July 24, 2019 • 46 mins
Starting with a single product, a forward thinking entrepreneur opens for business, and grows to become the largest reatailer in the world. But the man's name wasn't Jeff Bezos, and the year wasn't 1994. It was 1886 when Richard Warren Sears sold his first product, and eventually grew to become the world's first Everything Store. Amazon 1.0. But this episode of Bizography is not just about innovation and growth. It's also a story of ego, missed opportunities, and corporate raiders. Could it also be a cautionary tale for Amazon? You decide.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
We're at a Sears store to find out why Sears.
It's where America shops. Why do I shop at Sears?
It's easy for me. I can pick up tennis, ball's,
children's clothing, torque branches, and a dish all in the
same shop. Use my charge Partners is simple and easy.
Tears for America shop. That was then, this is now
(00:22):
breaking overnight. Sears, once a giant in the retailing industry,
has followed for bankruptcy protection following years of losses and
a lot of debt. Will Sears survivor will the company
vanished into retail history like Toys Are Us? So what happened?
Sears was once the Everything store, the Amazon one point oh,
they were the world's biggest retailer, and now they're on
(00:44):
the struggle bus to bankruptcy town. This is Phisiography, the
show where we dive into the strange but true stories
of iconic companies, where they're they're a current bright star
(01:08):
in the midst of a massive dumpster fire, or settling
into the dust heap of history. They all have a
past worth knowing. I'm Dana Barrett, a former tech executive
and entrepreneur and a TV and radio host, and over
the course of my career, I've interviewed thousands of business
leaders and reported on the bright beginnings and massive flame
outs of the brands we know and love. Some of
(01:28):
their stories are inspiring, some get my blood boiling, and
some are just plain weird. Hey, everyone, welcome to Phisiography.
Here with me, as always is my trustee producer, new
guy Nick. He's bringing the let's call it hopeful millennial
to my cynical gen x nous Hopeful maybe in some cases.
(01:48):
But have you seen the latest headlines about how while
Sears is going massively bankrupt, they're giving all their executives
like stupid huge bonuses. Yeah, and you know how much
I cannot stand that, And I will be pulling out
this out box a bit later to talk about that.
It's one of my biggest pet peeves of the bankruptcy courts.
I don't even understand why that stuff happens. But Sears is,
(02:09):
you know, circling the drain. They're on the struggle bus
to fail town, and I think there are definitely lessons
to be learned from where they went wrong, aside from
the fact that the bankruptcy judge, you know, is a
stinky mc stink in Stein. But what I think is
not only fascinating about what they did wrong. What I
think is fascinating is the parallel between Sears and Amazon. Right.
(02:29):
The thing is, though Amazon has had this whole advantage
of the Internet, so blowing up fast is kind of
to be expected a little bit. Sears started way back
in the day, So how on earth did they get
that big that fast without the interwebs. Well, that's the
whole point. I think there are a ton of parallels
with Sears. It was the trains. It was the trains
(02:50):
and the mail that was the speedy you know internet
air quotes of the day. That's just one parallel, and
the parallels continue from there. But let's just kind of,
you know, do a Wayne's World and roll back time
and get to the beginning of the Sears story. I
(03:10):
think everybody knows. Well I should just ask you. You
know what Amazon started with, right? Yeah? It was books, right,
That's how they started online. You bought your books at Amazon.
There you go, so like a one product beginning. Sears
was the same way. And I don't think most people
know that now you probably cheated, but you know what
they started with, right, Okay, so before I knew my
guests with Sears would have been something kind of big
(03:31):
for your house, Like, I don't know, an ice box,
isn't that what they had back then? Did have ice boxes? Yeah,
we can't imagine that now. Um, and they actually had
real ice in them to keep things cold. It's crazy,
but no, they started with watches, and it's kind of
a crazy story. So for a second there, When Richard
Warren Sears was born, which was in kind of the
mid eighteen hundreds, he was born in Minnesota, and he
(03:52):
had a moment in his young life where he could
have been a Trump, I mean not actually a Trump,
but trump e in that his parents were really wealthy.
They were doing really well. His dad was a successful
entrepreneur um. But then everything changed when little can I
call little Richard. When little Richard Richard Warren Sears was sixteen,
(04:14):
his dad died. But before he died, he sold his company,
made a windfall and then lost it all. So when
he died, the family was left panelists. So at sixteen,
Richard Warren Sears had to go get training and get
a job. And so what he did was he got
trained as a telegraph operator and he got a job
at a train station as the telegraph operator. So he
(04:36):
was working at the train station, you know, bringing a
few bucks home for a mom and the siblings, and
occasionally he would get his hands on some you know,
unclaimed lumber or coal and he would sell it on
the side to help the struggling family. That could have
been the whole story, except one day there was a
local jeweler who rejected a shipment of some gold filled watches.
(04:57):
They weren't good enough, I guess for his jewelry store,
and Richard Sear said, um, you know what can I
can I take those? So he got him for a
really good price and he sold them just to like
the other folks around the train station who worked there,
made money and realized there could be something here. So
basically what you're saying is he had a side hustle
(05:18):
and that turned into the main hustle. Yeah, he had
a side hustle, like you know, more than a hundred
years before that term actually became a term. And I'm
not even sure like in those days, if it was
okay to have a side hustle or if everyone did
it like now everyone kind of does it, don't think, right,
everyone has, you know, an uber job or something like that,
but you're right back in those days, you were very
career driven. You had your job and you focused on
(05:38):
that path. And he just kind of bucked the trend
a little bit. Ma. I think you were kind of
supposed to be a company man, definitely. But he sold
all those watches and ended up making a five thousand
dollar profit, which is huge for that time period. I
didn't do the math, but like, it wasn't millions, but
it was a lot. So he decided he was onto
something and decided to start a watch company. That's when
(06:00):
w Sears Watch Company was born. He took the profits
he made from that first venture and he started a
mail order watch business in Minneapolis. Look, we could go
into all the nitty gritty details of his life, but
basically he grew that while he was in his twenties.
He had moved from small town Minnesota to Minneapolis, and
the business was really successful enough that he was able
(06:21):
to resign from the railroad and kind of devote himself
sort of full time to this, and then he decided
he needed a partner. So at this point, he's about
twenty four eight seven. You remember, you know, the lack
of telephones and modern electricity. Right, there was definitely no Internet,
that's for sure. But he was only twenty four. He
(06:43):
moved to Chicago and he meets a guy named Alva
Curtis Roebuck, also in his twenties. They're similar aged, and
Alva Roebuck is just like a watch repairment. Okay, so
he got a little smart obviously, he's been working on
the railroad. Huh, and didn't are you gonna say, are
you going to sing it? Probably didn't have a whole
lot of knowledge in the watch world. I mean, he
knew what a good watch was and could sell it
(07:04):
for a buck. But god forbid, you get the shipment
in and half of them are busted up, you're gonna
toss him. So, all right, his first partnership, essentially in
the history of it is with Alva Roebuck. Yeah. Absolutely,
Alvis seems like a pretty good guy. They start working
together and they start expanding. So they've got watches, and
they add diamonds and jewelry and side note, you're you're
an engaged guy. Yeah, can you imagine buying your diamond
(07:28):
like in a mail ord acount? Absolutely not. All I
have to say is if I would have done that,
I wouldn't currently be an engaged guy. But it's so
funny because it's like at the time that was what
the choices you had. There weren't malls. You couldn't wander
into a Jared and buy your jewelry, you know, like
that just wasn't an option, absolutely, And if there was
a jeweler nearby, there probably wasn't a huge selection, because
(07:48):
now we're well used to, like you said, walking into
Jared and there's eight thousand options, probably had just a
couple dozens of tops. Right. Well, here's the other crazy thing.
Even though of course there were shysters back in the day,
people try to each other and they trusted that you
were going to do business a certain way. You weren't
going to advertise a diamond and then send them a
cubic zirconia, which, by the way, I don't think also
(08:09):
had been invented at that time. Maybe that was why
it was all okay. In any case, they expanded to
watches to jewelry, and they did something very innovative for
the time, had never been done before. They offered I
feel like this needs almost a drum roll. They offered
a money back guarantee. Oh wow, that's almost standard anymore.
When you buy anything is if you're not satisfied with
it or it messes up, you get your money back.
(08:30):
So that was revolutionary in that time. Yeah, I don't
think there were returns back in the day. Like you
didn't bring stuff. They didn't have a receipt and bring
stuff back. You bought it, that's it, You own it,
that's it. So they sort of introduced that innovators of
their time in much the same way that Jeff Bezos
is an innovator now, although he did not invent the
money back guarantee or really anything like it, but stay
with me. So Sears then decides in the late eighteen
(08:53):
eighties to cash in on this successful run and he
sells the business for a hundred thousand and he's going
to go to Iowa and become a banker. Well, that
does not last long. I think banking is pretty boring. Yeah,
probably after you've been somebody who built something from nothing
to a hundred thousand dollar company, which you know, in
eighteen eighty nine was quite a quite a pretty penny.
(09:13):
Probably being the company man again didn't quite satisfy the
itch even owning a bank. I think banking is just boring.
I mean, after reach out, who wants to be a banker?
For all of our banker listeners, you're not boring. Yes,
your jealous, Sorry about that. It's only two years. He
has a change of heart. He goes back to Minnesota
and he starts over and does a new catalog business.
And this time he calls up his friend Roebuck, who
(09:35):
stayed with it. By the way, the whole time Roebuck
stayed and had this catalog business. And so they form
another company together and it's now a C. Roebuck and Company,
and that's ish. Then by it becomes Sears, Roebuck and Company,
a name I think most of us know. They moved
the headquarters to Chicago, and by this point they have
a two hundred page catalog and they're selling everything from
(09:58):
sewing machines to saddles to musical instruments. That's two hundred pages.
It only takes another year and at this point they're
up to five hundred and seven pages. And Richard Warren
Sears himself wrote almost every single word dedicated man right
there right. And so this is where I think the
(10:18):
like the fascinating. Jeff Bezos comparisons can really begin. They
both started with one product, but they had a bigger vision.
You know. With Sears, what he saw was the ability
of the railroads to get things to people who didn't
have access to them. Otherwise. There weren't cars, there weren't malls.
