Sears Roebuck And Company

Sears, Roebuck and Co., a subsidiary company of Sears Holdings; was founded in 1886 by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck. Sears, a railroad agent in 1886 purchased an unwanted shipment of high end watches from a jeweler. He then resold them making a huge profit. Soon after that he started a business selling watches through mail order catalogs. A year later he moved to Chicago, Illinois where he met Alvha Roebuck and they started selling the watches together. They published the first Sears Catalog in 1888, and the business started to grow rapidly. A few years later in 1893 they renamed the business to Sears, Roebuck and Co. By 1894, the catalog was growing rapidly as they started to diversify their products, selling everything

When the depression of 1893 hit it caused an all-out panic; causing Sears, Roebuck and Co. to sit on large volumes of merchandise, this scared Richard Sears so he decided to quit, selling his half of the company in 1895 for $75,000.00 to Aaron Nusbaum who brought in his brother-in-law Julius Rosenwald. The company continued to grow quickly, but Sears and Rosenwald did not get along with Nusbaum, so in 1905 they bought him out for $1.3 Million

Under Rosenwald’s leadership as Vice President and Treasurer annual sales continued to climb over $50milion by 1906. So in 1906 they decided to make the company public, with $40milion in stock.

Sears opened its catalog plant in their Sears Merchandise Building Tower in Chicago, and in 1925 Sears opened its first retail store on Chicago’s west side. After the store opened and was successful they decided to diversify their products once again. This is when they introduced the hardware and building materials departments. Sears kept growing and adding stores, and in 1930 they added Allstate Insurance Company, placing agents in all the stores. Over the decades they kept adding national brands to their name such as (Diehard, Kenmore, craftsman Silverstone and Toughskins). Sears continued to grow adding more brand names and eventually adding Discover Card Credit Card in

of the United States in 1952, which now owns a 11.7% share

Sears made history in 1970 when they started building the now famous Sears Tower, it took three years to complete and used enough concrete to make an eight-lane, five-mile-long highway. They moved into the tower in 1974 and in 1988, Sears Roebuck and Company sold the tower and moved out of the building, but the Sears Tower name remained the same. (Eventually it was renamed the Willis Tower in 2009 after the Willis Group Holdings)

Sears decline started in the early 1990’s when they terminated the famous catalog due to shrinking sales. They started to sell off their credit card divisions and started to restructure the stores opening Sears Grand Stores (chain of stores usually located away from malls). On November 17, 2004 they publically announced they were being acquired by the national chain Kmart, changing the name to Sears