also a notable philanthropist. He felt a responsibility to use his wealth for the benefit of those less fortunate than he was. That included his employees, Richard Sears having retired in 1908.
Accordingly, the North Lawndale complex included an athletic field, a running track and tennis courts. Workers were invited to take their lunch breaks in a formal garden with a pergola and classical pavilions.
A year after Rosenwald retired as Sears’ president (though staying on as chairman), the company set off in a new direction. In 1925, it opened a retail store in the Homan Avenue complex that was so successful that others followed. The company became a retail chain with a mail-order business on the side. In 1993, it issued its last general-merchandise catalog. Eventually, a slow slide began that escalated into its current free fall. At the Homan Avenue complex, the Sears store and Merchandise Building, where products were shipped, are gone. The athletic fields have been replaced by a parking facility. But the tower is still there, and spring flowers are blossoming in the formal garden, just as they did when the company’s 60-piece band gave concerts there.
The Administration Building, where orders were processed, and the Power House remain. Their stolid look bears witness to an era when money-back guarantees carried more weight than designer labels. The Printing Building’s name is carved in the distinctive lettering architects then favored, marking it as the keystone of Sears’ golden years. Off its presses rolled the veritable bible of Americans who demanded honest value for whatever they could afford to spend. In the Sears catalog, many a product was offered at ascending price levels, their relative quality was labeled: “GOOD, BETTER, BEST.”