On this day in 1925, the retailer which had previously focused exclusively on mail-order sales, opened its first brick-and-mortar department store on the massive campus it had acquired and maintained as a city-within-a-city on the westside of Chicago—the complex hosting the company’s warehouses, catalogue printing, prototyping and product-testing laboratories, fashion studios and employee amenities—with its own fire and police departments and on-site private bank.
Despite its remote location on the outskirts of the city, it proved popular with customers, owing the increased car-use and leading to the development of shopping malls and its later reputation as an anchor store—pivoting from traditional urban flagship stores (
see previously) and catering to motorists. During the height of its success in the 1960s and 1970, Sears was the largest retailer in the world and moved its headquarters to the Sears Tower in 1973, the world’s tallest building briefly, surpassing New York’s
World Trade Centre. Over the next decade, the company began its slow-decline, diversifying its portfolio away from retail into brokerage and real estate, a credit card—Discover—and an online subscription venture with IBM called Prodigy. Divesting itself from ancillary operations and eventually declaring bankruptcy in October of 2018, it was acquired by a
private equity firm called Transform Holdco, with the remaining stores leveraged for their property value before being shuttered in 2022.
synchronoptica
one year ago: top-charting seventeenth century ballads (with synchronoptica), The Point (1971) plus a craving for compass liquor
seven years ago: French brutalist apartment blocs, postcards from Mars plus attacking the Deep State
eight years ago: a documentary on the making of Psycho
nine years ago: CS Lewis’ The Abolition of Man, assorted links worth revisiting plus US presidential candidate Ted Cruz
ten years ago: the Lost Generation plus eight or nine wise words about letter-writing
