Home Kits, Drugs, and Exercises: All Ways That Sears Was Amazon Before Amazon

The story of Sears is the story of American consumerism, its catalog is the picture book of a booming America of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Depending on the decade, consumers could order lumber, nails and paint, a house in a kit and a mortgage to finance it. Washable suits, arsenic pads for a fair complexion and your own gravestone were all on sale by mail from the "Great Book" pages first printed in 1893. Now 125 years old, Sears was Amazon

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before Amazon was Amazon.

Except now, Amazon is Amazon, one of two companies, including Apple, to briefly boast a $ 1 trillion market capitalization. And Sears – even with Sears.com, a movie in cybercafés and "shops in stores" – can only watch. The Deathwatch publishes Wednesday reports that Sears Holding Corp.

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, the parent company of the same name and Kmart stores with which it merged in 2004 under Eddie Lambert, hired advisers to explore the bankruptcy.

Lily: Sears would be a brand that has "no value" if it lapses.

It seems imminent that Sears is being made by an Amazon that is disrupting the retail business in the same way that Sears has done it. Walmart

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, with volume pricing and responsive logistics, has also played its part, but is also pursuing e-commerce buyers who prefer clicks to in-store visits.

Barron's: Sears bankruptcy could be a win for some homeowners

Here is an overview of how Sears has changed the retail and retail Sears – much of what Amazon is doing so well now.

At your door

Mail order has been a major contributor to East Coast products being in the hands of the developing Midwestern and Western countries. However, its creation can be considered to be in the right place at the right time: RW Sears, railway station manager, unloaded Excess inventory of gold watches from someone else for profit has finally found a partner in Alvah Roebuck and quickly sent the first Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog. The first retail store opened in 1925. The first Christmas catalog delighted and tormented the American children from from 1933, in full economic crisis, and was then officially called the "book of dreams" from 1968. The "general ledger" the general catalog was deleted in 1993.

Today, Amazon is competing with UPS

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and pay the US Post for the delivery of its goods, sometimes in less than two hours, in certain postal codes reserved for Premium members.

Sears

Everything and the kitchen sink

Sears sold big; in 1914, this included private power plants in rural areas and for a while you could buy a car directly from the catalog pages. But she was also selling groceries (live hens), which is not completely different from the way Amazon, who bought Whole Foods, cuts the supermarket today.

Sears

Sears brought consumers to what they did not even know they wanted. We quickly added the latest technologies, such as Thomas Edison's gramophone, radios and televisions that end up in American homes. The iconic brands have also helped, including the Craftsman branded home tools, which dates back to 1928 but has been sold to Stanley Black & Decker.

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Concentration

Sears had a few competitors, including Montgomery Ward, Hammacher Schlemmer and others, but none of them were fearsome enough to stop the Sears catalog as an icon, which had even been sent abroad by the US government to sentimental soldiers stationed abroad as easy propaganda.

Norman Rockwell painted some catalog covers from the Depression Crisis. Ted Williams, when he was not fighting the enemy and not playing the US pastime, was playing Sears; Lauren Bacall modeled her clothes, and later the model Cheryl Tiegs did. In the 1940s, retailer sales accounted for 1% of total US GDP.

Amazon, a target of critics who claim it crushes many retail communities, may never repeat Sears' place in American history. But the internet giant carries its own American symbolism, perhaps through its sales force and the speed with which it has attained this status; According to One Click Retail data, it accounted for about 44% of all e-commerce activity in the United States last year, or about 4% of total retail sales in the country. And like the albatross catalog, it is causing a loss of competitive buying as prices on e-commerce platforms become more uniform, says a discussion paper distributed this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research .

A house in a box

Today's movement and ecological awareness of prefabricated home building is inspired by Sears Modern Homes. About 70,000 to 75,000 home mail order kits were sold from 1908 to 1940 and the preservation fan clubs (as in Columbus, Ohio, below) celebrate them today. .

Some of the most extravagant kits came with over 30,000 individual pieces. Central heating, indoor plumbing and electricity have all been new developments in the design of the home that Sears Modern Homes plans incorporate into some styles.

Are home kits available on Amazon today? Of course that's what they are.

Sears

Money business

Sears eventually offered payment plans and mortgages, particularly when its home kit business resumed, but ended the financial practices after the seizures rose during the Great Depression. Sears offered insurance policies through its Allstate insurance company, including "war damage" policies in 1942.

The company became a conglomerate in the mid-twentieth century, adding brokerage services Dean Witter and Coldwell Banker Real Estate in 1981, creating Prodigy as a joint venture with IBM in 1984 and introducing the Discover credit card in 1985. sold its interests in the financial sector.

Amazon could end up with more than 70 million banking customers over the next five years if it starts offering check products and other financial products, according to a recent report from management giant Bain & Co.

Pharmacy by mail

The Sears catalog once sold opiates to "heal the tangled nerves". His pioneering research before the regulation of the Curious Panacea included advertisements for balms for baldness and potions that increased the size of the bust and promised to reduce it. She also sold aspirin and Alka-Seltzer.

Sears

Amazon lobbied its own pharmacy entry with a venture capital injection into the PillPak pills distribution business, and most people expect an almost complete surge in lucrative drug and drug business. medical devices. But some skeptics think that even the mighty Amazon could face difficulties, as in another highly regulated area: the drink.

Opinion: Investors misdiagnosed Amazon's initiative in the pharmacy sector