Starting with a single product, a forward thinking entrepreneur opens for business, and grows to become the largest reatailer in the world. But the man's name wasn't Jeff Bezos, and the year wasn't 1994. It was 1886 when Richard Warren Sears sold his first product, and eventually grew to become the world's first Everything Store. Amazon 1.0. But this episode of Bizography is not just about innovation and growth. It's also a story of ego, missed opportunities, and corporate raiders. Could it also be a cautionary tale for Amazon? You decide.
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We're at a Sears store to find out why Sears. It's where America shops. Why do I shop at Sears? It's easy for me. I can pick up tennis, ball's, children's clothing, torque branches, and a dish all in the same shop. Use my charge Partners is simple and easy. Tears for America shop. That was then, this is now breaking overnight. Sears, once a giant in the retailing industry, has followed for bankruptcy protection following years of losses and a lot of debt. Will Sears survivor will the company vanished into retail history like Toys Are Us? So what happened? Sears was once the Everything store, the Amazon one point oh, they were the world's biggest retailer, and now they're on the struggle bus to bankruptcy town. This is Phisiography, the show where we dive into the strange but true stories of iconic companies, where they're they're a current bright star in the midst of a massive dumpster fire, or settling into the dust heap of history. They all have a past worth knowing. I'm Dana Barrett, a former tech executive and entrepreneur and a TV and radio host, and over the course of my career, I've interviewed thousands of business leaders and reported on the bright beginnings and massive flame outs of the brands we know and love. Some of their stories are inspiring, some get my blood boiling, and some are just plain weird. Hey, everyone, welcome to Phisiography. Here with me, as always is my trustee producer, new guy Nick. He's bringing the let's call it hopeful millennial to my cynical gen x nous Hopeful maybe in some cases. But have you seen the latest headlines about how while Sears is going massively bankrupt, they're giving all their executives like stupid huge bonuses. Yeah, and you know how much I cannot stand that, And I will be pulling out this out box a bit later to talk about that. It's one of my biggest pet peeves of the bankruptcy courts. I don't even understand why that stuff happens. But Sears is, you know, circling the drain. They're on the struggle bus to fail town, and I think there are definitely lessons to be learned from where they went wrong, aside from the fact that the bankruptcy judge, you know, is a stinky mc stink in Stein. But what I think is not only fascinating about what they did wrong. What I think is fascinating is the parallel between Sears and Amazon. Right. The thing is, though Amazon has had this whole advantage of the Internet, so blowing up fast is kind of to be expected a little bit. Sears started way back in the day, So how on earth did they get that big that fast without the interwebs. Well, that's the whole point. I think there are a ton of parallels with Sears. It was the trains. It was the trains and the mail that was the speedy you know internet air quotes of the day. That's just one parallel, and the parallels continue from there. But let's just kind of, you know, do a Wayne's World and roll back time and get to the beginning of the Sears story. I think everybody knows. Well I should just ask you. You know what Amazon started with, right? Yeah? It was books, right, That's how they started online. You bought your books at Amazon. There you go, so like a one product beginning. Sears was the same way. And I don't think most people know that now you probably cheated, but you know what they started with, right, Okay, so before I knew my guests with Sears would have been something kind of big for your house, Like, I don't know, an ice box, isn't that what they had back then? Did have ice boxes? Yeah, we can't imagine that now. Um, and they actually had real ice in them to keep things cold. It's crazy, but no, they started with watches, and it's kind of a crazy story. So for a second there, When Richard Warren Sears was born, which was in kind of the mid eighteen hundreds, he was born in Minnesota, and he had a moment in his young life where he could have been a Trump, I mean not actually a Trump, but trump e in that his parents were really wealthy. They were doing really well. His dad was a successful entrepreneur um. But then everything changed when little can I call little Richard. When little Richard Richard Warren Sears was sixteen, his dad died. But before he died, he sold his company, made a windfall and then lost it all. So when he died, the family was left panelists. So at sixteen, Richard Warren Sears had to go get training and get a job. And so what he did was he got trained as a telegraph operator and he got a job at a train station as the telegraph operator. So he was working at the train station, you know, bringing a few bucks home for a mom and the siblings, and occasionally he would get his hands on some you know, unclaimed lumber or coal and he would sell it on the side to help the struggling family. That could have been the whole story, except one day there was a local jeweler who rejected a shipment of some gold filled watches. They weren't good enough, I guess for his jewelry store, and Richard Sear said, um, you know what can I can I take those? So he got him for a really good price and he sold them just to like the other folks around the train station who worked there, made money and realized there could be something here. So basically what you're saying is he had a side hustle and that turned into the main hustle. Yeah, he had a side hustle, like you know, more than a hundred years before that term actually became a term. And I'm not even sure like in those days, if it was okay to have a side hustle or if everyone did it like now everyone kind of does it, don't think, right, everyone