There were people who lived in rural areas who needed stuff,
(10:39):
and he found a way through the mail, using the
post office, and using the trains to move things around
the country in a way that they had never been
moved around before. I think that's really interesting too, in
the fact that he found essentially less less of selling
the product and more of selling the medium. The catalog
that you could buy everything from a watch to a
saddle for your horse. That was more. What the innovation
(11:02):
was with them was the catalog. Where obviously catalogs existed,
newspapers existed. You could buy things from a little way away,
but you bought it from that store, that person who
made it. He just had everything, which is kind of
the way Amazon has gone as well. Right, And Amazon
is fun. I mean, think about the Amazon logo. It's
got a big smile on it. And when I just
read a news story, I think it was today. I
(11:25):
was talking about how people should, you know, try to
save money by deleting certain apps from their mobile phones.
And one of the apps they suggested you delete was
the Amazon app because you would be tempted to buy stuff.
Like they said, you could still use Prime on your computer,
but take the take the app off your phone, because
maybe you'll settle yourself down. Let's be fair, how many
of us have had no intention of shopping and you
(11:46):
just open the Amazon It just just to see and
next thing you know, you're tapping check out, right, and
so exactly stop watching over my shoulder, but right, I mean,
this is exactly my point. Sears was so similar. People
got so excited about that catalog. It wasn't just that
they wanted the stuff that was in there. The catalog
became entertainment for America. So these guys, by the late
(12:09):
eighteen nineties are in their heyday. They've got this five
hundred some odd page catalog, and people in America are
starting to know who they are. So by the late
eighteen hundreds of these guys are crushing it. They've got
this five hundred some odd page catalog. It's going all
across America. People are starting to know their name and
look forward to that thing coming in the mail. We're
(12:30):
going to take a quick break, but before we do,
I'm feeling a musical interlague, musical interlude. What do you
have in mind, Dana, Well, the song that's popping into
my head is good Times by Chic because up next
we're going to talk about the good times for Sears. Yeah.
(12:57):
I don't think they had this song in the late
eighteen nineties, but these were the good times of Sears
really the first half of the nine hundreds, from the
late nineties all the way through the nineteen fifties nineteen sixties,
when you were still not even being thought about. You
weren't even a twinkle in anyone's eye by then new
guy nick Um. But yeah, they were really crushing it
in those days. And that catalog, that Sears catalog coming
(13:20):
in the mail was something Americans waited for. It literally
became known as the consumer Bible. But it also had
a little bit of a darker history, and that people
there were so much paper and sometimes you know, you
ran out of paper at home, so people use it
as toilet paper. Oh, that was not where I was
expecting that to go. I was thinking more maybe you know,
(13:41):
tender for the fireplace, but I guess it makes sense
if you don't have a horse, the saddles don't need them,
use them for something else. I don't know what that
analogy was, but okay, we'll roll with it. So they
had this amazing catalog, and what do you put on
five seven pages? Do you think? I mean, there's a
plethora of craziness you could probably get in there. Obviously,
normal stuff you would need, you know, maybe toiletries, and
(14:03):
back then they sold tonics and stuff, right, so I'm
sure there's plenty of that, But I think you I'm
speaking of tonics since you bring it up, I think
you could actually buy different kinds of drugs in the
series catalog, some that probably wouldn't even be legal now. Really. Yeah,
I don't think that FDA was really too powerful back
in those days. But they also had a lot of
(14:25):
weird stuff, and it just feels like this is the
time they could experiment, not unlike Amazon. You could buy
some pretty weird stuff on Amazon these days. Um, but
one of the ones that I thought was maybe the
weirdest was you could buy an entire house on Amazon,
a kit house like a build your own a d
I Y. There was no home depot then, so essentially
(14:45):
they were putting a keyat to shame back in the day. Oh,
this was like this right, This was like IKEA, like
if you if you got the kid to build the
entire store a like, except it was a house and
you could and there was not just one or two
like IKEA. There's like four different dressers. There were like
seventy different styles of homes you could buy um and
they literally sent you everything for the kit house except
(15:10):
I think the mortar and the nails, the foundation of
the home. And then obviously they didn't send you like
two guys to help you. They didn't know. They did
not send you people. People were not included in the
kid house, but they Yeah, I think the cement was
like the only thing that you had to sort of
make yourself. And so there are serious kit houses all
over the country to this day. And because they weren't
really labeled anywhere, like, they didn't keep track, they didn't
(15:32):
have the data management we have now, so they don't
really know who bought them. So they sort of got
put up all over the country and some of a
lot of them are gone now historians have looked into it,
but a lot of them still exists. But I thought
was pretty cool. It's fascinating. So if you were your
family member living in an older house, maybe do a
little research. Yes, and there are ways you can tell.
Apparently there's certain markers on some of the wood flooring
(15:54):
or like on behind the drywall, where you can find
markers that will tell you if it's a serious at house.
Almost like youahan an Ikea piece of furniture, you can
see the different you know, like the little type of
screws they have or whatever you recognize autely the thing
that makes it from Ikea. That's cool. Yeah, what's that
little tool you use to ye? There you go. If
you see one of those, like you know, it's probably
(16:15):
an Ikea addresser, same kind of deal. But they also
sold motorcycles, cars. That's a lot of crazy stuff that
they would have. Wait a minute, Wait a minute, we're
not even to the crazy yet. I know you looked
some of this up to don't don't act like you
don't know. The most interesting thing, no, not interesting. Let
me rephrase that. The craziest, weirdest thing that they sold
(16:35):
was they sold ladies safety belts for those of you
who don't know what that means. Yes, it was a
chastity belt. They sold chastity belts in the early nineteen
hundreds for women, followed shortly thereafter by chastity belts for men.
So in case you were worried about your daughter or
yourself being a little promiscuous, you could buy that and
you were safe. Sears Magic cover so you could get
(16:56):
opium I think in the serious catalog and chastity belts
just in case you got two out of your head.
You wouldn't do anything crazy. I think that's when you
look out for yourself. I mean, it's amazon start. You
never have to leave your house and you can have
a party, go bam, just like that. And if you
want the party to get really weird, just saying, you
could also buy baby chickens from Sears. That is a party.
(17:21):
So you have a crazy party in your Sears house
with your Sears opium, making sure that you know, some
of the crazier ones are not going to get too
out of control with the Sears chastity belts. Everyone's you know,
passing around the chickens and yeah, and the only as
mom hides the keys to the Sears cars and motorcycle
absolutely can't drive drunk. Perfect you all covered in every way, Bam,
come on, all right, obviously we jest, but there was
(17:42):
a lot in the Sears catalog obviously, and they you know, now,
other than Amazon, I feel like they're most companies now
sort of stick to a product line, a category. Sears
did not do that. They were the everything store, just
like Amazon is today, which makes it I think hard
times to have um a real connection to what you sell.
(18:05):
Instead of being connected to what you sell, you connect
to your customer. And that's the way Sears was positioning themselves.
They cared in theory about the farmers and the regular people.
There wasn't even suburbia really until the late part of
that era. In the nineteen fifties, suburbia started to become
a thing, but prior to that it was sort of
urban and rural, and they were most concerned with their
(18:26):
rural customers. So that is why they sold houses and
animals and you know, farm equipment, along with clothing and
things that you just couldn't get if you didn't live
in an urban area. That's who there. It was the
connection to the customer, not a particular category or product, right,
I think I think that's uh, something that we've noticed
with a lot of companies nowadays doing wrong is they
(18:48):
focus so much on, like you said, that product, they
lose sight of the people they're selling it to. So
we I think we see that a lot. Amazon does
kind of cover the base of everyone. But let's be fair,
some of our older family brs maybe a little less
inclined to use Amazon. They still like to go to
the brick and mortars, but they focus on kind of
gen x all the way down. That's Amazon's customer and
it appeals to that demographic. It's on Amazon, right, I
(19:11):
mean name Amazon may look at us as just all
Americans are all world, you know, we're all people in
the world, but stuff I don't know. But but certainly
for Sears, it was those rural customers and it was
giving those people access. But like all companies, I think
once you start growing to a certain point, it's sort
of about feeding the beast and continuing to grow the
company and how do you do that? And so they
(19:31):
started marketing as Amazon now does as well. I also
think it's funny by the way that Amazon that started
so online does TV commercials. Now, isn't that weird? They've
almost moved backwards a little bit, right? I know? Well,
once again, they were not created. Amazon did not come
up with any of this from scratch, because long before
Amazon started doing TV commercials, Sears was doing radio. Sears
(19:55):
was marketing via the radio. Who knew all the way
back in the nineteen twenties, they actually we bought a
radio station in Chicago and they owned the entire station.
It was originally w b b X, but as soon
as they started broadcasting on this station they called it.
For the first I think like one or two shows,
it was w e S World's Economy Store. Sound familiar,
(20:15):
and then they changed it to World's Largest Store. Also,
if you said that to somebody today, they would say,
what there you go. So w l S were the
ultimate call letters of this radio station, World's largest Store,
and they did everything from weather reports to music, two
tips for Housewives a k. The kind of first infomercials,
absolutely right, I mean, they innovated. They were doing infomercials
(20:39):
before that word existed. And it's smart on them to
kind of specifically cater the radio station to that demographic because,
as we know now, with all the research that's been
done is the women in the house have the buying power.
Seems like they probably kind of knew that back in
the day, as they said, while the husband's out working,
she's at home taking care of the kids. And guess what,
that catalogs open on the kitchen table. So if we
pitch stuff to her, she's just gonna open up and
(21:00):
send a letter right to us. Yeah. Absolutely, And if
you want more proof that they cared about their rural customer,
they had a show called The National Barn Dance that
was on every Sunday evening and it was literally the
most popular radio show in the Midwest. That's outrageous. Go
back then to the you know, the radio was the TV.
So they were smart and getting into the primary entertainment
(21:22):
venue back then. Fun fact, they sold the radio station
and only four years later, but it still operates today
and it's still WLS. I don't think they do tips
for housewives anymore, just a guess. I don't listen, but
I'm just guessing. One of the other things that's been
really fascinating to watch about Amazon certainly is that they've
managed to transition as times have changed. I mean, Amazon's
(21:45):
now what thirty years old. I think something like that
twenty or thirty years old. And you know, they're starting
to do more brick and mortar now. They've changed their
products over time, They've added tech products, etcetera, etcetera. Well,
Sears was doing the same thing. They were watching what
was happening in the market. They were changing and they
were modifying what they were doing to meet the times.
