[ad_1]
Now that Sears is bankrupt after 132 years of business, nostalgic journalists and shoppers are plotting the history of the department store, retracing its splendid climb and its equally remarkable retreat.
With its catalog system, Sears, Roebuck & Company was the Amazon of its time, an innovative pioneer of the early twentieth century, reminds the New York Times to its readers.
But Sears is more than a business story. He has also played a little known role as a disruptor of racial and identity politics in the United States. Thanks to a viral now Twitter feedAmericans discover a little known piece of the past of a famous brand.
Louis Hyman, a professor of history at Cornell University and director of his Institute for Workplace Studies, was interested in social media yesterday (October 15) to describe the democratization power of the Sears catalog in the Southern States United at the time of Jim Crow.
At that time, there was no traveling store aisle or items thrown in your cart. People were shopping in queues and asking for items at a general store, giving owners discretion as to what was sold to whom. In the South, says Hyman, they would force black clients to wait for white clients to be served, and black clients who worked as sharecroppers would often need to buy on credit. In rural areas, the landowner and the store owner were the same person. "In all respects, the purchases reinforced the hierarchy," writes Hyman. "Until #Sears."
The more than 300-page Sears catalog brought the general store to the doors of the country's Americans, including black shoppers, who eventually had an alternative that spared them the unworthiness of dealing with a local shopkeeper. "You can buy anything you want without being questioned about whether you should have it or not," says Hyman in a video conference posted on YouTube.
In their struggle to retain power, shop owners burned Sears catalogs during public bonfires, thus highlighting the fact of preventing black customers from buying the same clothes, tools or goods from the home that white clients, according to Hyman. Regardless, it also meant preventing white clients from ordering from Sears and its competitors in mail order stores.
But Sears has not been deterred. When traders tried to spread rumors that its Chicago-based founders were black, in an attempt to distract white buyers from the company, Sears released photographic evidence to the contrary. The rebuttal allowed the company to continue operating in the south. When postmasters, who often also operated general stores, refused to sell stamps and money orders to black clients, Sears still did not deviate. Instead, he has issued instructions for a workaround:
It's impossible to know how much Sears has fired from its black customers, because the data does not exist, writes Antonia Noori Farzan in the Washington Post. Sears revolutionary methods have not been applied in all areas of her business, she noted: in Atlanta, for example, the company followed Jim Crow's laws that limited black employees to jobs in warehouses or concierge or restaurant services, shop at the store.
Nevertheless, Sears and its ability to offer any citizen anonymous access to its stocks posed a threat to white supremacy. This revealed a contradiction in their version of capitalism. Traders have tried to "embrace modernity [and] at the same time contain it, "says Hyman in his speech. They wanted to exploit the work of the blacks and to refuse the consumption of blacks "to visually prevent the black consumers from being equal in clothes and what they consumed in the places where they went".
Part of their mission was to make that feeling inevitable, as if that was what black Americans "deserved," he adds.
In the last tweet of the thread, he greets Sears as a player who today could be called a militant business leader.
"As we think about #Sears today, let's see how retailing is not just about buying things, but about being part of a larger food system," Hyman concludes. "Every act of power contains the opportunity and the means to resist."
[ad_2]
Source link
