The advent of e-commerce has changed the world. You can buy entire vehicles from across the world and have them delivered to your door without ever leaving bed. Sites like Amazon, eBay, and Alibaba have countless items all just clicks away. In the past, that was the job of stores like Montgomery Ward and Sears.
Today, Matt wrote about how automakers tried to become software companies, but that isn’t really working out so well. Really, it joins a long list of things carmakers have tried to become, like lame “lifestyle” brands or in the case of my beloved Smart, a “viral” Internet brand. While you’re cleaning up the vomit off of the floor, let our readers take you on a nostalgia trip.
EXL500 starts it off with:
Sears could have been Amazon.
Andrew Daisuke correctly points out that stores like Sears actually was Amazon before Amazon became a thing:
sears was amazon! every house in the country got the catalogue and ordered tons of various stuff.
Rob Schneider notes some of the cool stuff you could buy from Sears:
For a while, you could even order the house from the Sears catalog. I’ve been in a couple of them. They were nice. Small by current standards, but overall great little homes.
As does Peter d:
I had a relatives who had a Sears house. They were farmers and as the suburbs encroached on their farm they had lots of stories about their new neighbors’ incompetence in the wilderness of their new neighborhood. Lots of stories about had to help this one do something simple… also they made the best cinnamon rolls ever. Always loved to visit and explore the barn.
Sears not only sold houses, but motorcycles, engines, tires, batteries, tools, and oh yeah, whole cars. You could have lived your entire life out of a Sears catalog, even more so than you could from Amazon from today.
Moving on to Cold Start, Jason showed us the deceptive-looking Ley T6. Gilbert Wham wins a nomination for this one-liner:
That is the most Richard Scarry looking car to ever exist IRL.
Finally, we land at Mark’s Shitbox Showdown, where Sid Bridge tells you how to build your own Tamaro:
Best I can guess here is that the Tamaro owner had a milkshake made out of cocaine, Mountain Dew, Aderal, Monster Energy Drink and Gelato, used that to down a bowl of pills, washed it back with a case of 4Loko he had been hoarding, stuck a handful of LSD sugar cubes in his mouth, took a nitrous oxide enema, had a serious craving for tacos, went outside to his Taurus and woke up to this thing three months later.
Have a great evening, everyone!
I live in a Sears home. An Osborne model, built in 1923. It has been heavily modified since then, but the signature roofline of that model is intact.
That house at the top is GORGEOUS. Love the Sears homes. They’re so neat.
There’s something about a symmetrical house that’s great to look at compared to the oddly designed McMansions from the past decade.
I used to live in a Sears house! Built in the ’20s. It was nice, although it has the old-house quirk of a tub and throne in separate rooms. It was also “sideways”, in that whoever built it put what would have been the front door on the side for some reason. The “front” had no door. No insulation to speak of and aggressively plain.
It was also freaking rock solid and will easily last another hundred years.
Those Sears houses could be built by a couple of people in a few weeks.
Hell yeah! And a couple kegs, judging by some of the corners on mine. Must have only had one speed square.
Sears branded Vespas are big bucks now
I worked for Sears for 21 years and recall flipping through the catalog and asking my boss how we made money selling everything from live chickens to engine blocks.
Turned out we didn’t make money and the catalog was closed a few years later.
That said, the death of Sears has one name: Eddie Lampert. Pundits may say it was all inevitable but the fact is the company was strong enough to actually still exist in minimal form even today. If it takes 20 years to kill something maybe it could have been saved after all.
Lampert was never interested in saving Sears. He just stripped out whatever he could for himself and left the husk behind.
Eddie Lampire is what we used to call him…Sucking the precious bodily fluids of the company while creeping us out on his zombie-like video meetings. He hated having people around him so much that he would literally do a video call from another room to groups IN THE FUCKIN BUILDING.
He wanted the real estate, among other things.
Sears was important to many people: https://www.npr.org/2018/10/16/657923126/how-the-sears-catalog-was-revolutionary-in-the-jim-crow-era
Thank you, I came here to post something similar and am glad to see the excellent NPR article already linked.
I don’t know what my hangup is here, but I think I’ve written better for your comments section that I have for myself in months.
My first job was with Sears. I remember someone bringing in a 20 year old tractor that died. It was Craftsman branded. He got a new tractor.
Wait did he plank down greenback and Buy a brand new tractor after the precious one quit after 20 years…
Or…
Did Sears actually give him a brand new tractor bc the old one was somehow still covered by some unbelievable warentee?