They started doing brick and mortar stores themselves. They started
(22:07):
doing malls, They started doing television ads on TV. After radio,
they started doing jingles. I think that now moving closer
into our era, and okay, my era we actually remember,
like back in the nineties seventies, for example, they had
a jingle that I think everybody remembers, is calling me
(22:30):
gotta have it, pick up the by come on. Okay.
(22:55):
I only wanted to play that in the middle of
this podcast because I want it stuck in everyone's head,
like the next two weeks, this moment for your life.
You know you're gonna be singing it, admit it. But yeah,
we were all singing those kinds of jingles back in
the day. Those were the good old days of television.
By the way, when sitcoms had original songs. Remember, well,
you don't remember, but Nick Knight remember watching them come on,
(23:17):
we saw them at Nick Nick Knight watch them. Yeah.
Well that that's the that was sort of the era.
By the time that came out in the nineties seventies,
maybe times weren't quite as good, but they were already
becoming sort of known the way we know them more now,
which is as a uh, you know, hardware company and
appliance company. And also they were already trying to make
(23:38):
sure by then that people understood that there was more
than just appliances. There was more for your life at Sears,
or maybe there was a softer side to Sears you
the first days, I always just said me all the
semple said, you see say, let's be honest. That never
(24:05):
really worked, but I do remember that jingle. I do
remember the softer side of Seeres playing when my mom
was watching k Yeah, I I they really tried to
show off there that they sold clothing and all of that.
But all I can remember, and I'm going to date
myself a little bit with this one, but when I
was a little kid going to school, what kind of
Jeanes you wore was super important to how cool you were,
(24:27):
And if you were wearing tough Skins, which was the
Sears brand of jeans, you were a who's just saying.
One step up from that was Wrangler. You were only
cool if you were Levis. It's just how it was.
And they didn't salt Levis that Sears back in the day.
So so at least in that department, maybe they stepped
their game up just a little bit because they kind
(24:48):
of carry everything I think in the in the closed
department now they have. That's a function I think of
the retail business in general being on the struggle bus,
so we don't know what to do next town. But
at the time, Levi's was everything, and tough Skins were
just lame. Uh So the softer side of Sears never
really was super successful. But in other efforts to sort
(25:10):
of stay current and diversify, Sears, and this is something
I think very few people know, actually launched a lot
of other famous brands that are famous to this day.
Let me give you a hinch on one of them.
You're in good hounds with the whole state. Did you
know that and see that? Know that anything? Like the actor?
(25:31):
I mean, you did your best, but I think that's
who's going to associate a massive retailer with like car
insurance and life and home and what how did that
even happen? Well, here's what's interesting. Some of the brands
that that Sears crafted made sense with the other things
they sold. For example, Craftsman Tools, they were selling tools
(25:51):
and hardware. Ken Moore Appliances was a big brand for them,
but those all stayed kind of in house brands. They
also had tire stores, remember which I think some big
store still do, like Costco I think still has a
tire store, right, I believe they do, and I know Sears,
at least the one near my house all this time
growing up, had the Automotive Center, and so that was
all part of that. Coming out of that member the
(26:12):
seven page catalog where you could buy entire cars, it
made sense to still have some of that in their
lineup because they had some expertise there. So they had
die hard batteries and All State Insurance I think bubbled
up out of that. It came out of this idea
of automobile insurance. It started all the way back in
believe it or not, and it was actually all State
was actually named after one of the Sears brand of
(26:33):
tires that they had back in the day, and so
All State obviously has since been spun off and continues
to live on as a far stronger brand than Sears
is now. The other thing that they did, look, they
almost made it, Sears was like, what's that song about?
We almost made it, you know about breaking up? I
feel like that's kind of Sears almost made it into
the next transition, like they could have been Amazon. They
(26:56):
almost made it. When the Internet was just starting to
become a thing, they actually developed Prodigy. Now you may
not remember that, Nick, You look a little puzzled, all right, Well,
you know what a O L is, right, absolutely so.
Prodigy was a competitor to a O L. Essentially, it
was in the dial up days and it was this
private network essentially where you could log onto Prodigy and
(27:20):
have access to a version of email at the time,
a private network, some basic shopping. And this was all
way before the Internet became mainstream. The problem was for
Sears with that, it's almost like they were the BlackBerry
of the Internet that just couldn't keep up. And also,
by the way they did that in partnership with IBM
(27:42):
and CBS. Prodigy was a partnership of Sears, IBM and CBS,
and it was like they almost had it and then
now and the other brand I think worth noting that
they spun off was Discover Card. That that stem from
maybe like a Sears store card, because that's been fascinating. Yes,
it did, and Sears was one of the early credit
card companies with the Sears store credit card, and for
(28:05):
a long time at Sears you could only use this
if they didn't take other credit cards. They only took
the Sears charge card. Now that was when times were
a little bit different. But ultimately they realized they needed
to branch out and they spun off Discover Card, which
again is now a far stronger brand on its own,
you know than it's It's Mommy and Daddy. Sears is
so pretty interesting. They were at one point, as things
(28:27):
started to go wrong for Sears, they were making far
more money with their financial products than they were with
any consumer products, which is kind of telling. All Right,
I love a good bunny trail, but let's get back
to the timeline. They a depthly manage this move from
mail order catalog to physical stores two malls. They moved
from caring only about rural customers to embracing this suburban
(28:51):
customer who really became their mainstay. And things were going
all in all amazingly well. So they started expanding and
building and expand ending and building. As companies deal we
talked about it from a brand perspective and a product perspective,
but they did it with you know, physical locations too,
And like m hm, anybody who has something they want
to um overcome, they have to show off by you know,
(29:14):
building big things, bigger, big, bigger, better, more like with
their name on them. You know, I'm not suggesting anything,
I'm just saying. So they started building some big buildings.
In fact, even right here in Atlanta, they built a
huge building that we are in fact sitting in right now.
We're in the old Seers Building right this very minute.
(29:35):
The building here was built in phases, starting back in
the company. Sears at the time bought sixteen acres for
about two thousand dollars. Can you imagine what a steel
and I'm not saying parallel, I'm just saying parallel Amazon
HQ two anyone. The first phase costs three million dollars
and it was a warehouse and a retail store. It
(29:56):
carried thirty five thousand items and employed teen hundred people.
And on its first day, wait for this, on its
very first day, there were thirty thousand visitors. That's how
excited people were. That is one heck of an economic engine.
What what in modern times could draw thirty thousand visitors
(30:16):
on one day other than like a sporting event or
a concert or something especially like the opening of a
new store. No way, I mean, I'm gonna I'm gonna
throw it out there the Olympics. It's like the only thing,
right absolutely, I mean maybe if it yeah, you know,
in a sense of retail, you're right. I think the
only thing that would draw that many people in one
day would be if Amazon opened a massive store in
(30:37):
the middle of a big city and they're like, by
the way, this is the Amazon store, and everything on
the line is in here. No, no, no no. The only
way thirty thousand people would show up for that is
if everything was free. People don't care about a store anymore.
That's not a thing. People don't line up for that.
But if you give it to me free, am there? Anyway?
They continue to grow this Atlanta presence, adding floors and
(30:57):
entire new buildings, turning it into a campus again somewhat
like our tech companies of today, until it reached two
million square feet. That was in the heyday of the
nineteen sixties of Sears, and that was just what they
did here in Atlanta. But Sears was literally becoming the
everything and everywhere store by then. In nineteen sixty nine,
Sears was the largest retailer in the world. They had
(31:20):
three and fifty thousand employees at one point and over
four thousand stores internationally. And that, of course is when
they decided they needed a teller. You know, everybody needs
to tell a big, huge building with our name slapped
on the side, that is correct. The Sears Tower, a
hundred and ten stories tall, was built in Chicago, Illinois.
(31:42):
It was completed in nineteen seventy three, and at that
time it was taller than the World Trade Center towers
in New York and it was the tallest building in
the world. That is one big midlife crisis right there.
It held that title for twenty five years. So I
think it's I don't to know which that what the
tallest building is now to you, it's it's a Burge
(32:04):
Khalifa in Saudi Arabia. It's one of those crazy huge towers.
You really know that? How do you know that? Because
they built it in the same premise the Royal family
where they said, you know what, we can do it bigger,
and so they did, and we're going to put our
name on it. Yeah. I feel like there's something about
building that giant building and slapping your name on it again,
(32:24):
whether it's the tallest or just the biggest, it feels
like an ego play to me. And I wonder a
little bit, and I'm just putting out there Jeff Bezos
that maybe it's the beginning of the end. It's the
signal of future doom, kind of your own Uh, your
own bravado has gotten the better of you. Now you
think you're better than everyone. So let's just do whatever
we want, right or yes, and we can in the
(32:46):
case of Amazon, certainly get the entire country to stop
everything they're doing and make proposals and uh, you know,
give us tax credits and put dog and pony shows
on to commitce us to come there and spend our
big money to build our big building, to put our
big name on it. And then what what's funny is
as Sears has begun to struggle Jeff Bezos has an
eye on it. He's watching what's happening to Sears in
(33:09):
modern times. I'll talk about that in just a minute.
But the money was also flowing like crazy for Sears
in the nineteen hundreds leading up to right around when
the Sears Tower was built. Um, they were crushing it
in all kinds of ways, not just size but also money.
And it wasn't until really after the Sears Tower when
things started to decline. That's the sad part of the story,
(33:31):
and that brings us to where we're at right now today.
We'll talk about that next. So you know how it goes.
Everything that goes up must come down, that's what they say. Anyway, Well, Sears,
that was definitely the case the nineteen hundreds overall pretty
good for Sears. Started a falter in the late nineteen hundreds,
(33:54):
but by the early two thousand's there was a little
bit of a resurgence in there. They hired a CEO
who turned things around for a minute, and they did okay,
they bought some other companies like lands End and and
they hung in there a little bit, but overall it
just wasn't happening, and things started to falter. For them.