has, you know, an uber job or something like that, but you're right back in those days, you were very career driven. You had your job and you focused on that path. And he just kind of bucked the trend a little bit. Ma. I think you were kind of supposed to be a company man, definitely. But he sold all those watches and ended up making a five thousand dollar profit, which is huge for that time period. I didn't do the math, but like, it wasn't millions, but it was a lot. So he decided he was onto something and decided to start a watch company. That's when w Sears Watch Company was born. He took the profits he made from that first venture and he started a mail order watch business in Minneapolis. Look, we could go into all the nitty gritty details of his life, but basically he grew that while he was in his twenties. He had moved from small town Minnesota to Minneapolis, and the business was really successful enough that he was able to resign from the railroad and kind of devote himself sort of full time to this, and then he decided he needed a partner. So at this point, he's about twenty four eight seven. You remember, you know, the lack of telephones and modern electricity. Right, there was definitely no Internet, that's for sure. But he was only twenty four. He moved to Chicago and he meets a guy named Alva Curtis Roebuck, also in his twenties. They're similar aged, and Alva Roebuck is just like a watch repairment. Okay, so he got a little smart obviously, he's been working on the railroad. Huh, and didn't are you gonna say, are you going to sing it? Probably didn't have a whole lot of knowledge in the watch world. I mean, he knew what a good watch was and could sell it for a buck. But god forbid, you get the shipment in and half of them are busted up, you're gonna toss him. So, all right, his first partnership, essentially in the history of it is with Alva Roebuck. Yeah. Absolutely, Alvis seems like a pretty good guy. They start working together and they start expanding. So they've got watches, and they add diamonds and jewelry and side note, you're you're an engaged guy. Yeah, can you imagine buying your diamond like in a mail ord acount? Absolutely not. All I have to say is if I would have done that, I wouldn't currently be an engaged guy. But it's so funny because it's like at the time that was what the choices you had. There weren't malls. You couldn't wander into a Jared and buy your jewelry, you know, like that just wasn't an option, absolutely, And if there was a jeweler nearby, there probably wasn't a huge selection, because now we're well used to, like you said, walking into Jared and there's eight thousand options, probably had just a couple dozens of tops. Right. Well, here's the other crazy thing. Even though of course there were shysters back in the day, people try to each other and they trusted that you were going to do business a certain way. You weren't going to advertise a diamond and then send them a cubic zirconia, which, by the way, I don't think also had been invented at that time. Maybe that was why it was all okay. In any case, they expanded to watches to jewelry, and they did something very innovative for the time, had never been done before. They offered I feel like this needs almost a drum roll. They offered a money back guarantee. Oh wow, that's almost standard anymore. When you buy anything is if you're not satisfied with it or it messes up, you get your money back. So that was revolutionary in that time. Yeah, I don't think there were returns back in the day. Like you didn't bring stuff. They didn't have a receipt and bring stuff back. You bought it, that's it, You own it, that's it. So they sort of introduced that innovators of their time in much the same way that Jeff Bezos is an innovator now, although he did not invent the money back guarantee or really anything like it, but stay with me. So Sears then decides in the late eighteen eighties to cash in on this successful run and he sells the business for a hundred thousand and he's going to go to Iowa and become a banker. Well, that does not last long. I think banking is pretty boring. Yeah, probably after you've been somebody who built something from nothing to a hundred thousand dollar company, which you know, in eighteen eighty nine was quite a quite a pretty penny. Probably being the company man again didn't quite satisfy the itch even owning a bank. I think banking is just boring. I mean, after reach out, who wants to be a banker? For all of our banker listeners, you're not boring. Yes, your jealous, Sorry about that. It's only two years. He has a change of heart. He goes back to Minnesota and he starts over and does a new catalog business. And this time he calls up his friend Roebuck, who stayed with it. By the way, the whole time Roebuck stayed and had this catalog business. And so they form another company together and it's now a C. Roebuck and Company, and that's ish. Then by it becomes Sears, Roebuck and Company, a name I think most of us know. They moved the headquarters to Chicago, and by this point they have a two hundred page catalog and they're selling everything from sewing machines to saddles to musical instruments. That's two hundred pages. It only takes another year and at this point they're up to five hundred and seven pages. And Richard Warren Sears himself wrote almost every single word dedicated man right there right. And so this is where I think the like the fascinating. Jeff Bezos comparisons can really begin. They both started with one product, but they had a bigger vision. You know. With Sears, what he saw was the ability of the railroads to get things to people who didn't have access to them. Otherwise. There weren't cars, there weren't malls. There were people who lived in rural areas who needed stuff, and he found a way through the mail, using the post office, and using the trains to move things around the country in a way that they had never been moved around before. I think that's really interesting too, in the fact that he found essentially less less of selling the product and more of selling the