Requiem for a Sears

When I read that the last Sears store in New York City would close forever in November 2021, I could not believe it. I could not believe that someone cared enough about Sears to write an entire article about it.

The author described the Brooklyn Sears building as “historic,” which to me implies some kind of artistic merit. Beautiful. Bold. At least iconic. I forgot that sometimes history is boring as hell. Sometimes, historic architecture looks exactly like every rat-trap shopping mall in Middle America. As I walked up to the hulking, windowless slab of a store, I felt myself transported back in time to small-town Colorado, a place I would have gnawed my own legs off to escape.

They all look the same. Every podunk shopping mall in America. I’d never stopped to wonder why that is. Or why shopping malls exist in the first place. Or why every suburb has one. It felt as natural as the passing seasons, as the rising of the sun in the east.

It’s Sears. Sears is why. And now Sears is dead.

Before I was born, Sears was big. Amazon big. Between 1 and 2 percent of America’s entire GDP from World War II all the way through the 80s big. And now they aren’t. And the story of why they aren’t mirrors the story of America itself.

Here lies the corpse of an empire. I enter her vast sepulcher. Yellow signs tastelessly announce her impending demise. EVERYTHING MUST GO.

Whatever your political opinions, it’s hard these days to escape the feeling that restless America will soon wake screaming from her long, sweet dream. The stirrings have already begun. The ground shifts beneath our feet.

Few Americans ever dreamed a longer and sweeter dream than Sears Roebuck & Co: American fantasy made flesh. And few Americans ever woke up as rudely, catastrophically, and horrifically either.

Bootstraps and Gumption

Richard J Sears strides onto the pages of history as the embodiment of American mythos. 

Sears grew up modestly wealthy, but his father lost the family fortune through speculation and died penniless. Just seventeen years old, Richard Sears went to work for the St. Louis railroad to support his mother and sisters. For six years the lad supported his entire family on an entry-level railroad salary--something actually possible at the time--until, in 1886, fate intervened in the form of a wayward box of watches.

The station manager did not want them. The wholesaler did not want to pay shipping to get them back. Sears solved both problems when he bought the box at a fire sale price. He then sent letters up down the railroad line advertising the timepieces to his fellow workers. The lad had a gift for prose. Soon, the watches were gone. A mail-order empire was born.

By 1900, the company moved a million dollars of merchandise per year. By 1905, that number exploded to nearly $38 million. On the strength of this spectacular growth, Sears Roebuck & Co went public in 1906 at $50 per share. 

Richard Sears stepped down from the helm, but the company barreled forward with a dynamism and flexibility that enabled it to weather the many storms of the early 20th century. The 1920s could have been the end for the company; as urban migration commenced, the rural farmers who comprised the backbone of Sears’ market dwindled to nearly nothing. Sears adapted by changing its core business strategy to focus on physical stores instead of catalog sales.

In 1928, Sears had 27 stores. By 1929, they had 342. The depression hit hard, but Sears’ gamble paid off. The company successfully weathered the storm. 

Sears, Roebuck & Co used its depression-era profits to install itself at the center of what would become the heart of post-war America: the suburban community. Often, the new Sears store opened its doors before the housing developments surrounding it finished construction. When it came time to furnish those new houses, the new suburbanites had a convenient place to go.

By 1949, five of every hundred dollars spent on merchandise in America went to Sears. 

FDR never actually said that America should air-drop the Sears catalog over the USSR to convert the communists. But the fact that so many people think he did speaks to the almost-religious place Sears occupied within American capitalism. The shopping malls that attached themselves to Sears stores became cultural and community centers. The store offered a little slice of the American dream to everyone: a new appliance, affordable clothes, and a steady paycheck for returning World War II veterans in need of work. Almost all promotions to management came from within the ranks. Work hard and you too could rise to the C-suite. No wonder so many Sears employees exhibited fanatical loyalty to the company.

By the 1960s, Sears, Roebuck & Co was as American as apple pie. The store’s explosive growth and high stock returns felt preordained. Think Microsoft in the 1990s. Think Amazon today.

The Drowning Man

The problem with a system that requires infinite growth is that growth is not infinite.

The year is 1972. Every town, hamlet, and village across America has a Sears store at its center--there’s nowhere else to build. Almost everyone who can afford a washing machine already has one: they won’t need another until this one breaks. The Sears building--tallest in the world--rises like a half-finished Tower of Babel over the metropolis of Chicago. But profits have begun to stagnate.

