The Last Catalog: How Sears Killed the Book That Built It

The full story of the Sears catalog: how a 1,500-page book that reached 14 million homes was shut down by the company it built. This is the whole story. In 1886 a 22-year-old station agent in North Redwood, Minnesota, sold a shipment of watches that a local jeweler had refused. By 1900 Sears, Roebuck was selling $10 million a year, more than Montgomery Ward. Along the way: Alvah Roebuck, the advertising Richard Sears wrote himself, Julius Rosenwald and the money-back promise, Rural Free Delivery, and the Homan Avenue plant in Chicago, with its pneumatic tubes, its conveyors and its own printing presses. Then Robert Wood put a store inside the mail-order plant, and by 1931 the stores outsold the catalog. In 1992 a new executive from Saks Fifth Avenue went through the printouts and found the Big Book losing about $160 million a year, while mail order across America was booming. The board met on the Saturday before Christmas. A million calls a day came in before the phone lines closed for good, and seventeen months after the announcement, Jeff Bezos founded the company that would become Amazon. If the Sears catalog came to your house, tell me what you ordered from it in the comments. Chapters 0:00 January 25, 1993 0:53 A shipment of watches nobody wanted 4:29 The Homan Avenue plant 5:47 The book 7:47 Robert Wood and the stores 10:34 The printouts 12:51 The announcement 14:37 Homan Avenue today Next: the rise and fall of Howard Johnson's, the orange roofs that were once on more than a thousand restaurants. The Rise and Fall of Howard Johnson's Sources: the Baltimore Sun (January 26, 1993), UPI Archives (1991 and 1993), the Deseret News (February 23, 1993), Newsweek, Smithsonian Magazine, the Sears Archives, the International Directory of Company Histories (FundingUniverse), Britannica, WTTW Chicago, the Historic American Buildings Survey, the Statistical Abstract of the United States (1926), and the Sears, Roebuck catalogs of 1894, 1897, 1902, 1912 and 1929. Picture credits Sears store, South Coast Plaza, Costa Mesa, 1980s: photo courtesy Orange County Archives, CC BY 2.0 Sears Tower from the Amtrak yards, 1985: Tim_kd5urs, CC BY-SA 2.0 Sears Tower, 1978: Acabashi, CC BY-SA 4.0 Saks Fifth Avenue, 2019: Ajay Suresh, CC BY 2.0 Sears store sign, Miami, 2014: Phillip Pessar, CC BY 2.0 Railroad pocket watch: Joe Haupt, CC BY-SA 2.0 Depot telegraph operator, Gretna, Ohio, about 1916: Willard Kerr, CC BY-SA 4.0 Richard W. Sears at his desk and the Homan Avenue administration building, 1906: Flickr user Richard (rich701), CC BY 2.0 Sears stereoscope cards of the Homan Avenue plant, 1906: Boston Public Library, Print Department, Harper Stereograph Collection, CC BY 2.0 Sears store, Miami, 1930s postcard: Boston Public Library, Print Department, Tichnor Brothers Collection, CC BY 2.0 Sears, Roebuck store, Gratiot Avenue, Detroit, 1931: CC BY 2.0 Walmart, Laredo, Texas, 2004: Jared C. Benedict, CC BY-SA 3.0 Green-bar computer paper: Kungfuman, CC BY-SA 3.0 Mail-order catalogs of 1986: Mike Mozart, CC BY 2.0 R.R. Donnelley's Calumet plant, 2013: Teemu008, CC BY-SA 2.0 Former Sears store interior, Enfield, Connecticut, 2017: JJBers, CC BY 2.0 Closed Sears, Kingston, New York, 2018: Daniel Case, CC BY-SA 3.0 The old power house, Homan Avenue, 2013: Michael J. Linden, CC BY 2.0 The Sears tower on Homan Avenue, 2006: John Delano, CC BY Homan Square, 2007: Peter Fitzgerald, CC BY-SA 4.0 Howard Johnson's, Key West, about 1965: Florida Keys Public Libraries, CC BY 2.0 Howard Johnson's, Lake George, 2007: Jennifer Rafieyan, CC BY 2.0 Creative Commons photographs via Wikimedia Commons and Flickr. Other pictures, catalog pages, patents and documents are public domain (Library of Congress, including the Historic American Buildings Survey, the John Margolies and Carol M. Highsmith archives; Internet Archive; Wikimedia Commons). Music ("Documentary Cinematic" by BestBackgroundSound) and sound effects licensed from Envato Elements. #Sears #SearsCatalog #RetailHistory