medium. The catalog that you could buy everything from a watch to a saddle for your horse. That was more. What the innovation was with them was the catalog. Where obviously catalogs existed, newspapers existed. You could buy things from a little way away, but you bought it from that store, that person who made it. He just had everything, which is kind of the way Amazon has gone as well. Right, And Amazon is fun. I mean, think about the Amazon logo. It's got a big smile on it. And when I just read a news story, I think it was today. I was talking about how people should, you know, try to save money by deleting certain apps from their mobile phones. And one of the apps they suggested you delete was the Amazon app because you would be tempted to buy stuff. Like they said, you could still use Prime on your computer, but take the take the app off your phone, because maybe you'll settle yourself down. Let's be fair, how many of us have had no intention of shopping and you just open the Amazon It just just to see and next thing you know, you're tapping check out, right, and so exactly stop watching over my shoulder, but right, I mean, this is exactly my point. Sears was so similar. People got so excited about that catalog. It wasn't just that they wanted the stuff that was in there. The catalog became entertainment for America. So these guys, by the late eighteen nineties are in their heyday. They've got this five hundred some odd page catalog, and people in America are starting to know who they are. So by the late eighteen hundreds of these guys are crushing it. They've got this five hundred some odd page catalog. It's going all across America. People are starting to know their name and look forward to that thing coming in the mail. We're going to take a quick break, but before we do, I'm feeling a musical interlague, musical interlude. What do you have in mind, Dana, Well, the song that's popping into my head is good Times by Chic because up next we're going to talk about the good times for Sears. Yeah. I don't think they had this song in the late eighteen nineties, but these were the good times of Sears really the first half of the nine hundreds, from the late nineties all the way through the nineteen fifties nineteen sixties, when you were still not even being thought about. You weren't even a twinkle in anyone's eye by then new guy nick Um. But yeah, they were really crushing it in those days. And that catalog, that Sears catalog coming in the mail was something Americans waited for. It literally became known as the consumer Bible. But it also had a little bit of a darker history, and that people there were so much paper and sometimes you know, you ran out of paper at home, so people use it as toilet paper. Oh, that was not where I was expecting that to go. I was thinking more maybe you know, tender for the fireplace, but I guess it makes sense if you don't have a horse, the saddles don't need them, use them for something else. I don't know what that analogy was, but okay, we'll roll with it. So they had this amazing catalog, and what do you put on five seven pages? Do you think? I mean, there's a plethora of craziness you could probably get in there. Obviously, normal stuff you would need, you know, maybe toiletries, and back then they sold tonics and stuff, right, so I'm sure there's plenty of that, But I think you I'm speaking of tonics since you bring it up, I think you could actually buy different kinds of drugs in the series catalog, some that probably wouldn't even be legal now. Really. Yeah, I don't think that FDA was really too powerful back in those days. But they also had a lot of weird stuff, and it just feels like this is the time they could experiment, not unlike Amazon. You could buy some pretty weird stuff on Amazon these days. Um, but one of the ones that I thought was maybe the weirdest was you could buy an entire house on Amazon, a kit house like a build your own a d I Y. There was no home depot then, so essentially they were putting a keyat to shame back in the day. Oh, this was like this right, This was like IKEA, like if you if you got the kid to build the entire store a like, except it was a house and you could and there was not just one or two like IKEA. There's like four different dressers. There were like seventy different styles of homes you could buy um and they literally sent you everything for the kit house except I think the mortar and the nails, the foundation of the home. And then obviously they didn't send you like two guys to help you. They didn't know. They did not send you people. People were not included in the kid house, but they Yeah, I think the cement was like the only thing that you had to sort of make yourself. And so there are serious kit houses all over the country to this day. And because they weren't really labeled anywhere, like, they didn't keep track, they didn't have the data management we have now, so they don't really know who bought them. So they sort of got put up all over the country and some of a lot of them are gone now historians have looked into it, but a lot of them still exists. But I thought was pretty cool. It's fascinating. So if you were your family member living in an older house, maybe do a little research. Yes, and there are ways you can tell. Apparently there's certain markers on some of the wood flooring or like on behind the drywall, where you can find markers that will tell you if it's a serious at house. Almost like youahan an Ikea piece of furniture, you can see the different you know, like the little type of screws they have or whatever you recognize autely the thing that makes it from Ikea. That's cool. Yeah, what's that little tool you use to ye? There you go. If you see one of those, like you know, it's probably an Ikea addresser, same kind of deal. But they also sold motorcycles, cars. That's a lot of crazy stuff that they would have. Wait a minute, Wait a minute, we're not even to the crazy yet. I know you looked some of this up to don't don't act like you don't know. The most interesting thing, no, not interesting. Let me rephrase that. The