Sears Christmas Wish Book Research Paper

In 1886, a Minnesota railway station agent Richard W. Sears bought a shipment of watches that a local jeweler refused to sign for. He began a side business selling the watches to other station agents. Sears quit his railway job a few months later and began the R.W. Sears Watch Company in Minneapolis. Richard Sears decided in 1887 to move his business to Chicago. Sears placed an ad in a Chicago newspaper which brought watchmaker Alvah C. Roebuck into the business. By1893 the successful partnership formerly became Sears, Roebuck, and Company. Sears and Roebuck quickly expanded the business into a mail-order catalog that supplied goods to America’s enormous 19th-century rural population which was approximately two-thirds of Americans who lived

The catalog contained toys and other holiday gifting merchandise. Items that were featured in the first catalog included the popular Miss Pigtails doll, Lionel electric train sets, a Mickey Mouse watch, boxes of chocolate and even live singing canaries. The catalog, which arrived in mailboxes in late August or early September, soon became a holiday tradition with warm, colorful Christmas scenes decorating the cover. The Wish Book began to diminish in size during the late 1990s and early 2000s, as merchandizing shifted to online purchases (Sears Media,

Despite the merger with Kmart which was the second-largest retailer and with an affirmed belief that it can still turn things around, Sears is teetering on the edge of disaster. Under the direction of the hedge-fund moneyman Edward S. Lampert, Sears has borrowed to the hilt. Many of its most valuable assets have been sold off. Sears stores have been starved for cash and attention. An early shift in the organizational structure designed to create competition among store departments a strategy used by some hedge funds to allocate company resources instead led to infighting (Peterson,