So just to give you an idea of some of
(34:14):
the numbers, in two thousand and the year two thousand,
Sears had sales of forty one billion for the company,
and by let's say sixteen, they were down to two billion,
so almost half gone. That's years, and that's just it's
really interesting to see that transition from so much success
in the nineties and then as soon as the twenty
(34:34):
first century came around, they just stopped and started to drop. Well,
the real problem started for Sears. They were, you know,
they were starting to struggle a little bit. They were
losing some of that vision that they had had in
their earlier days. And I have to mention that part
of the reason I think Sears lost their vision. And
this has not happened to Amazon. I'm sure Jeff Bezos
is knocking on wood. But Richard Sears died really young,
(34:55):
and so that was part of the problem. And he
was sort of a workaholic, and that you know, health
just wasn't what it is now. They didn't have access
to the same kind of medicine and doctors, and people
didn't live as long. And he died like at age fifty,
so he was out of the picture pretty early on,
and the company was led by others, some people that
had been in on it with him from the early days,
who shepherded it pretty well as we saw through the
(35:17):
nineteen hundreds. But what really went wrong was that as
things started to falter for Sears and and part of
that was competition from stores like Target and Walmart, and
they weren't able to compete. They weren't the only ones anymore.
They weren't able to compete in the way that they
once did, and so they ended up being purchased slash
merging with Kmart under the name Sears Holdings has happened
(35:40):
in two thousand five, and this is where the evil
villain of the story enters the picture. He is a
man named Eddie Lampert. He is the current I think
he's the current chairman. He's the current chairman, had to
resign a CEO. Correct why? Because he is evil? He
might have noticed, even just from those two sentences that
(36:01):
I'm not a huge fan of Eddie Lampert, but he
got involved in two thousand five. This is a guy
who is one of those sort of classic Wall Street
hedge fund managers who believes in making himself and his
cronies as rich as possible, and seems to not give
a hoot. Can you give a hoot about anything or
(36:24):
anyone else? He makes me think of a famous movie
from back in the eighties called Wall Street. Remember that one?
Did you ever watch it? Okay, remember this scene. The
point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of
a better word, is good. Greed is right, Greed works,
(36:47):
Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures these of the evolutionary spirit.
Greed in all of its forms, greed for life, for money,
for love, knowledge has marked upwards. Search of mankind and
green you mark my words will not only save tells
(37:10):
our paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.
For the record, it's not working for Sears or the
good old us of A writes this very minute. But
Eddie Lampertshire believes in greed. That is what he's doing.
So he brings Kmart and Sears together under Sears Holdings
back in two thousand five. And you know it seems
to think he's going to be able to or at
(37:31):
least is trying to present a front of I'm going
to fix all of this. I have all these great ideas.
Just everybody, stay with me. We're gonna make it work well.
Fast forward. We're now in two thousand eighteen, but by
two thousand sixteen sales were down to two billion. Seen
tells really cut in half, all gone. If you've walked
into a Sear store in eighteen, what did you see?
(37:55):
Things all over the floor. It's not well kept. Their
products selection is starting to slowly get worse and worse
and worse. It's not pretty now, it's horrible. Sears by
modern times is just lost. It's lost. It's they claim
that they made an effort to have you know, Sears
dot com. Does anyone go to Sears dot com for anything?
(38:16):
I've gone before. There's a reason I was on there
for two minutes and have never been back. There you go,
they missed their opportunity. From that perspective, it's not something
Eddie Lamper ever fixed. The stores are dirty and discussing
in a disaster. Again, not something that Eddie Lamper ever fixed.
He is so sketchy he literally makes my stomach turn.
(38:40):
I mean, this is a guy who is selling parts
of the company off. There were when he got involved
in two thousand five. Still some assets that are part
of Seers that have value, and he sold them off
in theory to save the company. But the sketchy part
is he in many cases sold the pieces and parts
off to other holding company of which he personally had
(39:01):
an interest. So he's basically scraping the meat off the bones.
That's what this guy is doing. And even when he
tries to give a pep talk. Now Sears now has
filed for bankruptcy, and as you pointed out at the
very beginning of this episode, has just gotten for himself
and again his cronies in the midst of bankruptcy huge
bonuses while Sears employees right before Christmas time are out
(39:25):
of work. Yea Sears, And even when he tries to
give a pep talk, Eddie Lampord just sounds like somebody
you want to punch in the face. The world of
retail was going to be stable. It would have been
much more difficult to create something different. There'd be no Amazon,
just the larger Walmart, and they would not have been
(39:46):
the opportunity for Sears to break from the pack once
again and change the face of retailing like it always
had in the past. As we all know, we haven't
capitalized in this opportunity the way I would have liked,
instead of grow with an investment. We have faced retransment
every structuring. When he says break from the pack, does
he mean like fall behind, like the you know, like
(40:09):
the kid in gym class. We just can't keep up
with the other kids. Is that what he means? I
just imagined like a herd of cattle and one of
them breaks its leg. It's just really limbing. Don't pick
on the you know it's it's it's the Sears chickens
they bought back in the day, and one of them
was a little defective, and it just can't keep up
with all the other chickens anymore. Yeah, I mean, I
don't know what he's even talking about there. I mean, yes, certainly, retail.
(40:31):
We've seen a lot of struggles in the retail industry
in the last ten years, with big box stores going
out of business, with malls struggling. I mean, there's certainly
have been challenges, but I have not seen Sears do
anything that looks positive to try to break from the pack.
Right my whole life, I graduated in my whole life
of being able to go to the mall by myself
and knowing about companies, it's always been that dingy, dark
(40:53):
corner of the mall, and it's like, really, you went
to you win into Sears. Oh man, I just go
in there to use the bathroom. Yeah, so exactly. And
the bathroom probably wasn't even clean, It wasn't, but it
was the closest one. You know, what are you gonna do? Well,
you're a dude. That's okay for you. It's not as
good for us, but right, fair point. And I think,
you know, Sears could have turned it back around. Think
about how many brands we've seen that we're sort of
(41:15):
not cool become cool again in a vintagey way, like
they could have spun off something that was specifically Sears.
You know, maybe they do smaller hardware stores because look,
home Depot now has taken over the hardware market, but
you need a neighborhood hardware store. What if Sears had
started small corner hardware stores with their Craftsman brand, they
(41:36):
could have totally done that. They could have had an
amazing Craftsman website and had that. You know, there were opportunities, absolutely,
and that's one of the saddest parts about it is
because ken More appliances are actually pretty good. Craftsman tools
are really good. And if Sears is going to die
and these brands die with it, that's that's that's really sad.
See that happen, Right, Start ken More appliance stores or
(41:56):
put a ken More you know store within Best Buy
like Apple does. Right. I mean, there were ways that
Sears could have stayed relevant and they just never did.
I mean, even do some new, softer side of Sears
and make fun of it and find a way to
make that cool. I mean, Hush Puppies came back for
a minute. I don't know if you remember that, but
they did. Vinyl records are back. They are very right, exactly,
(42:17):
and they're useless, but they're really cool. I mean, they're
not nearly as good as digital music in terms of
the ability, you know, the ease of carrying them around
and all that, but they're cool. You're right. It's it's
something kind of novelty to have and with the big
Sears with the blue kind of double lined logos and
everything else, that's what we've all known for twenty years now,
and it's they would have gone back to the kind
(42:38):
of the seventies logo with the almost handwritten script Sears
with the line under it like you said, if you
can make fun of yourself, sometimes that launches you right
back into the spotlight. And they just they didn't. I
don't even know if it was a lack of execution.
It was a lack of caring more than anything else, right,
And it was Eddie Lampert wanting to make money for
himself and his cronies. And that is where we are today,
(42:59):
and that is where this story, sadly is going to end.
It makes me sad to see what used to be
an iconic company going away kind of but in this case,
goodbye Sears, you know, like see it wouldn't want to
be a rights like that question you grow up with
and you were friends with through college, and then you've
gotten back in touch leader in life and you realize,
oh you've changed, and I don't like you anymore. Yeah
(43:21):
you really weren't. I don't really. I thought you were cool,
but no maybe not. Or as Michelle Obama would say,
bye Felicia. Look before we go, I feel like we
have to wrap up with poor Roebuck, who we haven't
talked much about. How How did how did things end
up for the guy I mean Alva Roebuck was one
of the founding guys. I wonder if he were still around,
if he could have made it cool again. Would It
(43:43):
would be very interesting to know, because yeah, you're right, Sears,
Roebuck and Company, and then Roebuck kinda fell off the map,
right well. Sears, the guy, Richard Sears, made millions. He
was worth twenty five million by the time he died,
which is roughly six and twelve million in today's dollars,
So he did pretty well before he passed away, but
he did die young. And Roebuck he got disinterested in
(44:06):
the company after the first two years of being with
the company, so way back in the late eighteen hundreds,
he was like, yeah, this is not for me. I'm
gonna just take sell off my shares. I think he
sold them for about twenty dollars at the time. There's
different stories about how much he got, but it wasn't
a ton. He took his money. He went to Florida,
tried a few other businesses. Ultimately he ended up going
(44:26):
back to Sears on request to do a demo kind
of to be on like to be sort of paraded
around for who he was he enjoyed it, they enjoyed
having him. So Ultimately, this is many years later, now
twenty years later or something. He becomes the company historian
and spends kind of the latter years of his life
being sort of a poster boy for Sears, which was
(44:46):
still Sears Roebuck and Company for quite some time and
then and by the way, he lived a nice long life.
Died at age eighty four. In a couple of years
before he died, and by the way, this is included
in his o bit in the New York Time Times,
he was asked, uh if he felt bad that he
didn't know stick with it and make millions like his
buddy Sears, and he said, mmmm, he died in his
(45:10):
forties and I'm still here, so yeah, all good. I'm
good with that. I think maybe Roebuck had the right idea,
Yes he did. Yeah. Um. Ultimately, to sum it all up,
there is a cautionary tale here for Jeff Bezos and Amazon,
and Jeff Bezos was recently asked about the demise of
Sears and what he thought about it, and even Jeff
(45:31):
Bezos said, yeah, I see it, and we might not
be around forever. Sears icon to fondly remember, or a
cautionary tale for Amazon, or another reason in this country
needs bankruptcy reform. I don't know, maybe it's all three.
That's our show for today. Phisiography is produced by the
(45:53):
iHeart Podcast Network. I'm your host Dana Barrick. My co
host and producer is Nick Bean. Our executive producer is
christ for hascy Otis and Josh Thame provides audio production.