craziest, weirdest thing that they sold was they sold ladies safety belts for those of you who don't know what that means. Yes, it was a chastity belt. They sold chastity belts in the early nineteen hundreds for women, followed shortly thereafter by chastity belts for men. So in case you were worried about your daughter or yourself being a little promiscuous, you could buy that and you were safe. Sears Magic cover so you could get opium I think in the serious catalog and chastity belts just in case you got two out of your head. You wouldn't do anything crazy. I think that's when you look out for yourself. I mean, it's amazon start. You never have to leave your house and you can have a party, go bam, just like that. And if you want the party to get really weird, just saying, you could also buy baby chickens from Sears. That is a party. So you have a crazy party in your Sears house with your Sears opium, making sure that you know, some of the crazier ones are not going to get too out of control with the Sears chastity belts. Everyone's you know, passing around the chickens and yeah, and the only as mom hides the keys to the Sears cars and motorcycle absolutely can't drive drunk. Perfect you all covered in every way, Bam, come on, all right, obviously we jest, but there was a lot in the Sears catalog obviously, and they you know, now, other than Amazon, I feel like they're most companies now sort of stick to a product line, a category. Sears did not do that. They were the everything store, just like Amazon is today, which makes it I think hard times to have um a real connection to what you sell. Instead of being connected to what you sell, you connect to your customer. And that's the way Sears was positioning themselves. They cared in theory about the farmers and the regular people. There wasn't even suburbia really until the late part of that era. In the nineteen fifties, suburbia started to become a thing, but prior to that it was sort of urban and rural, and they were most concerned with their rural customers. So that is why they sold houses and animals and you know, farm equipment, along with clothing and things that you just couldn't get if you didn't live in an urban area. That's who there. It was the connection to the customer, not a particular category or product, right, I think I think that's uh, something that we've noticed with a lot of companies nowadays doing wrong is they focus so much on, like you said, that product, they lose sight of the people they're selling it to. So we I think we see that a lot. Amazon does kind of cover the base of everyone. But let's be fair, some of our older family brs maybe a little less inclined to use Amazon. They still like to go to the brick and mortars, but they focus on kind of gen x all the way down. That's Amazon's customer and it appeals to that demographic. It's on Amazon, right, I mean name Amazon may look at us as just all Americans are all world, you know, we're all people in the world, but stuff I don't know. But but certainly for Sears, it was those rural customers and it was giving those people access. But like all companies, I think once you start growing to a certain point, it's sort of about feeding the beast and continuing to grow the company and how do you do that? And so they started marketing as Amazon now does as well. I also think it's funny by the way that Amazon that started so online does TV commercials. Now, isn't that weird? They've almost moved backwards a little bit, right? I know? Well, once again, they were not created. Amazon did not come up with any of this from scratch, because long before Amazon started doing TV commercials, Sears was doing radio. Sears was marketing via the radio. Who knew all the way back in the nineteen twenties, they actually we bought a radio station in Chicago and they owned the entire station. It was originally w b b X, but as soon as they started broadcasting on this station they called it. For the first I think like one or two shows, it was w e S World's Economy Store. Sound familiar, and then they changed it to World's Largest Store. Also, if you said that to somebody today, they would say, what there you go. So w l S were the ultimate call letters of this radio station, World's largest Store, and they did everything from weather reports to music, two tips for Housewives a k. The kind of first infomercials, absolutely right, I mean, they innovated. They were doing infomercials before that word existed. And it's smart on them to kind of specifically cater the radio station to that demographic because, as we know now, with all the research that's been done is the women in the house have the buying power. Seems like they probably kind of knew that back in the day, as they said, while the husband's out working, she's at home taking care of the kids. And guess what, that catalogs open on the kitchen table. So if we pitch stuff to her, she's just gonna open up and send a letter right to us. Yeah. Absolutely, And if you want more proof that they cared about their rural customer, they had a show called The National Barn Dance that was on every Sunday evening and it was literally the most popular radio show in the Midwest. That's outrageous. Go back then to the you know, the radio was the TV. So they were smart and getting into the primary entertainment venue back then. Fun fact, they sold the radio station and only four years later, but it still operates today and it's still WLS. I don't think they do tips for housewives anymore, just a guess. I don't listen, but I'm just guessing. One of the other things that's been really fascinating to watch about Amazon certainly is that they've managed to transition as times have changed. I mean, Amazon's now what thirty years old. I think something like that twenty or thirty years old. And you know, they're starting to do more brick and mortar now. They've changed their products over time, They've added tech products, etcetera, etcetera. Well, Sears was doing the same thing. They were watching what was happening in the market. They were changing and they were modifying what they were