Before there were strip malls and shopping centers, Walmart, or Target, and certainly before there was any Amazon.com, there was Sears.
Established in the late 1880s, by Richard W. Sears and Alvah C. Roebuck as a mail order catalog company selling watches and jewelry, A.C. Roebuck Watch Company would become Sears, Roebuck & Co. in 1893 and expand its product offerings to compete with general stores selling select high-priced supplies and goods to rural farmers on credit. General store owners often negotiated prices with the farmers based on creditworthiness. The Sears catalog offered fixed pricing on a much larger selection of goods. That formula worked, and business boomed. In 1893, sales were more than $400,000 (about $12 million today), and by 1895 they topped $750,000 ($20 million today). The catalog grew, eventually surpassing 1,000 pages and included a vast array of items, such as sewing machines, bicycles, sporting goods, groceries, and even automobiles.
The ‘Works'
In order to accommodate its need to ship and receive a vast amount of merchandise, the Sears complex was built on the Chicago Terminal Transfer Railway to capitalize on its access to every railway line passing through Chicago. The Merchandise Building, pictured here, was nicknamed the “works” for the large army of employees “busy from early morning until late at night in filling the orders from our customers.”
In 1906, Sears and his then-partner and brother-in-law Julius Rosenwald decided to take the company public. The successful initial public offering (IPO) was the first major retail IPO in American financial history.
That same year, Sears opened a new catalog plant and the Sears Merchandise Building Tower in Chicago. The building was the anchor of what would become the massive 40-acre Sears, Roebuck and Company Complex of offices, laboratories, and mail-order operations at Homan Avenue and Arthington Street. The complex was the base of the mail-order catalog business until 1993 and served as corporate headquarters until 1973 when the Sears Tower was completed.
The company