Have questions, want to give us feedback or have a
company you'd like us to cover. Email us at info
at physiography dot show, or contact us on social. I'm
(46:13):
at the Danta Barrett on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or
just search for Data Barrett on LinkedIn
We're at a Sears store to find out why Sears.
It's where America shops. Why do I shop at Sears?
It's easy for me. I can pick up tennis, ball's,
children's clothing, torque branches, and a dish all in the
same shop. Use my charge Partners is simple and easy.
Tears for America shop. That was then, this is now
(00:22):
breaking overnight. Sears, once a giant in the retailing industry,
has followed for bankruptcy protection following years of losses and
a lot of debt. Will Sears survivor will the company
vanished into retail history like Toys Are Us? So what happened?
Sears was once the Everything store, the Amazon one point oh,
they were the world's biggest retailer, and now they're on
(00:44):
the struggle bus to bankruptcy town. This is Phisiography, the
show where we dive into the strange but true stories
of iconic companies, where they're they're a current bright star
(01:08):
in the midst of a massive dumpster fire, or settling
into the dust heap of history. They all have a
past worth knowing. I'm Dana Barrett, a former tech executive
and entrepreneur and a TV and radio host, and over
the course of my career, I've interviewed thousands of business
leaders and reported on the bright beginnings and massive flame
outs of the brands we know and love. Some of
(01:28):
their stories are inspiring, some get my blood boiling, and
some are just plain weird. Hey, everyone, welcome to Phisiography.
Here with me, as always is my trustee producer, new
guy Nick. He's bringing the let's call it hopeful millennial
to my cynical gen x nous Hopeful maybe in some cases.
(01:48):
But have you seen the latest headlines about how while
Sears is going massively bankrupt, they're giving all their executives
like stupid huge bonuses. Yeah, and you know how much
I cannot stand that, And I will be pulling out
this out box a bit later to talk about that.
It's one of my biggest pet peeves of the bankruptcy courts.
I don't even understand why that stuff happens. But Sears is,
(02:09):
you know, circling the drain. They're on the struggle bus
to fail town, and I think there are definitely lessons
to be learned from where they went wrong, aside from
the fact that the bankruptcy judge, you know, is a
stinky mc stink in Stein. But what I think is
not only fascinating about what they did wrong. What I
think is fascinating is the parallel between Sears and Amazon. Right.
(02:29):
The thing is, though Amazon has had this whole advantage
of the Internet, so blowing up fast is kind of
to be expected a little bit. Sears started way back
in the day, So how on earth did they get
that big that fast without the interwebs. Well, that's the
whole point. I think there are a ton of parallels
with Sears. It was the trains. It was the trains
(02:50):
and the mail that was the speedy you know internet
air quotes of the day. That's just one parallel, and
the parallels continue from there. But let's just kind of,
you know, do a Wayne's World and roll back time
and get to the beginning of the Sears story. I
(03:10):
think everybody knows. Well I should just ask you. You
know what Amazon started with, right? Yeah? It was books, right,
That's how they started online. You bought your books at Amazon.
There you go, so like a one product beginning. Sears
was the same way. And I don't think most people
know that now you probably cheated, but you know what
they started with, right, Okay, so before I knew my
guests with Sears would have been something kind of big
(03:31):
for your house, Like, I don't know, an ice box,
isn't that what they had back then? Did have ice boxes? Yeah,
we can't imagine that now. Um, and they actually had
real ice in them to keep things cold. It's crazy,
but no, they started with watches, and it's kind of
a crazy story. So for a second there, When Richard
Warren Sears was born, which was in kind of the
mid eighteen hundreds, he was born in Minnesota, and he
(03:52):
had a moment in his young life where he could
have been a Trump, I mean not actually a Trump,
but trump e in that his parents were really wealthy.
They were doing really well. His dad was a successful
entrepreneur um. But then everything changed when little can I
call little Richard. When little Richard Richard Warren Sears was sixteen,
(04:14):
his dad died. But before he died, he sold his company,
made a windfall and then lost it all. So when
he died, the family was left panelists. So at sixteen,
Richard Warren Sears had to go get training and get
a job. And so what he did was he got
trained as a telegraph operator and he got a job
at a train station as the telegraph operator. So he
(04:36):
was working at the train station, you know, bringing a
few bucks home for a mom and the siblings, and
occasionally he would get his hands on some you know,
unclaimed lumber or coal and he would sell it on
the side to help the struggling family. That could have
been the whole story, except one day there was a
local jeweler who rejected a shipment of some gold filled watches.
(04:57):
They weren't good enough, I guess for his jewelry store,
and Richard Sear said, um, you know what can I
can I take those? So he got him for a
really good price and he sold them just to like
the other folks around the train station who worked there,
made money and realized there could be something here. So
basically what you're saying is he had a side hustle
(05:18):
and that turned into the main hustle. Yeah, he had
a side hustle, like you know, more than a hundred
years before that term actually became a term. And I'm
not even sure like in those days, if it was
okay to have a side hustle or if everyone did
it like now everyone kind of does it, don't think, right,
everyone has, you know, an uber job or something like that,
but you're right back in those days, you were very
career driven. You had your job and you focused on
(05:38):
that path. And he just kind of bucked the trend
a little bit. Ma. I think you were kind of
supposed to be a company man, definitely. But he sold
all those watches and ended up making a five thousand
dollar profit, which is huge for that time period. I
didn't do the math, but like, it wasn't millions, but
it was a lot. So he decided he was onto
something and decided to start a watch company. That's when
(06:00):
w Sears Watch Company was born. He took the profits
he made from that first venture and he started a
mail order watch business in Minneapolis. Look, we could go
into all the nitty gritty details of his life, but
basically he grew that while he was in his twenties.
He had moved from small town Minnesota to Minneapolis, and
the business was really successful enough that he was able
(06:21):
to resign from the railroad and kind of devote himself
sort of full time to this, and then he decided
he needed a partner. So at this point, he's about
twenty four eight seven. You remember, you know, the lack
of telephones and modern electricity. Right, there was definitely no Internet,
that's for sure. But he was only twenty four. He
(06:43):
moved to Chicago and he meets a guy named Alva
Curtis Roebuck, also in his twenties. They're similar aged, and
Alva Roebuck is just like a watch repairment. Okay, so
he got a little smart obviously, he's been working on
the railroad. Huh, and didn't are you gonna say, are
you going to sing it? Probably didn't have a whole
lot of knowledge in the watch world. I mean, he
knew what a good watch was and could sell it
(07:04):
for a buck. But god forbid, you get the shipment
in and half of them are busted up, you're gonna
toss him. So, all right, his first partnership, essentially in
the history of it is with Alva Roebuck. Yeah. Absolutely,
Alvis seems like a pretty good guy. They start working
together and they start expanding. So they've got watches, and
they add diamonds and jewelry and side note, you're you're
an engaged guy. Yeah, can you imagine buying your diamond
(07:28):
like in a mail ord acount? Absolutely not. All I
have to say is if I would have done that,
I wouldn't currently be an engaged guy. But it's so
funny because it's like at the time that was what
the choices you had. There weren't malls. You couldn't wander
into a Jared and buy your jewelry, you know, like
that just wasn't an option, absolutely, And if there was
a jeweler nearby, there probably wasn't a huge selection, because
(07:48):
now we're well used to, like you said, walking into
Jared and there's eight thousand options, probably had just a
couple dozens of tops. Right. Well, here's the other crazy thing.
Even though of course there were shysters back in the day,
people try to each other and they trusted that you
were going to do business a certain way. You weren't
going to advertise a diamond and then send them a
cubic zirconia, which, by the way, I don't think also
(08:09):
had been invented at that time. Maybe that was why
it was all okay. In any case, they expanded to
watches to jewelry, and they did something very innovative for
the time, had never been done before. They offered I
feel like this needs almost a drum roll. They offered
a money back guarantee. Oh wow, that's almost standard anymore.
When you buy anything is if you're not satisfied with
it or it messes up, you get your money back.
(08:30):
So that was revolutionary in that time. Yeah, I don't
think there were returns back in the day. Like you
didn't bring stuff. They didn't have a receipt and bring
stuff back. You bought it, that's it, You own it,
that's it. So they sort of introduced that innovators of
their time in much the same way that Jeff Bezos
is an innovator now, although he did not invent the
money back guarantee or really anything like it, but stay
with me. So Sears then decides in the late eighteen
(08:53):
eighties to cash in on this successful run and he
sells the business for a hundred thousand and he's going
to go to Iowa and become a banker. Well, that
does not last long. I think banking is pretty boring. Yeah,
probably after you've been somebody who built something from nothing
to a hundred thousand dollar company, which you know, in
eighteen eighty nine was quite a quite a pretty penny.
(09:13):
Probably being the company man again didn't quite satisfy the
itch even owning a bank. I think banking is just boring.
I mean, after reach out, who wants to be a banker?
For all of our banker listeners, you're not boring. Yes,
your jealous, Sorry about that. It's only two years. He
has a change of heart. He goes back to Minnesota
and he starts over and does a new catalog business.
And this time he calls up his friend Roebuck, who
(09:35):
stayed with it. By the way, the whole time Roebuck
stayed and had this catalog business. And so they form
another company together and it's now a C. Roebuck and Company,
and that's ish. Then by it becomes Sears, Roebuck and Company,
a name I think most of us know. They moved
the headquarters to Chicago, and by this point they have
a two hundred page catalog and they're selling everything from
(09:58):
sewing machines to saddles to musical instruments. That's two hundred pages.
It only takes another year and at this point they're
up to five hundred and seven pages. And Richard Warren
Sears himself wrote almost every single word dedicated man right
there right. And so this is where I think the
(10:18):
like the fascinating. Jeff Bezos comparisons can really begin. They
both started with one product, but they had a bigger vision.
You know. With Sears, what he saw was the ability
of the railroads to get things to people who didn't
have access to them. Otherwise. There weren't cars, there weren't malls.