doing to meet the times. They started doing brick and mortar stores themselves. They started doing malls, They started doing television ads on TV. After radio, they started doing jingles. I think that now moving closer into our era, and okay, my era we actually remember, like back in the nineties seventies, for example, they had a jingle that I think everybody remembers, is calling me gotta have it, pick up the by come on. Okay. I only wanted to play that in the middle of this podcast because I want it stuck in everyone's head, like the next two weeks, this moment for your life. You know you're gonna be singing it, admit it. But yeah, we were all singing those kinds of jingles back in the day. Those were the good old days of television. By the way, when sitcoms had original songs. Remember, well, you don't remember, but Nick Knight remember watching them come on, we saw them at Nick Nick Knight watch them. Yeah. Well that that's the that was sort of the era. By the time that came out in the nineties seventies, maybe times weren't quite as good, but they were already becoming sort of known the way we know them more now, which is as a uh, you know, hardware company and appliance company. And also they were already trying to make sure by then that people understood that there was more than just appliances. There was more for your life at Sears, or maybe there was a softer side to Sears you the first days, I always just said me all the semple said, you see say, let's be honest. That never really worked, but I do remember that jingle. I do remember the softer side of Seeres playing when my mom was watching k Yeah, I I they really tried to show off there that they sold clothing and all of that. But all I can remember, and I'm going to date myself a little bit with this one, but when I was a little kid going to school, what kind of Jeanes you wore was super important to how cool you were, And if you were wearing tough Skins, which was the Sears brand of jeans, you were a who's just saying. One step up from that was Wrangler. You were only cool if you were Levis. It's just how it was. And they didn't salt Levis that Sears back in the day. So so at least in that department, maybe they stepped their game up just a little bit because they kind of carry everything I think in the in the closed department now they have. That's a function I think of the retail business in general being on the struggle bus, so we don't know what to do next town. But at the time, Levi's was everything, and tough Skins were just lame. Uh So the softer side of Sears never really was super successful. But in other efforts to sort of stay current and diversify, Sears, and this is something I think very few people know, actually launched a lot of other famous brands that are famous to this day. Let me give you a hinch on one of them. You're in good hounds with the whole state. Did you know that and see that? Know that anything? Like the actor? I mean, you did your best, but I think that's who's going to associate a massive retailer with like car insurance and life and home and what how did that even happen? Well, here's what's interesting. Some of the brands that that Sears crafted made sense with the other things they sold. For example, Craftsman Tools, they were selling tools and hardware. Ken Moore Appliances was a big brand for them, but those all stayed kind of in house brands. They also had tire stores, remember which I think some big store still do, like Costco I think still has a tire store, right, I believe they do, and I know Sears, at least the one near my house all this time growing up, had the Automotive Center, and so that was all part of that. Coming out of that member the seven page catalog where you could buy entire cars, it made sense to still have some of that in their lineup because they had some expertise there. So they had die hard batteries and All State Insurance I think bubbled up out of that. It came out of this idea of automobile insurance. It started all the way back in believe it or not, and it was actually all State was actually named after one of the Sears brand of tires that they had back in the day, and so All State obviously has since been spun off and continues to live on as a far stronger brand than Sears is now. The other thing that they did, look, they almost made it, Sears was like, what's that song about? We almost made it, you know about breaking up? I feel like that's kind of Sears almost made it into the next transition, like they could have been Amazon. They almost made it. When the Internet was just starting to become a thing, they actually developed Prodigy. Now you may not remember that, Nick, You look a little puzzled, all right, Well, you know what a O L is, right, absolutely so. Prodigy was a competitor to a O L. Essentially, it was in the dial up days and it was this private network essentially where you could log onto Prodigy and have access to a version of email at the time, a private network, some basic shopping. And this was all way before the Internet became mainstream. The problem was for Sears with that, it's almost like they were the BlackBerry of the Internet that just couldn't keep up. And also, by the way they did that in partnership with IBM and CBS. Prodigy was a partnership of Sears, IBM and CBS, and it was like they almost had it and then now and the other brand I think worth noting that they spun off was Discover Card. That that stem from maybe like a Sears store card, because that's been fascinating. Yes, it did, and Sears was one of the early credit card companies with the Sears store credit card, and for a long time at Sears you could only use this if they didn't take other credit cards. They only took the Sears charge card. Now that was when times were a little bit different. But ultimately they realized they needed to branch out and they spun off Discover Card, which again is now a far stronger brand on its own, you know than it's It's Mommy and Daddy. Sears is so pretty interesting. They were at one point, as things started to go wrong for Sears, they were making far more money with