They gave him a new one: lifetime warranty.
Wow that’s incredible
Wait, what? My best memories of Sears were at the tail end of their heyday, but I only remember lifetime warranties on hand tools. Anything with an engine had a shorter warranty.
That was the Craftsman deal: if it broke, you bring it back and get a new one.
I’m excited to make COTD! And I do have a life.
HIGH FIVE DUDE!
Menards still sells house kits: https://www.menards.com/main/search.html?search=house+building+kits (sort of)
Sears was better than amazon. It was actually curated. It’s wasn’t a bunch of slave wage people selling us literal trash. Amazon sucks now. It’s an online flea market. Nothing more.
Amazon is a mess. It is basically resellers acting as middlemen for AliExpress and other Chinese sites. You have to actively search to avoid the 50 generic versions of the “GOBATOPD” brand product.
It’s so annoying. Though I still can find deals. You have to spend a lot of time and have a discerning eye. I think the real issue is amazon has obviously introduced search results based off metadata. So if you search for a brand name good, you get the Chinese shit because they’ve added that metadata to their listing. And I LOVE metadata (I work with it for my day job), but metadata is only good if it’s accurate of which listing a generic good with metadata of a brand name is not good metadata. Garbage in, garbage out.
Yeah I searched for something specific the other day and still had to sift through a page of junk results before I got to it.
The generics are also hiding the name brand in the listing. I was searching for a name brand part for my air conditioner and the generics have “replacement for….” in their listing. So it comes up in the search.
It’s sad in a way. Sears was huge for a couple of generations, and then failed. Amazon retail will surely fail at some point. What will we do with these warehouses?! Data Centers I guess.
haha, I was going to bring this up. Search for something like Dockers men’s shorts. Get 15 pages of GOOBYLOO and SSINYAP shorts before you can find an actual branch you know.
Seriously. Amazon is just unusable to me, the whole supply chain thrives on exploitative working conditions, and the free shipping isn’t worth supporting that or wading through all the crap.
It’s fucking terrifying that Musk isn’t even the worst possible billionaire that could be hypothetically chosen to be the “efficiency czar”
I spent 10 years trying to get teachers and schools to use digital educational tools, devices, and e-learning websites. The Luddites pushed back and said never. Then the pandemic happened. Online education is bigger than ever.
Sears did something earlier, similar, but vastly worse they could have been Amazon and they did not take the internet seriously and paid the price.
From the condition of their stores, they didn’t take brick and mortar retail seriously either.
Once they were bought out by private equity, they were doomed.
Not sure when that happened, but my local store hadn’t seen any real updates since the early 90’s at the latest. It was clean, but obviously old.
They were also in the unique position of being at a mall that is still very busy to this day. Other area malls are essentially dead, visited only by packs of feral teens.
That’s actually interesting bc I have the same impression, i.e. once a company is bought by private equity the company is screwed and either is sold for parts or never rises again.
This is worth exploring further to get real quanitative numbers to confirm or refute our shared assumption
Until K-Mart bought Sears, everything I owned came from them. Tools, appliances, furniture, housewares, dishes, clothes. If it didn’t come from a grocery store, then I bought it at Sears.
Then I walked in one day and it was full of K-Mart clothes and Chinese tools. I turned around and never went back.
Sad.
Oh man the old Craftsman tool sets Sears had were amazing to my kid eyes
We’ve got some from the early 90s, still working great 🙂
I still have the sockets I got from them to work on my bike as a kid. The ratchets have been replaced, but the sockets remain (well, the 10mm has been replaced several times).
10mm sockets basically qualify as cryptids these days.
Yep, we had a Kenmore vacuum cleaner, Kenmore appliances, Craftsman tools, etc. I had a winter coat from Sears that lasted 20 years.
When we moved here, it came with a Lady Kenmore trash compactor.
Sears was absolutely the Amazon of its time. You could even purchase guns through them. A friend of mine’s Uncle died and part of the estate was a rifle. She asked me to take a look at it. It was in 2 pieces and “tiny”. Turns out it was most defintely a mail order from Sears for a 22 caliber 1907 “boy’s rifle”. Probably like $3 and quite common as a first rifle purchase for Jr to learn how to shoot. I have read that you could even get a Thompson submachine gun through Sears until Prohibition gangsters made them famous and Congress eventually took action.
Also have heard numerous tales about Sears houses being ordered and delivered by train to “X amount of miles west of (insert town name here)”. Folks would just wait track side for their “house” to show up. Train would stop and unload it right there trackside to be hauled away.
