How old is sears

The Sears catalogue contained more than pages of merchandise by the late s. Chicago clothing manufacturer Julian Rosenwald bought the company in , though Sears remained president. Roebuck resigned due to poor health. The company needed capital for its rapidly expanding business.

In , Rosenwald and Sears sold stock on the open market. Sears has been publicly owned and traded company ever since. Sears took advantage of new homebuilding materials and construction techniques at the turn of the twentieth century. Between and , Sears sold 70, to 75, pre-fab kit homes by mail order. Mass-produced materials lowered manufacturing costs.

Sears Modern Homes typically arrived with a detailed instruction manual and two boxcars worth of building materials. Due to their high-quality materials and practical design, many Sears homes are still in use. The first Sears Christmas Wish Book catalogue came out in The catalogue contained toys and other holiday gifting merchandise. Items featured in the first catalogue included the popular Miss Pigtails doll, Lionel electric train sets, a Mickey Mouse watch, boxes of chocolate and even live singing canaries.

The catalogue, which arrived in mailboxes in late August or early September, soon became a holiday tradition with warm, colorful Christmas scenes decorating the cover. The Wish Book began to diminish in size during the late s and early s, as merchandizing shifted to online purchases. As increasing numbers of Americans moved to cities in the twentieth century, Sears faced the loss of rural consumers.

City dwellers with easy access to a variety of stores had little need for huge mail order catalogues. Early Sears department stores typically opened in working class neighborhoods outside of the major city shopping districts. Sears was one of the first department stores to cater to men as well as women by selling tools and hardware. Its merchandise emphasized durability and practicality over fashion, and its store layout allowed customers to select goods without the aid of a clerk.

In the s and s, Sears began to shift its focus from urban to suburban markets. The Sears name soon became synonymous with the suburban shopping experience.

Their large department stores anchored shopping malls all over the country, and Sears catered to suburban motorists by expanding their automotive services. Sears announced plans to build a new headquarters in downtown Chicago in The combined companies—to be headquartered in Chicago and called Sears Holdings—would operate around 3, locations. Analysts expressed excitement at combining the fading giants' mainstays, cross-selling brands such as Sears' Craftsman and Kmart's Martha Stewart Everyday.

Lampert left Goldman to start a hedge fund in at the age of 25 and bought up Kmart's debt when the retailer declared bankruptcy in As chairman of the combined company—he took on the CEO role as well in —Lampert initially attracted breathless praise from the media.

A Bloomberg Businessweek cover story called him "the next Warren Buffett. A little over 13 years later, such comparisons seem ridiculous. Sears Holdings' sales rose in , its first full year as a combined company, but then fell in each of the following nine years. The recovery was tepid and short-lived. Shares peaked again that April at less than two-thirds their pre-crisis high.

They have not recovered since. Kmart was Lampert's first majority stake, and he proved to be a better speculator than a manager. A Bloomberg article excoriates his Ayn Rand-inspired approach: In , he split the company into 30 divisions—which swelled to 40 a year later—each of which reported profits separately and had to compete with the others for resources.

Lampert was both strict with money and distant, seldom leaving his home in South Florida. Divisions found themselves acting like separate companies, even drawing up contracts with each other. Compensation costs rose as each division hired its own senior management. These executives, in turn, had to form their own boards, and their pay was determined according to an in-house profit metric that led to cannibalization as some divisions cut jobs, forcing others to step in.

The appliances unit found itself being gouged by the Kenmore unit, so it bought wares from LG, a South Korean conglomerate, instead. In , its total debt surpassed its market cap. While Lampert experimented with new management techniques, Amazon built a retail empire. In the tech giant surpassed Sears, then lapped it in When Kmart's acquisition of Sears was announced in , Lampert commented, "I don't think any retailer should aspire to have its real estate be worth more than its operating business.

As Sears' prospects fade, however, investors began eyeing its real estate. Sears cut the hours, pay, and headcount of retail staff to save cash, causing stores and customer experience to deteriorate. The end is coming soon, get out while you can. This was not the first time Sears partnered with Amazon—the company landed deals to sell appliances and car batteries on Amazon in It would be easy to read this story as a triumph of ecommerce, or to reflect on the irony that Sears was a first-mover when it came to online shopping, with its proto-Internet joint venture Prodigy.

But even recently, Sears has been ahead of the curve in that area. According to Bloomberg, Lampert "showered" the online division with resources while the rest fought over a shrinking pie. Nor did competition with Amazon alone precipitate Sears' decline. When sales and profits began to fade, in the mids, other big-box retailers—particularly Walmart—were thriving.

Perhaps the might-have-been next Warren Buffett should have listened to the original, who told University of Kansas students in , "Eddie is a very smart guy, but putting Kmart and Sears together is a tough hand.