their financial products than they were with any consumer products, which is kind of telling. All Right, I love a good bunny trail, but let's get back to the timeline. They a depthly manage this move from mail order catalog to physical stores two malls. They moved from caring only about rural customers to embracing this suburban customer who really became their mainstay. And things were going all in all amazingly well. So they started expanding and building and expand ending and building. As companies deal we talked about it from a brand perspective and a product perspective, but they did it with you know, physical locations too, And like m hm, anybody who has something they want to um overcome, they have to show off by you know, building big things, bigger, big, bigger, better, more like with their name on them. You know, I'm not suggesting anything, I'm just saying. So they started building some big buildings. In fact, even right here in Atlanta, they built a huge building that we are in fact sitting in right now. We're in the old Seers Building right this very minute. The building here was built in phases, starting back in the company. Sears at the time bought sixteen acres for about two thousand dollars. Can you imagine what a steel and I'm not saying parallel, I'm just saying parallel Amazon HQ two anyone. The first phase costs three million dollars and it was a warehouse and a retail store. It carried thirty five thousand items and employed teen hundred people. And on its first day, wait for this, on its very first day, there were thirty thousand visitors. That's how excited people were. That is one heck of an economic engine. What what in modern times could draw thirty thousand visitors on one day other than like a sporting event or a concert or something especially like the opening of a new store. No way, I mean, I'm gonna I'm gonna throw it out there the Olympics. It's like the only thing, right absolutely, I mean maybe if it yeah, you know, in a sense of retail, you're right. I think the only thing that would draw that many people in one day would be if Amazon opened a massive store in the middle of a big city and they're like, by the way, this is the Amazon store, and everything on the line is in here. No, no, no no. The only way thirty thousand people would show up for that is if everything was free. People don't care about a store anymore. That's not a thing. People don't line up for that. But if you give it to me free, am there? Anyway? They continue to grow this Atlanta presence, adding floors and entire new buildings, turning it into a campus again somewhat like our tech companies of today, until it reached two million square feet. That was in the heyday of the nineteen sixties of Sears, and that was just what they did here in Atlanta. But Sears was literally becoming the everything and everywhere store by then. In nineteen sixty nine, Sears was the largest retailer in the world. They had three and fifty thousand employees at one point and over four thousand stores internationally. And that, of course is when they decided they needed a teller. You know, everybody needs to tell a big, huge building with our name slapped on the side, that is correct. The Sears Tower, a hundred and ten stories tall, was built in Chicago, Illinois. It was completed in nineteen seventy three, and at that time it was taller than the World Trade Center towers in New York and it was the tallest building in the world. That is one big midlife crisis right there. It held that title for twenty five years. So I think it's I don't to know which that what the tallest building is now to you, it's it's a Burge Khalifa in Saudi Arabia. It's one of those crazy huge towers. You really know that? How do you know that? Because they built it in the same premise the Royal family where they said, you know what, we can do it bigger, and so they did, and we're going to put our name on it. Yeah. I feel like there's something about building that giant building and slapping your name on it again, whether it's the tallest or just the biggest, it feels like an ego play to me. And I wonder a little bit, and I'm just putting out there Jeff Bezos that maybe it's the beginning of the end. It's the signal of future doom, kind of your own Uh, your own bravado has gotten the better of you. Now you think you're better than everyone. So let's just do whatever we want, right or yes, and we can in the case of Amazon, certainly get the entire country to stop everything they're doing and make proposals and uh, you know, give us tax credits and put dog and pony shows on to commitce us to come there and spend our big money to build our big building, to put our big name on it. And then what what's funny is as Sears has begun to struggle Jeff Bezos has an eye on it. He's watching what's happening to Sears in modern times. I'll talk about that in just a minute. But the money was also flowing like crazy for Sears in the nineteen hundreds leading up to right around when the Sears Tower was built. Um, they were crushing it in all kinds of ways, not just size but also money. And it wasn't until really after the Sears Tower when things started to decline. That's the sad part of the story, and that brings us to where we're at right now today. We'll talk about that next. So you know how it goes. Everything that goes up must come down, that's what they say. Anyway, Well, Sears, that was definitely the case the nineteen hundreds overall pretty good for Sears. Started a falter in the late nineteen hundreds, but by the early two thousand's there was a little bit of a resurgence in there. They hired a CEO who turned things around for a minute, and they did okay, they bought some other companies like lands End and and they hung in there a little bit, but overall it just wasn't happening, and things started to falter. For them. So just to give you an idea of some of the numbers, in two thousand and the year two thousand, Sears had sales of forty one billion for the company, and by let's say sixteen, they were down to two billion, so almost half gone. That's years, and that's just