History of Sears, Roebuck and Co. I would like you to use your imagination for just one moment. Picture America in the late 1880s. At that time, the states were only 38 in number. Their total population was 58 million and about 65 percent of these people lived in rural areas. Very few cities had 200,000 or more residents. And the yearly national income was about $10 billion. This was the scene when, one day in 1886, a Chicago jewelry company shipped some watches to a jeweler in a Minnesota hamlet. This brought about the name of a man that would go down in history. Richard Sears was an agent of the Minneapolis and St. Louis railway station in North Redwood, Minnesota. Sears job as station agent left him plenty of spare time, so he sold lumber and coal to local residents on the side to make extra money. Later, when he received a shipment of watches, which were unwanted by a neighboring Redwood Falls jeweler, he was ready. Mr. Sears purchased them himself, sold the watches at a nice profit to other station agents up and down the line, and then ordered more for resale. In 1886, R. W. Sears became a watch company in Minneapolis. Time for RevisionThey were only a mail order store at the time. They would not become a department store until 1925. In 1925, they opened one retail store in Chicago. They immediately made a profit. They opened 7 new stores that year, and by the end of the 1927, they had 27 retail stores. They boosted ahead in the retail business with the opening of 400 stores in 1933. "In 1931 Sears retail sales topped mail-order sales for the first time. Stores accounted for 53.4 percent of total sales of more than $180 million." By 1941, Sears's retail stores totaled 600. Since then Sears has built many stores and grown into one of the largest department store chains with a total of 800 department stores. And recently put their store up on the web. Sears ProductsAfter that, Sears saw the opportunity to sell other t...