The way Sears capitalized on the railroad is such an American story. They filled a need for a rapidly expanding population at the same time modern production techniques made it possible to supply the
crapgoods people craved. I’m almost surprised they didn’t sell human beings through the catalog.Look, don’t knock mail-order kits from that period of time. Besides Sears homes, lots of old iron bridges for both roads and rail that still exist today in various parts of the country were kits
It’s still mind-boggling to me that Thompsons were marketed to cattle ranchers to deal with “vermin” like groundhogs
Sears would rebrand Puch 175cc and 250cc motorcycles and sell them as “Allstate” motorcycles. They did the same with, IIRC, Gilera motorcycles, for the smaller displacements, and rebadged a Vespa for a scooter.
Back in the day, anything automotive or automotive-adjacent at Sears was called an “Allstate”. This includes the insurance company of the same name.
I have a few Allstate/Puch motorcycles, and it’s a trip to see spark plugs that say “Allstate” on them…
They rebadged the Henry J as an Allstate and sold it loaded up with Sears store brand components (battery, tires, headlights, etc)
They did the same with Vespas.
There was an entire episode of “M*A*S*H” about Hawkeye and BJ failing to requisition an artificial kidney machine, then going back to the inventor’s plans, ordering all the parts they need from the Sears catalog, and building their own. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0638243/
And yeah, Sears & Roebuck was Amazon before Amazon, and should have been Amazon instead of Amazon. I have remarked before how the sorry late history and failure of Sears makes me picture Richard Sears looking down from Retail Heaven and weeping, while Sam Walton puts a supportive hand on his shoulder and says, “It’s a damn shame what they did to your company down there.”
See also: Radio Shack. How do you make your bones as a company on the bleeding edge of personal technology, then find a way to go bankrupt right at the dawn of the technological revolution?
Very first thing I thought of when I saw this article… Man we’re old.
Radio Shack went all-in on smartphones at exactly the wrong time just as the carriers opened their own stores, so they were paying for midsize storefronts while competing against both mall kiosks and the likes of AT&T and Verizon. They also “cleaned up” their stores to copy the Apple Store look, getting rid of all the good stuff just in time to miss the maker movement.
Edit: As for MASH, I would wonder what the turnaround time on their order to an APO address in a war zone would’ve been.
That was only one of their many missteps. Best Buy and Circuit City swooped in and overtook the personal/home electronics market while RS kept hocking their inferior store brand stuff. By that time, the only people walking into the stores were electronics hobbyists hunting for that resistor or connector they needed. Abandoning that market was the death knell, as there was no longer any reason for anyone to go there.
Man, most of my middle school and high school science fair projects lived on Radioshack components. Back in the mid 2000’s.
I worked at a Radio Shack in 1995. They were focusing more on underpaying the employees and pushing them to make sales for commissions than actually responding to the changing electronics markets.
CC and BestBuy had multiple versions of home electronics from different brands. Radio shack offered dated-looking store brand versions, often under-featured and always priced higher.
I used to love looking though the catalog and figuring out what pieces I could use to assemble a project back when almost every component in the catalog was available at the local store. I feel like availability of the full lien had dropped off by the end of the 90’s.
Boy do I miss the convenience of getting stuff from Radio Shack – looking back they really did stock a wide range of maker-style electronic components that today you usually have to order online (although places like You-Do-It electronics still have bricks & mortar stores). I do wonder how much of Radio Shack’s profits came from small items versus the radios, stereos batteries, and computers. Imagine how much more fun stuff kids could do today if they could get a Raspberry Pie (& advice) at the mall or just around the corner. Now I feel old – I think the Shack left us more than a decade ago.
You-do-it is closing this year. It was a hike from where I live, but it was a great store.
https://www.boston.com/news/business/2024/05/24/you-do-it-electronics-center-announces-store-closure/
Yeah, that bit about Radio Shack was more of a rhetorical question. I have an in-law who worked for them during exactly that time, and he gave me the lowdown. Essentially, I was pointing out that they had to willfully find a way to go bankrupt, because it wouldn’t have naturally occurred to them if they had simply maintained their previously successful business model, which the rest of the world was just finally beginning to catch up to right around the time they abandoned it.
I’ll bet the boys in Korea got their stuff from Sears faster than you think. Remember, we were using the worldwide logistics network we had put together for World War II.
“As for MASH, I would wonder what the turnaround time on their order to an APO address in a war zone would’ve been.”
Seems like the kind of thing that was either horrible, or they had worked out a fast system during WW2.