it's really interesting to see that transition from so much success in the nineties and then as soon as the twenty first century came around, they just stopped and started to drop. Well, the real problem started for Sears. They were, you know, they were starting to struggle a little bit. They were losing some of that vision that they had had in their earlier days. And I have to mention that part of the reason I think Sears lost their vision. And this has not happened to Amazon. I'm sure Jeff Bezos is knocking on wood. But Richard Sears died really young, and so that was part of the problem. And he was sort of a workaholic, and that you know, health just wasn't what it is now. They didn't have access to the same kind of medicine and doctors, and people didn't live as long. And he died like at age fifty, so he was out of the picture pretty early on, and the company was led by others, some people that had been in on it with him from the early days, who shepherded it pretty well as we saw through the nineteen hundreds. But what really went wrong was that as things started to falter for Sears and and part of that was competition from stores like Target and Walmart, and they weren't able to compete. They weren't the only ones anymore. They weren't able to compete in the way that they once did, and so they ended up being purchased slash merging with Kmart under the name Sears Holdings has happened in two thousand five, and this is where the evil villain of the story enters the picture. He is a man named Eddie Lampert. He is the current I think he's the current chairman. He's the current chairman, had to resign a CEO. Correct why? Because he is evil? He might have noticed, even just from those two sentences that I'm not a huge fan of Eddie Lampert, but he got involved in two thousand five. This is a guy who is one of those sort of classic Wall Street hedge fund managers who believes in making himself and his cronies as rich as possible, and seems to not give a hoot. Can you give a hoot about anything or anyone else? He makes me think of a famous movie from back in the eighties called Wall Street. Remember that one? Did you ever watch it? Okay, remember this scene. The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, Greed works, Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures these of the evolutionary spirit. Greed in all of its forms, greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked upwards. Search of mankind and green you mark my words will not only save tells our paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. For the record, it's not working for Sears or the good old us of A writes this very minute. But Eddie Lampertshire believes in greed. That is what he's doing. So he brings Kmart and Sears together under Sears Holdings back in two thousand five. And you know it seems to think he's going to be able to or at least is trying to present a front of I'm going to fix all of this. I have all these great ideas. Just everybody, stay with me. We're gonna make it work well. Fast forward. We're now in two thousand eighteen, but by two thousand sixteen sales were down to two billion. Seen tells really cut in half, all gone. If you've walked into a Sear store in eighteen, what did you see? Things all over the floor. It's not well kept. Their products selection is starting to slowly get worse and worse and worse. It's not pretty now, it's horrible. Sears by modern times is just lost. It's lost. It's they claim that they made an effort to have you know, Sears dot com. Does anyone go to Sears dot com for anything? I've gone before. There's a reason I was on there for two minutes and have never been back. There you go, they missed their opportunity. From that perspective, it's not something Eddie Lamper ever fixed. The stores are dirty and discussing in a disaster. Again, not something that Eddie Lamper ever fixed. He is so sketchy he literally makes my stomach turn. I mean, this is a guy who is selling parts of the company off. There were when he got involved in two thousand five. Still some assets that are part of Seers that have value, and he sold them off in theory to save the company. But the sketchy part is he in many cases sold the pieces and parts off to other holding company of which he personally had an interest. So he's basically scraping the meat off the bones. That's what this guy is doing. And even when he tries to give a pep talk. Now Sears now has filed for bankruptcy, and as you pointed out at the very beginning of this episode, has just gotten for himself and again his cronies in the midst of bankruptcy huge bonuses while Sears employees right before Christmas time are out of work. Yea Sears, And even when he tries to give a pep talk, Eddie Lampord just sounds like somebody you want to punch in the face. The world of retail was going to be stable. It would have been much more difficult to create something different. There'd be no Amazon, just the larger Walmart, and they would not have been the opportunity for Sears to break from the pack once again and change the face of retailing like it always had in the past. As we all know, we haven't capitalized in this opportunity the way I would have liked, instead of grow with an investment. We have faced retransment every structuring. When he says break from the pack, does he mean like fall behind, like the you know, like the kid in gym class. We just can't keep up with the other kids. Is that what he means? I just imagined like a herd of cattle and one of them breaks its leg. It's just really limbing. Don't pick on the you know it's it's it's the Sears chickens they bought back in the day, and one of them was a little defective, and it just can't keep up with all the other chickens anymore. Yeah, I mean, I don't know what he's even talking about there. I mean, yes, certainly, retail. We've seen a lot of struggles in the retail industry in the last ten years, with big box stores going out of business, with malls struggling. I mean, there's certainly have been challenges, but I have not seen Sears do anything that looks positive to try to break