There were people who lived in rural areas who needed stuff,
(10:39):
and he found a way through the mail, using the
post office, and using the trains to move things around
the country in a way that they had never been
moved around before. I think that's really interesting too, in
the fact that he found essentially less less of selling
the product and more of selling the medium. The catalog
that you could buy everything from a watch to a
saddle for your horse. That was more. What the innovation
(11:02):
was with them was the catalog. Where obviously catalogs existed,
newspapers existed. You could buy things from a little way away,
but you bought it from that store, that person who
made it. He just had everything, which is kind of
the way Amazon has gone as well. Right, And Amazon
is fun. I mean, think about the Amazon logo. It's
got a big smile on it. And when I just
read a news story, I think it was today. I
(11:25):
was talking about how people should, you know, try to
save money by deleting certain apps from their mobile phones.
And one of the apps they suggested you delete was
the Amazon app because you would be tempted to buy stuff.
Like they said, you could still use Prime on your computer,
but take the take the app off your phone, because
maybe you'll settle yourself down. Let's be fair, how many
of us have had no intention of shopping and you
(11:46):
just open the Amazon It just just to see and
next thing you know, you're tapping check out, right, and
so exactly stop watching over my shoulder, but right, I mean,
this is exactly my point. Sears was so similar. People
got so excited about that catalog. It wasn't just that
they wanted the stuff that was in there. The catalog
became entertainment for America. So these guys, by the late
(12:09):
eighteen nineties are in their heyday. They've got this five
hundred some odd page catalog, and people in America are
starting to know who they are. So by the late
eighteen hundreds of these guys are crushing it. They've got
this five hundred some odd page catalog. It's going all
across America. People are starting to know their name and
look forward to that thing coming in the mail. We're
(12:30):
going to take a quick break, but before we do,
I'm feeling a musical interlague, musical interlude. What do you
have in mind, Dana, Well, the song that's popping into
my head is good Times by Chic because up next
we're going to talk about the good times for Sears. Yeah.
(12:57):
I don't think they had this song in the late
eighteen nineties, but these were the good times of Sears
really the first half of the nine hundreds, from the
late nineties all the way through the nineteen fifties nineteen sixties,
when you were still not even being thought about. You
weren't even a twinkle in anyone's eye by then new
guy nick Um. But yeah, they were really crushing it
in those days. And that catalog, that Sears catalog coming
(13:20):
in the mail was something Americans waited for. It literally
became known as the consumer Bible. But it also had
a little bit of a darker history, and that people
there were so much paper and sometimes you know, you
ran out of paper at home, so people use it
as toilet paper. Oh, that was not where I was
expecting that to go. I was thinking more maybe you know,
(13:41):
tender for the fireplace, but I guess it makes sense
if you don't have a horse, the saddles don't need them,
use them for something else. I don't know what that
analogy was, but okay, we'll roll with it. So they
had this amazing catalog, and what do you put on
five seven pages? Do you think? I mean, there's a
plethora of craziness you could probably get in there. Obviously,
normal stuff you would need, you know, maybe toiletries, and
(14:03):
back then they sold tonics and stuff, right, so I'm
sure there's plenty of that, But I think you I'm
speaking of tonics since you bring it up, I think
you could actually buy different kinds of drugs in the
series catalog, some that probably wouldn't even be legal now. Really. Yeah,
I don't think that FDA was really too powerful back
in those days. But they also had a lot of
(14:25):
weird stuff, and it just feels like this is the
time they could experiment, not unlike Amazon. You could buy
some pretty weird stuff on Amazon these days. Um, but
one of the ones that I thought was maybe the
weirdest was you could buy an entire house on Amazon,
a kit house like a build your own a d
I Y. There was no home depot then, so essentially
(14:45):
they were putting a keyat to shame back in the day. Oh,
this was like this right, This was like IKEA, like
if you if you got the kid to build the
entire store a like, except it was a house and
you could and there was not just one or two
like IKEA. There's like four different dressers. There were like
seventy different styles of homes you could buy um and
they literally sent you everything for the kit house except
(15:10):
I think the mortar and the nails, the foundation of
the home. And then obviously they didn't send you like
two guys to help you. They didn't know. They did
not send you people. People were not included in the
kid house, but they Yeah, I think the cement was
like the only thing that you had to sort of
make yourself. And so there are serious kit houses all
over the country to this day. And because they weren't
really labeled anywhere, like, they didn't keep track, they didn't
(15:32):
have the data management we have now, so they don't
really know who bought them. So they sort of got
put up all over the country and some of a
lot of them are gone now historians have looked into it,
but a lot of them still exists. But I thought
was pretty cool. It's fascinating. So if you were your
family member living in an older house, maybe do a
little research. Yes, and there are ways you can tell.
Apparently there's certain markers on some of the wood flooring
(15:54):
or like on behind the drywall, where you can find
markers that will tell you if it's a serious at house.
Almost like youahan an Ikea piece of furniture, you can
see the different you know, like the little type of
screws they have or whatever you recognize autely the thing
that makes it from Ikea. That's cool. Yeah, what's that
little tool you use to ye? There you go. If
you see one of those, like you know, it's probably
(16:15):
an Ikea addresser, same kind of deal. But they also
sold motorcycles, cars. That's a lot of crazy stuff that
they would have. Wait a minute, Wait a minute, we're
not even to the crazy yet. I know you looked
some of this up to don't don't act like you
don't know. The most interesting thing, no, not interesting. Let
me rephrase that. The craziest, weirdest thing that they sold
(16:35):
was they sold ladies safety belts for those of you
who don't know what that means. Yes, it was a
chastity belt. They sold chastity belts in the early nineteen
hundreds for women, followed shortly thereafter by chastity belts for men.
So in case you were worried about your daughter or
yourself being a little promiscuous, you could buy that and
you were safe. Sears Magic cover so you could get
(16:56):
opium I think in the serious catalog and chastity belts
just in case you got two out of your head.
You wouldn't do anything crazy. I think that's when you
look out for yourself. I mean, it's amazon start. You
never have to leave your house and you can have
a party, go bam, just like that. And if you
want the party to get really weird, just saying, you
could also buy baby chickens from Sears. That is a party.
(17:21):
So you have a crazy party in your Sears house
with your Sears opium, making sure that you know, some
of the crazier ones are not going to get too
out of control with the Sears chastity belts. Everyone's you know,
passing around the chickens and yeah, and the only as
mom hides the keys to the Sears cars and motorcycle
absolutely can't drive drunk. Perfect you all covered in every way, Bam,
come on, all right, obviously we jest, but there was
(17:42):
a lot in the Sears catalog obviously, and they you know, now,
other than Amazon, I feel like they're most companies now
sort of stick to a product line, a category. Sears
did not do that. They were the everything store, just
like Amazon is today, which makes it I think hard
times to have um a real connection to what you sell.
(18:05):
Instead of being connected to what you sell, you connect
to your customer. And that's the way Sears was positioning themselves.
They cared in theory about the farmers and the regular people.
There wasn't even suburbia really until the late part of
that era. In the nineteen fifties, suburbia started to become
a thing, but prior to that it was sort of
urban and rural, and they were most concerned with their
(18:26):
rural customers. So that is why they sold houses and
animals and you know, farm equipment, along with clothing and
things that you just couldn't get if you didn't live
in an urban area. That's who there. It was the
connection to the customer, not a particular category or product, right,
I think I think that's uh, something that we've noticed
with a lot of companies nowadays doing wrong is they
(18:48):
focus so much on, like you said, that product, they
lose sight of the people they're selling it to. So
we I think we see that a lot. Amazon does
kind of cover the base of everyone. But let's be fair,
some of our older family brs maybe a little less
inclined to use Amazon. They still like to go to
the brick and mortars, but they focus on kind of
gen x all the way down. That's Amazon's customer and
it appeals to that demographic. It's on Amazon, right, I
(19:11):
mean name Amazon may look at us as just all
Americans are all world, you know, we're all people in
the world, but stuff I don't know. But but certainly
for Sears, it was those rural customers and it was
giving those people access. But like all companies, I think
once you start growing to a certain point, it's sort
of about feeding the beast and continuing to grow the
company and how do you do that? And so they
(19:31):
started marketing as Amazon now does as well. I also
think it's funny by the way that Amazon that started
so online does TV commercials. Now, isn't that weird? They've
almost moved backwards a little bit, right? I know? Well,
once again, they were not created. Amazon did not come
up with any of this from scratch, because long before
Amazon started doing TV commercials, Sears was doing radio. Sears
(19:55):
was marketing via the radio. Who knew all the way
back in the nineteen twenties, they actually we bought a
radio station in Chicago and they owned the entire station.
It was originally w b b X, but as soon
as they started broadcasting on this station they called it.
For the first I think like one or two shows,
it was w e S World's Economy Store. Sound familiar,
(20:15):
and then they changed it to World's Largest Store. Also,
if you said that to somebody today, they would say,
what there you go. So w l S were the
ultimate call letters of this radio station, World's largest Store,
and they did everything from weather reports to music, two
tips for Housewives a k. The kind of first infomercials,
absolutely right, I mean, they innovated. They were doing infomercials
(20:39):
before that word existed. And it's smart on them to
kind of specifically cater the radio station to that demographic because,
as we know now, with all the research that's been
done is the women in the house have the buying power.
Seems like they probably kind of knew that back in
the day, as they said, while the husband's out working,
she's at home taking care of the kids. And guess what,
that catalogs open on the kitchen table. So if we
pitch stuff to her, she's just gonna open up and
(21:00):
send a letter right to us. Yeah. Absolutely, And if
you want more proof that they cared about their rural customer,
they had a show called The National Barn Dance that
was on every Sunday evening and it was literally the
most popular radio show in the Midwest. That's outrageous. Go
back then to the you know, the radio was the TV.
So they were smart and getting into the primary entertainment
(21:22):
venue back then. Fun fact, they sold the radio station
and only four years later, but it still operates today
and it's still WLS. I don't think they do tips
for housewives anymore, just a guess. I don't listen, but
I'm just guessing. One of the other things that's been
really fascinating to watch about Amazon certainly is that they've
managed to transition as times have changed. I mean, Amazon's
(21:45):
now what thirty years old. I think something like that
twenty or thirty years old. And you know, they're starting
to do more brick and mortar now. They've changed their
products over time, They've added tech products, etcetera, etcetera. Well,
Sears was doing the same thing. They were watching what
was happening in the market. They were changing and they
were modifying what they were doing to meet the times.
