When Sears & Roebuck were the industry disrupters

With Sears now in decline and fading fast it is interesting to look back at how this mighty giant was once a major threat to established brick and mortar stores at its founding.

Richard Sears turned his side job of selling mail-order watches into a full time business in 1893. He had partnered with Alvah Roebuck, a watch repairman he first hired in 1897 while he was still in Minnesota working as a railroad station agent.  The “R. W. Sears Watch Company” transformed itself into “Sears, Roebuck and Company” and moved to Chicago. The transformation included a diversification into all sorts of products people could use in their daily lives.  

The catalog business was born and rapidly took off. The vast majority of the US population now had a way to buy goods at a lower cost than the one or two stores in a small town could provide, stores that usually profited from selling to locals on credit when they couldn’t pay up front.

The rapid rise of the catalog mail-order industry jolted the small town stores, so much so that ads such as the one below began to appear.  The language is remarkable and the overall tone is not unlike the same messages that appeared (and still appear) as Amazon.com became a formidable retail giant in the late 90s and into the 2000s.