WhereIsAtlas · Retail

Sears

The catalog-and-store giant that the discount era and Amazon left behind

Defunct — Chapter 11 in 2018; the once-1,000+ store icon is down to a handful of stores under Transformco.

Sears began in 1886 as Richard Sears' mail-order watch business and grew into a machine that taught middle-class America how to buy. The Sears, Roebuck catalog - the "Wish Book" - delivered sewing machines, farm tools, bicycles and whole prefab homes to the rural heartland, long before stores were on every corner. In 1925 it opened its first physical store, and by the 1960s and 70s the suburban Sears anchored American malls, adding the 1973 Sears Tower and subsidiaries like Allstate, Dean Witter and Discover to its empire.

The empire peaked in the 1970s but the discount era was already eating it. Walmart's low-cost big-box model overtook Sears by the early 1990s, while the catalog it was built on fell to never-ending price competition and later to Amazon. Managing its decline through the 2000s, Sears merged with Kmart in 2005 into Sears Holdings under hedge-fund manager Eddie Lampert, who kept the company afloat largely by liquidating its real estate - selling the very assets that made it a retailer.

Sears filed for Chapter 11 on 15 October 2018. Lampert won the bankruptcy auction and folded it into Transformco, but the chain has kept shrinking ever since, down to a small handful of surviving stores. The Sears brand endures, but the giant that once defined American retail is effectively gone.

Quick facts

Founded
1886, by Richard W. Sears
Catalog & store
First store 1925; catalog since 1888
Peak status
Largest retailer in the world, 1970s
Icon
Sears Tower (1973), now Willis Tower
Merged with Kmart
2005 (Sears Holdings)
Chapter 11
Oct 15, 2018

Sources

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