Amazon is the dark mirror of Sears.
Sears was doing the car thing for a long time. I remember seeing pictures of a 1908 Sears business runabout model J. It looked like a carriage that was missing the horses. As a child of the 60s Sears was the go to place for tons of stuff. How many of us have old Craftsman tools in the garage?
Was it common for the buyers to assemble the house themselves? Or did a lot of folks just hire a crew to do that part. I’d guess even if you hired a crew the bulk purchasing power of Sears probably got you a good price on the materials. And ease of logistics.
People probably already knew how to put one together before they ordered it, and had plenty of friends who did as well. Americans from a century ago would not have bad at an eye at assembling an entire house IKEA-flatpack-style. They were probably doing it to replace the one they built out of literal trees.
A lot of them were ordered in bulk by developers to build on spec too. There are entire neighborhoods of Sears and other kit houses.
Hah and here I am thinking I had this clever business idea that you could just buy these in bulk and sell entire neighborhood developments of these houses 😛
Tons of companies started would purchase and build these kits on spec. There are entire neighborhoods of these.
Both, probably. But the magic of the house kit was everything be pre-measured and cut. All that you needed to do was assembly. I remember reading an article on McMansion Hell about Sears houses. Apparently, a handful of people could build them in a few weeks.
I live in a Sears house! I’m near Chicago where Sears was based and my town is full of them, enough to have a walking tour. Our town was the end of the train line for Chicago, so it was really easy to have the home delivered by rail and left in the rail yard until you picked it up and got it to your site nearby
We’re in a Sears Marina home and we still have some proof that’s it genuine. We really have enjoyed it but it’s taken a decent amount of effort to fix it up.
Goddamn I’d love to have a kit of the high quality materials those homes are made of instead of the new growth garbage of today.
My house was built in 1964, and it may be the last house in North America that was built with actual dimensional lumber instead of “nominal” (as in, “in name only”) sizes. The 2X4s in my walls and joists actually measure two inches by four inches, with very tight grain patterns. You can’t get either of those anymore.
I suspect I may be in a Sears home (or other kit home). How can this be verified?
You need to look for stencils on the lumber in accessible places, like the basement or attic. Every piece should have been marked with the model number of the house and a number to designate where in the house it belonged
I have projects I’m avoiding in the basement.
Search for “sears home registry” and there are several sites, including one run by the remains of Sears, that have information and pictures of many of the models that were available.
I grew up in a Sears Starlight model in Southern Illinois, built in the 1920’s, we moved there in 1968, and my mother still lives there now. It’s all oak and yellow pine, with really hard plaster over lathe walls. There were two floorplans available for the Starlight, and I’m just glad we had the one with an indoor bathroom! 😀
{ googles } Oh my gosh, that is WAY cuter than the car, heh. Glad the house found a loving owner!
I had a discussion with one of my older coworkers about this a few years ago. Had Sears had the vision to duplicate their catalog on their website and allowed for easy shipping to homes as well as the nearest store/pickup centre, they would have muscled out Amazon before they had a chance to expand beyond books and movies.Of course, it’s easy to say that now, but even at the time it was probably obvious to those with enough vision and who weren’t afraid to piss off their retail sales division,
That’s also how Sears’ first physical stores started around the turn of the 20th century. Originally, they were franchised operations that supported the catalog, they distributed catalog copies and helped customers with complex orders, provided assembly and warranty repair services, and were a place to pick up large/bulky items that were difficult to deliver all the way to a home address. They also displayed some samples of whatever the hottest new products were, and had a limited amount of stuff to sell that was mostly customer returns. They had the click-and-mortar hybrid model down before there was any such thing as clicking
Sears didn’t open their own, full-line company-owned department stores until the 1920s
Is there a good book(s) on Sears? I’d love to dive deeper into their role in US business history.
I’m sure at least a few folks high up had an idea of using the internet as a selling platform. And who knows, probably researched and got a rough idea of what it would take.
But… these is a very old, publicly traded company we’re talking about. Aside from pissing off their retail sales division, there’s the whole rocking the boat thing, having dealing with short-term thinking shareholders, etc.
The problem with Sears in the early 90’s was the age of their upper management. They were all old, very conserative white guys in their late 60’s/70’s. All company lifers.
I bet not a one of them knew how to use a computer. To them a computer was some behemoth that ran punch cards, took up the whole 5th floor, and was there to do the accounting. Heck I bet some of them didnt even know how to type, they just dictated to their secertary.
