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Business Leaders: A Historical Sketch of Richard W. Sears

1999; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 5; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/107179199900500205

1071-7919

Daniel A. Wren, Ronald G. Greenwood,

American History and Culture

great price maker; Send us no money; With cash, we pay the freight. These were advertising phrases that reached out to rural captured a market that was eager for the products available in urban areas. The idea of ordering by mail was not new: Benjamin Franklin issued a catalog in 1744 offering a list of six hundred books that could be ordered by mail. A. T. Stewart, R. H. Macy, John Wanamaker, Charles Tiffany had mail order departments that targeted primarily the inland cities of America. The Larkin Company had a catalog for ordering soap, tea, coffee, extracts; Butler Brothers of Boston offered hardware; National Cloak Suit (later renamed National Bella Hess) was also in the mail order business, specializing in certain product lines with urban markets in mind. In 1880 72 percent of America's population was classified as rural, this market was relatively untapped. Aaron Montgomery Ward his brother-in-law, George R. Thorne, pioneered the idea of a general-merchandise catalog that was targeted for the rural market. Ward began his career as a clerk for Field, Palmer, Leiter (predecessor to the Marshall Field Company) launched his catalog business with one-page flyers, followed by a catalog of a broad range of merchandise in 1874. By 1887 Ward advertised twenty-four thousand different items in a 540-page catalog. Like other mail order firms, Ward had to gain the trust of customers who relied on the printed page to tell them what they needed to know about a product. Ward received an endorsement from the National Grange of Patrons of Husbandry, an agrarian group that promoted the interests of farmers, which helped create this image of trust. Cheapest Cash House in America Satisfaction Guaranteed--Or Your Money Back were slogans intended to promote the reliability of doing business with a distant supplier by mail order. Born in Stuartsville, Minnesota, in 1863, Richard Warren Sears came to the mail order business by a different route. At the age of sixteen he learned telegraphy (like Carnegie Edison) used this to advance his career on the Minneapolis Saint Louis Railroad, becoming station agent at North Redwood, Minnesota. In this position he could read the numerous mail order catalogs that passed through become familiar with prices markup from the bills of lading. A consignment of watches from a Chicago jeweler was refused by the North Redwood jeweler Richard Sears was given the opportunity to buy them for $12 each. Sears knew this was a good price that watches carried a high markup, but he also knew that he could not sell all of these gold-filled watches in the small town of North Redwood. He wrote other agents on the line that he would sell them for $14 each, subject to examination, COD. These watches retailed for $25 Sears told the agents that they could keep any profits over his price. The watches were sold through the agents they asked for more. In the first six months of this venture Sears netted $5,000, left the railroad to establish the R.W. Sears Watch Company in Minneapolis in 1886. After a year in Minneapolis he moved his business to Chicago, where he felt he had a more central location superior communication transportation facilities. Sears expanded his product assortment to include jewelry silverware, requests for watch repair started appearing. To take care of this side of the business, he hired Alvah Curtis Roebuck an Indiana farmboy, who had learned watch repair through a correspondence course. Sears Roebuck parted in 1889 but joined forces again in 1893 to form Sears, Roebuck Company, with and company being represented by Sears's sister, Eva, who held one share of stock. Catalogs While the railroad the telegraph provided the support system of transportation communication that enabled the mailorder business to succeed, the U. …