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To appreciate the rise and fall of Sears, the supermarket giant who filed for bankruptcy Monday, is considering a 19th century pocket watch.
For most modern buyers, a pocket watch is boring. It is a potentially old-fashioned and potentially broken gerontic jewel. But for others, it's not just an artifact. It's a success: a silent symphony of a mite's waist screw, swirling in a strange harmony.
The same goes for Sears. Today's consumers look down on the retailer if they see it at all. Over the past five years, the company has lost nearly $ 6 billion and closed more than 1,000 stores. Not all bankruptcies are fatal, but Sears deposit reports seem rather funereal. Deeply indebted by his hedge fund owners, Sears is almost certainly a goner.
But anything that lasts 132 years, like Sears, deserves a real eulogy. In the story, you do not live longer than any human being without a few things.
The story of Sears begins with pocket watches. In the early 1880s, a railway agent named Richard Warren Sears came into possession of a wrecked watch box left behind by a local store. He sold them to other railway agents with a good profit. There was an idea: Sell the business of others.
With the help of a watch repairer named Alvah C. Roebuck, Sears opens a mail order business in Chicago – Sears, Roebuck. The idea was to send catalogs to Americans, using guaranteed delivery from US post offices in rural areas. At first, the catalog focused on his jewelry, such as watches and necklaces. In less than 10 years, the book was over 500 pages long. In a short time, the so-called consumer's Bible reads as an index of the entire US economy. The company sold dolls and dresses, cocaine and gravestones, and even houses to build oneself. Decades before technology analysts started talking about platforms, Sears was OG platform technology.
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