The catalog had been losing $$$ for decades by the early 90s. All these old guys grew the company by expanding retail and thought that was the future. They didnt see the tremendous asset that was the catalogue distribution and logistics network.
Sears had brand new computerized cash registers in 1971 when I started working there.
They were one of the first.
But they were a partner with IBM for Prodigy Online Service, and didn’t know what the hell to do with it. They were the 2nd largest service, right behind Compuserve in the mid ’80s.
The biggest issue was that they had everything set up for the 4-6 week turnaround that had been the norm since forever. Cut a week or two off right away since the order didn’t have to come in at the speed of a physical letter carried by the U.S. Mail. or maybe not since even phone-order houses were quoting 4-6 weeks in the ’80s and ’90s.
I bought a snowblower to mount to the front of my riding mower from them in 2014. They offered a cab enclosure – just plastic sheets hung from a light frame, but enough to keep blowing snow out of my face. I went to buy one from a not-so-local store that listed one in stock. Ordered online and then just drove there to pick it up since I’d barely make it before they closed.
The one in inventory was a display model – which I asked to buy but they would not sell. Quoted me 6 weeks for delivery. I didn’t see the sense in waiting until the end of the season for it so I just bought warmer clothing.
“ Ordered online and then just drove there to pick it up”
For some reason my mind pictured you driving there on your riding mower.
Yes, and it was colder than necessary without that enclosure thing.
Sears wasn’t the only outfit selling kit homes back then. I live in one and my neighborhood is full of them. There are a few authentic Sears Craftsman homes, but most are other kits whose origins are largely unknown or unclear.
Sears homes are beautiful… would love to live in one (minus the asbestos and lead they probably came with.) Lots of new homes seem to be built like sh!t compared to old Sears homes.
That’s probably true of most homes of the age, kits or not.
My wife actually grew up in a Sears house. I looked it up once but don’t recall the model name. It was almost identical to the one here, but with less ornate exterior.
It was extremely well built and nice inside.
20 years ago we moved out to a rural farming area. There are 6 Sears homes in a row on the road next to us. All have been redone, and look really nice now.
Sears only sold 8 Magnolias between 1918 and 1923, it was the biggest and most elaborate house they ever offered and was probably a loss leader to get attention. But, strip away a lot of the detailing and take off some of the add-on rooms and it’s essentially a pretty standard center hall Colonial Revival that also has some bones in common with Sears’ wide range of American Foursquare models, I’d figure there had to be at least one or two larger models with similar features
Exactly. The town I live in is chock full of Sears homes. They would arrive by rail then be floated across the bay on a barge to town. They could be trucked in, but the roads were not paved here till the mid to late 1940s, and with 60+ inches of rain per year, well. Was easier to float them 8 miles than to truck em 30-40 miles back then.
If Sears still existed, and offered a quality home kit today, I’d be there with cash in hand. Or send it to them by the WWW thing.
It’s a shame how Venture Cap and Hedge Funds can help destroy a company for profit. America.
Sears houses were absolutely top of the line, the best quality materials and lots of thoughtful design details, they owned their own lumber yards and produced their own doors, windows, millwork, etc in-house. After they closed down the Modern Homes division, the Sears catalog continued to sell off the excess inventory of leftover house parts, which ran into the late 1940s/early 1950s. If you ordered a new door or hardwood flooring from them during that time, it was probably originally produced for a kit house that was never sold.
Sears was Amazon in an even more direct sense, in that they were one of the partners in the Prodigy online service that launched in 1984, with Sears providing the entirety of the online retail component. It was a tough sell in those days, lost a bunch of money, and they pulled out of it just on the cusp of the Internet going mainstream. Around the same time, they discontinued the catalog and closed down all their regional warehouse/fulfillment centers, just a few short years before Internet shopping really took hold. Would have been so easy to pivot the infrastructure of the catalog division into the core of a new e-commerce division if they had held onto it just a little longer.
But, none of that really killed them, they were still a pretty viable company until Fast Eddie Lampert came along
This! Absolutely this!
I had a boss who lived in one of those old Sears Craftsman houses. I helped him renovate the house and was surprised at how well the house was actually built for being from the 1920s – it certainly put the build quality of more recent homes to shame.
Gosh, just looking at the raggedy sticks that went into the new-build nextdoor to me is depressing. Some still had edges with bark on ’em.
I think the most shocking thing was his house was 90 years old at the time and the doors all closed nicely and the floors didn’t squeak. I can’t say that about any of the five homes I’ve owned, three of which were built this century.