from the pack. Right my whole life, I graduated in my whole life of being able to go to the mall by myself and knowing about companies, it's always been that dingy, dark corner of the mall, and it's like, really, you went to you win into Sears. Oh man, I just go in there to use the bathroom. Yeah, so exactly. And the bathroom probably wasn't even clean, It wasn't, but it was the closest one. You know, what are you gonna do? Well, you're a dude. That's okay for you. It's not as good for us, but right, fair point. And I think, you know, Sears could have turned it back around. Think about how many brands we've seen that we're sort of not cool become cool again in a vintagey way, like they could have spun off something that was specifically Sears. You know, maybe they do smaller hardware stores because look, home Depot now has taken over the hardware market, but you need a neighborhood hardware store. What if Sears had started small corner hardware stores with their Craftsman brand, they could have totally done that. They could have had an amazing Craftsman website and had that. You know, there were opportunities, absolutely, and that's one of the saddest parts about it is because ken More appliances are actually pretty good. Craftsman tools are really good. And if Sears is going to die and these brands die with it, that's that's that's really sad. See that happen, Right, Start ken More appliance stores or put a ken More you know store within Best Buy like Apple does. Right. I mean, there were ways that Sears could have stayed relevant and they just never did. I mean, even do some new, softer side of Sears and make fun of it and find a way to make that cool. I mean, Hush Puppies came back for a minute. I don't know if you remember that, but they did. Vinyl records are back. They are very right, exactly, and they're useless, but they're really cool. I mean, they're not nearly as good as digital music in terms of the ability, you know, the ease of carrying them around and all that, but they're cool. You're right. It's it's something kind of novelty to have and with the big Sears with the blue kind of double lined logos and everything else, that's what we've all known for twenty years now, and it's they would have gone back to the kind of the seventies logo with the almost handwritten script Sears with the line under it like you said, if you can make fun of yourself, sometimes that launches you right back into the spotlight. And they just they didn't. I don't even know if it was a lack of execution. It was a lack of caring more than anything else, right, And it was Eddie Lampert wanting to make money for himself and his cronies. And that is where we are today, and that is where this story, sadly is going to end. It makes me sad to see what used to be an iconic company going away kind of but in this case, goodbye Sears, you know, like see it wouldn't want to be a rights like that question you grow up with and you were friends with through college, and then you've gotten back in touch leader in life and you realize, oh you've changed, and I don't like you anymore. Yeah you really weren't. I don't really. I thought you were cool, but no maybe not. Or as Michelle Obama would say, bye Felicia. Look before we go, I feel like we have to wrap up with poor Roebuck, who we haven't talked much about. How How did how did things end up for the guy I mean Alva Roebuck was one of the founding guys. I wonder if he were still around, if he could have made it cool again. Would It would be very interesting to know, because yeah, you're right, Sears, Roebuck and Company, and then Roebuck kinda fell off the map, right well. Sears, the guy, Richard Sears, made millions. He was worth twenty five million by the time he died, which is roughly six and twelve million in today's dollars, So he did pretty well before he passed away, but he did die young. And Roebuck he got disinterested in the company after the first two years of being with the company, so way back in the late eighteen hundreds, he was like, yeah, this is not for me. I'm gonna just take sell off my shares. I think he sold them for about twenty dollars at the time. There's different stories about how much he got, but it wasn't a ton. He took his money. He went to Florida, tried a few other businesses. Ultimately he ended up going back to Sears on request to do a demo kind of to be on like to be sort of paraded around for who he was he enjoyed it, they enjoyed having him. So Ultimately, this is many years later, now twenty years later or something. He becomes the company historian and spends kind of the latter years of his life being sort of a poster boy for Sears, which was still Sears Roebuck and Company for quite some time and then and by the way, he lived a nice long life. Died at age eighty four. In a couple of years before he died, and by the way, this is included in his o bit in the New York Time Times, he was asked, uh if he felt bad that he didn't know stick with it and make millions like his buddy Sears, and he said, mmmm, he died in his forties and I'm still here, so yeah, all good. I'm good with that. I think maybe Roebuck had the right idea, Yes he did. Yeah. Um. Ultimately, to sum it all up, there is a cautionary tale here for Jeff Bezos and Amazon, and Jeff Bezos was recently asked about the demise of Sears and what he thought about it, and even Jeff Bezos said, yeah, I see it, and we might not be around forever. Sears icon to fondly remember, or a cautionary tale for Amazon, or another reason in this country needs bankruptcy reform. I don't know, maybe it's all three. That's our show for today. Phisiography is produced by the iHeart Podcast Network. I'm your host Dana Barrick. My co host and producer is Nick Bean. Our executive producer is christ for hascy Otis and Josh Thame provides audio production. Have questions, want to give us feedback or have a company you'd like us to cover. Email us at info at physiography dot show, or contact us on social. I'm at the Danta Barrett on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or just search for Data Barrett on LinkedIn