Turning around a retailer that has been slipping for a long time would be very difficult. Can you think of an example of a retailer that was successfully turned around? Accessed Sept. AP News. The Wall Street Journal. Yahoo Finance. Penney Company, Inc. Sears Archives. As though by some dark science, an identity split occurred in Chapter Out came a new Sears, Transformco, with the last remaining stores of a one-time retail empire.

The old Sears, Sears Holdings, remains a corporate shadow, like a tortured doppelganger, stuck in bankruptcy ever since. The Sears Holdings that filed for bankruptcy amounts to a tangle of paper corporate entities, a massive pile of bills and a perpetual litigation machine.

Most of the world has forgotten both. Other than that, nobody cares. Why would you care? Since Eddie Lampert acquired the last Sears and Kmart stores out of bankruptcy in early — over the objections of unsecured creditors — both banners have continued their seemingly never-ending decline that started more than a decade ago. At the time of the acquisition, Lampert took control of Kmarts and Sears department stores through the new company, Transformco aka Transform Holdco.

By then, the Sears and Kmart banners were mere fractions of what they were even a few years earlier. The number of Kmarts and Sears stores has since become an even smaller and starker fraction of the one-time giant. According to a Retail Dive count of Sears' website, there were 40 Kmart stores and 39 Sears full-line stores including Puerto Rico and other territories as of May Those counts are based on how up-to-date, or not, Transform's websites are and might not reflect the company's store count exactly.

Other counts differ. F inancial analysis firm Creditntell lists 38 Kmarts and 87 Sears stores based on a variety of datapoints. Writing for Forbes, Michael Lisicky estimated earlier this year that there would be just 21 Kmarts and 28 Sears stores left by this summer after the latest planned closures.

A spokesperson for Transformco did not respond to Retail Dive's request to confirm the company's current store count and make an executive available for interview. Jim Rice, a senior vice president with Creditntell, said in an interview that Transformco's current Sears and Kmart footprints might not be enough to support overhead costs for the banners. Moreover, Sears and Kmart's supplier base has likely diminished along with their footprints.

Rice said he has received fewer inquiries from those interested in selling to Sears in the time since it emerged from bankruptcy. Customer traffic remains severely depressed as well. Diminishment seems like an eternal state for Sears, defying mathematics and logic. Surely if Sears and Kmart keep closing stores they will reach zero eventually — right?

Older generations can recall a very different trajectory for Sears, which was formed out of a partnership between Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck, originally to sell watches and jewelry to America's far-flung towns.

By the early s, the Sears catalog sold women's garments, guns, fishing tackle, bicycles, baby carriages, musical instruments and even houses, along with a whole lot of other things. It was also an early pioneer in consumer credit plans and launched its own iconic brands, including the Craftsman brand of tools.

Starting in , Sears began building brick-and-mortar stores, adding hundreds within just a few years. By , retail sales passed its catalog revenue. Erik Gordon, a professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, noted in an interview how Sears "early on, saw suburbanization and shopping malls as an opportunity — and they saw it as such a big opportunity they built malls.

Sears developed into a multifaceted mammoth. Along with its catalog and retail business, and private brands, it housed among other units an insurance company, a real estate company and a credit card Discover , all of which were eventually spun off.

You look at it and think, 'Oh my goodness, they were Amazon. Not long after Lampert and his hedge fund ESL Investments took over Kmart, following the latter's bankruptcy in the early s, he merged the discount store with Sears in a move to expand the product range of both stores and accelerate Sears' off-mall strategy.

But both banners went into the merger with longstanding existing issues. Sears was tied to a department store sector in decline amid the rise of big-box players and off-mall shopping. Sears discontinued the general catalog just short of its th anniversary. The timing was bad: Americans were about to start shopping online.

Despite its catalog origins, Sears never became a major player in direct-to-home retail business online. After a year run in the Dow, Sears lost its spot to rival Home Depot. The combination of the two old-line retail brands failed to stave off younger, more agile competitors, such as Walmart, Target, Amazon and Home Depot. Sears was able to make money through , but the red ink started to flow in , and it has never stopped.

Lampert tried to stem losses by closing less profitable stores. But sales continued to fall, and the losses left the company starved for cash. The lack of investment in Sears and Kmart stores turned them into barren, outdated relics. While Sears got the cash it needed, it lost its ability to sell the still popular brand exclusively. The company continued to insist that it had plan to return to profitability, but the admission created more problems as vendors worried about not getting money owed to them by Sears, started to demand cash up front, putting the retailer at a greater competitive disadvantage.

Some, including appliance maker Whirlpool, pulled its products out of Sears and Kmart stores altogether. Eddie Lampert stepped down as CEO, but remained chairman.