We grew up within walking distance of the neighborhood Sears store.
It wasn't across the street, but it was near enough so that my mom could gather up the boys on a moment's notice for a brisk walk to the department store.
Walk, yes, walk. There were no shopping malls to drive to in quaint 1950s America. People actually walked.
Our Sears had a fancy Hillman's grocery in the basement, and the walk was worth it for the fresh baked bread and warm cookies alone.
Like many Americans of a certain age I grew up in a "Sears home," where everything from the refrigerator to back-to-school clothes came from the iconic retailer that announced a surprise $11 billion merger with Kmart Wednesday to do battle with rivals Wal-Mart and Target.
A "Sears home" is very different than a "Sears House."
Sears, Roebuck and Co. actually sold kits in their mail-order catalog from 1908 to 1940 providing everything from roofs to windows that could be assembled into a small but sturdy build-it-yourself house.
There were 30,000 parts. The kits came with a 75-page instruction booklet, 750 pounds of nails and 27 gallons of paint.
Thousands of the 75,000 Sears Houses built across the country still exist.
A "Sears home" just looked like it was assembled from a "Sears House" kit. Our refrigerator was a Sears Coldspot, the washing machine a Sears Kenmore, my dad's tools Sears Craftsman, the television set a Sears Silvertone.
Most of the furniture came from Sears, including a garishly bright-green sofa that got "Champ," our pet cocker spaniel, banished from the living room. I think the carpeting was from Sears, too.
Present-day retailers like Wal-Mart and Best Buy spend hundreds of millions on advertising to try to engender the kind of store loyalty families in the 1950s naturally had.
Every U.S. neighborhood had Ford families, Chrysler families and General Motors families who stuck with the same car manufacturer for life. Sears families had the same loyalty to the nation's premier general-merchandise retailer.
When post-World War II America needed general merchandise for that national growth spurt that produced the baby-boom generation (today's parents and grandparents), Sears, Montgomery Ward's, JC Penny and dozens of regional retailers were there.
The Sears formula was simple.
It had the famous mail-order catalog, later called the "Wish Book," and three categories of merchandise: Sears, Sears Better and Sears Best.
The basic merchandise was always solid and serviceable, Sears better was a mid-priced step up, and Sears Best was the best Sears had to offer. Three categories of goods were offered for nearly everything from appliances to clothing -- even baseball mitts.
Mine was a "genuine leather" Roberto Clemente autograph outfielders' glove, a birthday gift of Sears Best that I treasured until it literally unraveled and fell into pieces on a diamond.
Each fall my brother and I returned to elementary school in new clothes from Sears. My mother would buy two of each article of clothing in different sizes. If my brother got a new shirt, I got the same shirt in a different color. It was the same for pants, caps, socks and underwear.
One of my prized articles of apparel was a brown "bomber jacket." It was Sears Better so it wasn't "genuine leather," but it looked just like the zippered jackets with fur collars real pilots wore.
I wore it to school on a cold November morning after a heavy snowfall. The temperature was in the low teens and the "leatherette" man-made material froze solid like a metal breastplate worn by the Spanish conquistadors in Mexico.
Snowballs hurled by classmates bounced harmlessly off the stiff jacket, but I wasn't able to return fire because the sleeves also froze solid. I felt like the tin woodsman in "The Wizard of Oz" worried the jacket would crack and shatter, falling off my body.
I fled across the schoolyard to the warm school lobby to check for cracks.
I stuck with Sears into adulthood, especially for appliances, and when we remodeled a bathroom in the 1990s we bought Sears fixtures, except for a designer Kohler toilet my wife called "the throne."
My wife had never been inside a Kmart until we were putting together our first apartment and I introduced her to the Blue Light Special. Initially skeptical, she left loaded down with bathroom stuff.
When we remodeled the bathroom, Sears was in trouble. It became evident to even loyal consumers when they delivered four medicine chests to our house in a month. The first one had a cracked mirror. Broken glass rattled so loudly the second box never made it off the truck. The third medicine chest arrived undamaged, but a fourth one showed up a short time later. We sent it back unopened.
My sales-executive wife once took the Sears catalog writer's test. Crafting those pithy product descriptions paid pretty well, but around the time she expected a call back Sears began phasing out the Big Book and laying off 50,000 employees.
Sears was able to avoid bankruptcy, but Kmart did not and filed for reorganization in January 2002. Both companies lost ground to upstarts Wal-Mart and Target, both considered second-tier discounters at the time. Kmart closed more than 600 stores as Wal-Mart kept expanding to become the world's largest retailer with $9 billion in profits in 2003. Target morphed into a destination retailer with the hip nickname "Tar-zhay."
Sears remained No. 1 in home appliances, despite tough competition from Home Depot, the nation's second-largest retailer, Lowe's and other home-improvement chains.
Kmart sold off prime real estate to both Sears and Wal-Mart to concentrate on apparel and home accessories. Sears probably sees Kmart's exclusive brands -- Joe Boxer, Jaclyn Smith and Martha Stewart Everyday -- as the good, better and best merchandise of today.
The new Sears Holding Corp. will operate 3,500 stores under both brand names but is expected to change its mall-based strategy and shift to more off-mall stand-alone stores.
Analysts say Sears is sitting on a real-estate goldmine and can sell underperforming mall locations at a substantial profit. Combining lines of merchandise from Sears Craftsman tools to low-priced clothing will eventually save hundreds of millions in operating expenses and help both chains become more current in the eyes of youth-oriented consumers.
The combined company will be run from Sears' headquarters campus in Hoffman Estates, Ill.
It's a good thing Sears was not bought by Kmart. Can you imagine a big red K surrounded by blue lights on the top of the 110-story Sears Tower in downtown Chicago?
--
(Please send comments to [email protected].)