They started doing brick and mortar stores themselves. They started
(22:07):
doing malls, They started doing television ads on TV. After radio,
they started doing jingles. I think that now moving closer
into our era, and okay, my era we actually remember,
like back in the nineties seventies, for example, they had
a jingle that I think everybody remembers, is calling me
(22:30):
gotta have it, pick up the by come on. Okay.
(22:55):
I only wanted to play that in the middle of
this podcast because I want it stuck in everyone's head,
like the next two weeks, this moment for your life.
You know you're gonna be singing it, admit it. But yeah,
we were all singing those kinds of jingles back in
the day. Those were the good old days of television.
By the way, when sitcoms had original songs. Remember, well,
you don't remember, but Nick Knight remember watching them come on,
(23:17):
we saw them at Nick Nick Knight watch them. Yeah.
Well that that's the that was sort of the era.
By the time that came out in the nineties seventies,
maybe times weren't quite as good, but they were already
becoming sort of known the way we know them more now,
which is as a uh, you know, hardware company and
appliance company. And also they were already trying to make
(23:38):
sure by then that people understood that there was more
than just appliances. There was more for your life at Sears,
or maybe there was a softer side to Sears you
the first days, I always just said me all the
semple said, you see say, let's be honest. That never
(24:05):
really worked, but I do remember that jingle. I do
remember the softer side of Seeres playing when my mom
was watching k Yeah, I I they really tried to
show off there that they sold clothing and all of that.
But all I can remember, and I'm going to date
myself a little bit with this one, but when I
was a little kid going to school, what kind of
Jeanes you wore was super important to how cool you were,
(24:27):
And if you were wearing tough Skins, which was the
Sears brand of jeans, you were a who's just saying.
One step up from that was Wrangler. You were only
cool if you were Levis. It's just how it was.
And they didn't salt Levis that Sears back in the day.
So so at least in that department, maybe they stepped
their game up just a little bit because they kind
(24:48):
of carry everything I think in the in the closed
department now they have. That's a function I think of
the retail business in general being on the struggle bus,
so we don't know what to do next town. But
at the time, Levi's was everything, and tough Skins were
just lame. Uh So the softer side of Sears never
really was super successful. But in other efforts to sort
(25:10):
of stay current and diversify, Sears, and this is something
I think very few people know, actually launched a lot
of other famous brands that are famous to this day.
Let me give you a hinch on one of them.
You're in good hounds with the whole state. Did you
know that and see that? Know that anything? Like the actor?
(25:31):
I mean, you did your best, but I think that's
who's going to associate a massive retailer with like car
insurance and life and home and what how did that
even happen? Well, here's what's interesting. Some of the brands
that that Sears crafted made sense with the other things
they sold. For example, Craftsman Tools, they were selling tools
(25:51):
and hardware. Ken Moore Appliances was a big brand for them,
but those all stayed kind of in house brands. They
also had tire stores, remember which I think some big
store still do, like Costco I think still has a
tire store, right, I believe they do, and I know Sears,
at least the one near my house all this time
growing up, had the Automotive Center, and so that was
all part of that. Coming out of that member the
(26:12):
seven page catalog where you could buy entire cars, it
made sense to still have some of that in their
lineup because they had some expertise there. So they had
die hard batteries and All State Insurance I think bubbled
up out of that. It came out of this idea
of automobile insurance. It started all the way back in
believe it or not, and it was actually all State
was actually named after one of the Sears brand of
(26:33):
tires that they had back in the day, and so
All State obviously has since been spun off and continues
to live on as a far stronger brand than Sears
is now. The other thing that they did, look, they
almost made it, Sears was like, what's that song about?
We almost made it, you know about breaking up? I
feel like that's kind of Sears almost made it into
the next transition, like they could have been Amazon. They
(26:56):
almost made it. When the Internet was just starting to
become a thing, they actually developed Prodigy. Now you may
not remember that, Nick, You look a little puzzled, all right, Well,
you know what a O L is, right, absolutely so.
Prodigy was a competitor to a O L. Essentially, it
was in the dial up days and it was this
private network essentially where you could log onto Prodigy and
(27:20):
have access to a version of email at the time,
a private network, some basic shopping. And this was all
way before the Internet became mainstream. The problem was for
Sears with that, it's almost like they were the BlackBerry
of the Internet that just couldn't keep up. And also,
by the way they did that in partnership with IBM
(27:42):
and CBS. Prodigy was a partnership of Sears, IBM and CBS,
and it was like they almost had it and then
now and the other brand I think worth noting that
they spun off was Discover Card. That that stem from
maybe like a Sears store card, because that's been fascinating. Yes,
it did, and Sears was one of the early credit
card companies with the Sears store credit card, and for
(28:05):
a long time at Sears you could only use this
if they didn't take other credit cards. They only took
the Sears charge card. Now that was when times were
a little bit different. But ultimately they realized they needed
to branch out and they spun off Discover Card, which
again is now a far stronger brand on its own,
you know than it's It's Mommy and Daddy. Sears is
so pretty interesting. They were at one point, as things
(28:27):
started to go wrong for Sears, they were making far
more money with their financial products than they were with
any consumer products, which is kind of telling. All Right,
I love a good bunny trail, but let's get back
to the timeline. They a depthly manage this move from
mail order catalog to physical stores two malls. They moved
from caring only about rural customers to embracing this suburban
(28:51):
customer who really became their mainstay. And things were going
all in all amazingly well. So they started expanding and
building and expand ending and building. As companies deal we
talked about it from a brand perspective and a product perspective,
but they did it with you know, physical locations too,
And like m hm, anybody who has something they want
to um overcome, they have to show off by you know,
(29:14):
building big things, bigger, big, bigger, better, more like with
their name on them. You know, I'm not suggesting anything,
I'm just saying. So they started building some big buildings.
In fact, even right here in Atlanta, they built a
huge building that we are in fact sitting in right now.
We're in the old Seers Building right this very minute.
(29:35):
The building here was built in phases, starting back in
the company. Sears at the time bought sixteen acres for
about two thousand dollars. Can you imagine what a steel
and I'm not saying parallel, I'm just saying parallel Amazon
HQ two anyone. The first phase costs three million dollars
and it was a warehouse and a retail store. It
(29:56):
carried thirty five thousand items and employed teen hundred people.
And on its first day, wait for this, on its
very first day, there were thirty thousand visitors. That's how
excited people were. That is one heck of an economic engine.
What what in modern times could draw thirty thousand visitors
(30:16):
on one day other than like a sporting event or
a concert or something especially like the opening of a
new store. No way, I mean, I'm gonna I'm gonna
throw it out there the Olympics. It's like the only thing,
right absolutely, I mean maybe if it yeah, you know,
in a sense of retail, you're right. I think the
only thing that would draw that many people in one
day would be if Amazon opened a massive store in
(30:37):
the middle of a big city and they're like, by
the way, this is the Amazon store, and everything on
the line is in here. No, no, no no. The only
way thirty thousand people would show up for that is
if everything was free. People don't care about a store anymore.
That's not a thing. People don't line up for that.
But if you give it to me free, am there? Anyway?
They continue to grow this Atlanta presence, adding floors and
(30:57):
entire new buildings, turning it into a campus again somewhat
like our tech companies of today, until it reached two
million square feet. That was in the heyday of the
nineteen sixties of Sears, and that was just what they
did here in Atlanta. But Sears was literally becoming the
everything and everywhere store by then. In nineteen sixty nine,
Sears was the largest retailer in the world. They had
(31:20):
three and fifty thousand employees at one point and over
four thousand stores internationally. And that, of course is when
they decided they needed a teller. You know, everybody needs
to tell a big, huge building with our name slapped
on the side, that is correct. The Sears Tower, a
hundred and ten stories tall, was built in Chicago, Illinois.
(31:42):
It was completed in nineteen seventy three, and at that
time it was taller than the World Trade Center towers
in New York and it was the tallest building in
the world. That is one big midlife crisis right there.
It held that title for twenty five years. So I
think it's I don't to know which that what the
tallest building is now to you, it's it's a Burge
(32:04):
Khalifa in Saudi Arabia. It's one of those crazy huge towers.
You really know that? How do you know that? Because
they built it in the same premise the Royal family
where they said, you know what, we can do it bigger,
and so they did, and we're going to put our
name on it. Yeah. I feel like there's something about
building that giant building and slapping your name on it again,
(32:24):
whether it's the tallest or just the biggest, it feels
like an ego play to me. And I wonder a
little bit, and I'm just putting out there Jeff Bezos
that maybe it's the beginning of the end. It's the
signal of future doom, kind of your own Uh, your
own bravado has gotten the better of you. Now you
think you're better than everyone. So let's just do whatever
we want, right or yes, and we can in the
(32:46):
case of Amazon, certainly get the entire country to stop
everything they're doing and make proposals and uh, you know,
give us tax credits and put dog and pony shows
on to commitce us to come there and spend our
big money to build our big building, to put our
big name on it. And then what what's funny is
as Sears has begun to struggle Jeff Bezos has an
eye on it. He's watching what's happening to Sears in
(33:09):
modern times. I'll talk about that in just a minute.
But the money was also flowing like crazy for Sears
in the nineteen hundreds leading up to right around when
the Sears Tower was built. Um, they were crushing it
in all kinds of ways, not just size but also money.
And it wasn't until really after the Sears Tower when
things started to decline. That's the sad part of the story,
(33:31):
and that brings us to where we're at right now today.
We'll talk about that next. So you know how it goes.
Everything that goes up must come down, that's what they say. Anyway, Well, Sears,
that was definitely the case the nineteen hundreds overall pretty
good for Sears. Started a falter in the late nineteen hundreds,
(33:54):
but by the early two thousand's there was a little
bit of a resurgence in there. They hired a CEO
who turned things around for a minute, and they did okay,
they bought some other companies like lands End and and
they hung in there a little bit, but overall it
just wasn't happening, and things started to falter. For them.
