Before the advent of superstores, shopping malls, and big-box outlets, one company dominated retail commerce in middle America – Sears, Roebuck & Co.
For those of us who lived in rural, geographically isolated areas, Sears offered us an opportunity to purchase ready-made products at a fair price and allowed us to begin to assimilate into a modern world.
I can remember one morning, in the early 1960s, as I prepared to make the long walk to the one-room schoolhouse; I stopped to realize that every single piece of clothing I had on, came from the mail-order giant. Boots, pants, shirt, underwear, socks, coat, and even my belt, had arrived in a neatly bundled parcel tied with white twine. Back then, Sears never shipped anything (to us, at least) in a cardboard box.
When I returned home that afternoon, I continued to be amazed at the influence one company had on our life. My mother did laundry with a Sears, wringer-style, washing machine. Dad used a David Bradley (a line of Sears) chainsaw to cut the firewood that was our only heat source for the home. Most of his mechanics’ tools were ordered from Sears, as well as many of the hand tools we used on a daily basis around the farm. In later years, kitchen appliances from the same company dominated our home and when we finally got an air conditioner in 1969, it, too, came from Sears.
Twice each year (spring/summer and fall/winter), a gigantic issue of the mail-order catalog would arrive in our mailbox, and the next several nights would find my mother carefully perusing the pages and dog-earring each page that had something she would like to have. It was pretty easy for me to understand the nickname, “wish book,” that my father had assigned to the behemoth catalog. And, as soon as the newest issue would arrive, the old, out-of-date issue would be retired to our outhouse where it would lie until every page had been used. There, it was not a “wish book” unless you just wished there weren’t so many slick pages.
Sadly, the Sears Co. got out of the mail-order business many years ago. In my opinion, millions of kids were deprived of the Christmas-like feeling that I had enjoyed each year when the letter carrier would honk his horn, alerting us that the twine-tied bundle from Sears had finally arrived.
Even sadder, was the recent news release from Sears, that the company would be closing 150 more stores and selling off a couple of their major brand names, in order to try to stay in business. According to the news report, it is getting increasingly more difficult for the retailer to compete with online retailing giants that make it easier to sit down at the computer and order their goods with the click of a mouse and have those goods delivered to their doorstep in a couple of days.
Easy ordering and doorstep delivery, all from the comfort of your own home? Hmmm. Who would have ever thought of such a crazy idea? Once again, we’ve come full circle.