So just to give you an idea of some of
(34:14):
the numbers, in two thousand and the year two thousand,
Sears had sales of forty one billion for the company,
and by let's say sixteen, they were down to two billion,
so almost half gone. That's years, and that's just it's
really interesting to see that transition from so much success
in the nineties and then as soon as the twenty
(34:34):
first century came around, they just stopped and started to drop. Well,
the real problem started for Sears. They were, you know,
they were starting to struggle a little bit. They were
losing some of that vision that they had had in
their earlier days. And I have to mention that part
of the reason I think Sears lost their vision. And
this has not happened to Amazon. I'm sure Jeff Bezos
is knocking on wood. But Richard Sears died really young,
(34:55):
and so that was part of the problem. And he
was sort of a workaholic, and that you know, health
just wasn't what it is now. They didn't have access
to the same kind of medicine and doctors, and people
didn't live as long. And he died like at age fifty,
so he was out of the picture pretty early on,
and the company was led by others, some people that
had been in on it with him from the early days,
who shepherded it pretty well as we saw through the
(35:17):
nineteen hundreds. But what really went wrong was that as
things started to falter for Sears and and part of
that was competition from stores like Target and Walmart, and
they weren't able to compete. They weren't the only ones anymore.
They weren't able to compete in the way that they
once did, and so they ended up being purchased slash
merging with Kmart under the name Sears Holdings has happened
(35:40):
in two thousand five, and this is where the evil
villain of the story enters the picture. He is a
man named Eddie Lampert. He is the current I think
he's the current chairman. He's the current chairman, had to
resign a CEO. Correct why? Because he is evil? He
might have noticed, even just from those two sentences that
(36:01):
I'm not a huge fan of Eddie Lampert, but he
got involved in two thousand five. This is a guy
who is one of those sort of classic Wall Street
hedge fund managers who believes in making himself and his
cronies as rich as possible, and seems to not give
a hoot. Can you give a hoot about anything or
(36:24):
anyone else? He makes me think of a famous movie
from back in the eighties called Wall Street. Remember that one?
Did you ever watch it? Okay, remember this scene. The
point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of
a better word, is good. Greed is right, Greed works,
(36:47):
Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures these of the evolutionary spirit.
Greed in all of its forms, greed for life, for money,
for love, knowledge has marked upwards. Search of mankind and
green you mark my words will not only save tells
(37:10):
our paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.
For the record, it's not working for Sears or the
good old us of A writes this very minute. But
Eddie Lampertshire believes in greed. That is what he's doing.
So he brings Kmart and Sears together under Sears Holdings
back in two thousand five. And you know it seems
to think he's going to be able to or at
(37:31):
least is trying to present a front of I'm going
to fix all of this. I have all these great ideas.
Just everybody, stay with me. We're gonna make it work well.
Fast forward. We're now in two thousand eighteen, but by
two thousand sixteen sales were down to two billion. Seen
tells really cut in half, all gone. If you've walked
into a Sear store in eighteen, what did you see?
(37:55):
Things all over the floor. It's not well kept. Their
products selection is starting to slowly get worse and worse
and worse. It's not pretty now, it's horrible. Sears by
modern times is just lost. It's lost. It's they claim
that they made an effort to have you know, Sears
dot com. Does anyone go to Sears dot com for anything?
(38:16):
I've gone before. There's a reason I was on there
for two minutes and have never been back. There you go,
they missed their opportunity. From that perspective, it's not something
Eddie Lamper ever fixed. The stores are dirty and discussing
in a disaster. Again, not something that Eddie Lamper ever fixed.
He is so sketchy he literally makes my stomach turn.
(38:40):
I mean, this is a guy who is selling parts
of the company off. There were when he got involved
in two thousand five. Still some assets that are part
of Seers that have value, and he sold them off
in theory to save the company. But the sketchy part
is he in many cases sold the pieces and parts
off to other holding company of which he personally had
(39:01):
an interest. So he's basically scraping the meat off the bones.
That's what this guy is doing. And even when he
tries to give a pep talk. Now Sears now has
filed for bankruptcy, and as you pointed out at the
very beginning of this episode, has just gotten for himself
and again his cronies in the midst of bankruptcy huge
bonuses while Sears employees right before Christmas time are out
(39:25):
of work. Yea Sears, And even when he tries to
give a pep talk, Eddie Lampord just sounds like somebody
you want to punch in the face. The world of
retail was going to be stable. It would have been
much more difficult to create something different. There'd be no Amazon,
just the larger Walmart, and they would not have been
(39:46):
the opportunity for Sears to break from the pack once
again and change the face of retailing like it always
had in the past. As we all know, we haven't
capitalized in this opportunity the way I would have liked,
instead of grow with an investment. We have faced retransment
every structuring. When he says break from the pack, does
he mean like fall behind, like the you know, like
(40:09):
the kid in gym class. We just can't keep up
with the other kids. Is that what he means? I
just imagined like a herd of cattle and one of
them breaks its leg. It's just really limbing. Don't pick
on the you know it's it's it's the Sears chickens
they bought back in the day, and one of them
was a little defective, and it just can't keep up
with all the other chickens anymore. Yeah, I mean, I
don't know what he's even talking about there. I mean, yes, certainly, retail.
(40:31):
We've seen a lot of struggles in the retail industry
in the last ten years, with big box stores going
out of business, with malls struggling. I mean, there's certainly
have been challenges, but I have not seen Sears do
anything that looks positive to try to break from the pack.
Right my whole life, I graduated in my whole life
of being able to go to the mall by myself
and knowing about companies, it's always been that dingy, dark
(40:53):
corner of the mall, and it's like, really, you went
to you win into Sears. Oh man, I just go
in there to use the bathroom. Yeah, so exactly. And
the bathroom probably wasn't even clean, It wasn't, but it
was the closest one. You know, what are you gonna do? Well,
you're a dude. That's okay for you. It's not as
good for us, but right, fair point. And I think,
you know, Sears could have turned it back around. Think
about how many brands we've seen that we're sort of
(41:15):
not cool become cool again in a vintagey way, like
they could have spun off something that was specifically Sears.
You know, maybe they do smaller hardware stores because look,
home Depot now has taken over the hardware market, but
you need a neighborhood hardware store. What if Sears had
started small corner hardware stores with their Craftsman brand, they
(41:36):
could have totally done that. They could have had an
amazing Craftsman website and had that. You know, there were opportunities, absolutely,
and that's one of the saddest parts about it is
because ken More appliances are actually pretty good. Craftsman tools
are really good. And if Sears is going to die
and these brands die with it, that's that's that's really sad.
See that happen, Right, Start ken More appliance stores or
(41:56):
put a ken More you know store within Best Buy
like Apple does. Right. I mean, there were ways that
Sears could have stayed relevant and they just never did.
I mean, even do some new, softer side of Sears
and make fun of it and find a way to
make that cool. I mean, Hush Puppies came back for
a minute. I don't know if you remember that, but
they did. Vinyl records are back. They are very right, exactly,
(42:17):
and they're useless, but they're really cool. I mean, they're
not nearly as good as digital music in terms of
the ability, you know, the ease of carrying them around
and all that, but they're cool. You're right. It's it's
something kind of novelty to have and with the big
Sears with the blue kind of double lined logos and
everything else, that's what we've all known for twenty years now,
and it's they would have gone back to the kind
(42:38):
of the seventies logo with the almost handwritten script Sears
with the line under it like you said, if you
can make fun of yourself, sometimes that launches you right
back into the spotlight. And they just they didn't. I
don't even know if it was a lack of execution.
It was a lack of caring more than anything else, right,
And it was Eddie Lampert wanting to make money for
himself and his cronies. And that is where we are today,
(42:59):
and that is where this story, sadly is going to end.
It makes me sad to see what used to be
an iconic company going away kind of but in this case,
goodbye Sears, you know, like see it wouldn't want to
be a rights like that question you grow up with
and you were friends with through college, and then you've
gotten back in touch leader in life and you realize,
oh you've changed, and I don't like you anymore. Yeah
(43:21):
you really weren't. I don't really. I thought you were cool,
but no maybe not. Or as Michelle Obama would say,
bye Felicia. Look before we go, I feel like we
have to wrap up with poor Roebuck, who we haven't
talked much about. How How did how did things end
up for the guy I mean Alva Roebuck was one
of the founding guys. I wonder if he were still around,
if he could have made it cool again. Would It
(43:43):
would be very interesting to know, because yeah, you're right, Sears,
Roebuck and Company, and then Roebuck kinda fell off the map,
right well. Sears, the guy, Richard Sears, made millions. He
was worth twenty five million by the time he died,
which is roughly six and twelve million in today's dollars,
So he did pretty well before he passed away, but
he did die young. And Roebuck he got disinterested in
(44:06):
the company after the first two years of being with
the company, so way back in the late eighteen hundreds,
he was like, yeah, this is not for me. I'm
gonna just take sell off my shares. I think he
sold them for about twenty dollars at the time. There's
different stories about how much he got, but it wasn't
a ton. He took his money. He went to Florida,
tried a few other businesses. Ultimately he ended up going
(44:26):
back to Sears on request to do a demo kind
of to be on like to be sort of paraded
around for who he was he enjoyed it, they enjoyed
having him. So Ultimately, this is many years later, now
twenty years later or something. He becomes the company historian
and spends kind of the latter years of his life
being sort of a poster boy for Sears, which was
(44:46):
still Sears Roebuck and Company for quite some time and
then and by the way, he lived a nice long life.
Died at age eighty four. In a couple of years
before he died, and by the way, this is included
in his o bit in the New York Time Times,
he was asked, uh if he felt bad that he
didn't know stick with it and make millions like his
buddy Sears, and he said, mmmm, he died in his
(45:10):
forties and I'm still here, so yeah, all good. I'm
good with that. I think maybe Roebuck had the right idea,
Yes he did. Yeah. Um. Ultimately, to sum it all up,
there is a cautionary tale here for Jeff Bezos and Amazon,
and Jeff Bezos was recently asked about the demise of
Sears and what he thought about it, and even Jeff
(45:31):
Bezos said, yeah, I see it, and we might not
be around forever. Sears icon to fondly remember, or a
cautionary tale for Amazon, or another reason in this country
needs bankruptcy reform. I don't know, maybe it's all three.
That's our show for today. Phisiography is produced by the
(45:53):
iHeart Podcast Network. I'm your host Dana Barrick. My co
host and producer is Nick Bean. Our executive producer is
christ for hascy Otis and Josh Thame provides audio production.
Have questions, want to give us feedback or have a
company you'd like us to cover. Email us at info
at physiography dot show, or contact us on social. I'm
(46:13):
at the Danta Barrett on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or
just search for Data Barrett on LinkedIn
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