Growth ceases. The company falters. The 1973 oil crisis sends the American economy into a spiral of inflation and uncertainty. Layoffs begin even as the Sears Tower opens its doors.

Over the subsequent decades, the company tried everything to restart that wild growth. Like a drowning swimmer, they grasped at any flotsam that came within reach. Banking and real estate businesses. A stock broker firm. The Discover credit card. An eye care franchise. An auto department. Anything not bolted down.

Jack of all trades. Master of none.

It didn’t work. By the 1980s, K-Mart sales surpassed Sears. Wal-Mart, Target, and Home Depot soon followed. Times changed. The Sears model did not--or at least, not in any of the right ways.

Sears declared bankruptcy for the first time in 2003. 

And then it got so much worse.

Rand-Inspired Postcapitalist Hell

In 2003, Eddie Lampert bought both Sears and K-Mart, consolidated both into K-Mart holdings, and proceeded to ravage the corpses of both business concerns for the next decade or so.

Eddie Lampert, a 41-year-old hedge fund billionaire, has no retail experience. Eddie Lampert had no desire to gain any, either. Jargon like “vendors” and “consumers” reportedly upset him. He got rid of anyone who knew what the hell they were doing and replaced them with finance bros: friends from his days on Wall Street.

But let no one say that Lampert lacked initiative and imagination. An enormous and self-declared Ayn Rand fan, he implemented a model of cutthroat competition for Sears and K-Mart in 2007 that ultimately proved the rough equivalent of setting $4 billion and thousands of jobs on fire. 

Lampert--and I swear this is true--divided the company into 30 autonomous subdivisions and told them to compete with each other. The CEO would distribute resources and support to each subdivision based solely on who generated the most yearly profit compared to everyone else. In other words, not only was it in the Retail subdepartment’s best interest to bring in more money than, say, Hardware, it was in their best interest for Hardware to do poorly.

Imagine floor managers for different departments in the same store physically fighting for display space. Imagine screaming matches over who gets advertisement placement in weekly circulars. Imagine cutting personnel to the bone and then scraping away at that bone. Anything that would help the store as a whole, as opposed to the subdivision specifically, would give the competition free resources while cutting into their own precious bottom line. 

Ever wonder why Sears and K-Mart stores were so dirty? Now you know.

The only place K-mart holdings did not cut costs was at the administrative level. To be truly autonomous, each subdivision required its own C-suite and its own board of directors—with board of directors pay, of course. To make up for the massive additional expense, the subdivisions simply cut the salaries of middle managers. No problem.

Meanwhile, Lampert sat in his $38 million Florida home and, like a petulant child smashing plastic toys together, demanded vanity projects from the tech department. These projects included “Pebble,” an internal social media platform that primarily functioned as a way to spy on employees and as an outlet for Lampert’s strange anonymous shitposting.

In 2010, Sears and K-Mart had 3,500 store locations in the United States. By 2020, that number shrunk to 182. By 2022, 34 stores will remain.

The current Sears stock price is 2 cents. 

As Goes Sears…

I’m at the Sears. I’m at the K-Mart. I am at the combination Sears and K-Mart

It is November 22nd, and fifteen or so racks of clothing huddle around the one remaining checkout counter as if for warmth. They are puzzlingly normal, these racks. Twenty red polo shirts. Blue T-shirts for kids. They are not picked over. They are brand new shipments, with all the sizes, arranged meticulously for all the customers that are not there.

The shoe section looks like a graveyard after an earthquake. No two pairs of shoes stand up straight. Paper from inside shoe boxes clutter the aisles like tumbleweeds.

Over the loudspeaker, an advertisement urges customers to visit ShopYourWay.com for an immersive shopping experience. The website appears to be some unholy amalgam of social network and rewards club that I refuse to investigate further.

The hideously chipper voice of a woman who makes her living smiling while eating low-fat yogurt becomes distorted into dystopian menace as it bounces off bare walls, reverberates through the emptiness of a three-story building once full of material goods. Beyond the limits of shoes and polos lies an enormous white void. A bent clothes rack here. A rusted shelf there. A single chair, occupied by an elderly employee. She stares into the abyss and talks occasionally in Spanish to an employee twenty feet away.

These are not the first empty shelves I have seen today. In my head, unplanned and unbidden, I now carry a working map of the convenience stores that surround my home and school. An inventory of which store has what goods in stock. I watch inventory tick down without replacement.

The result of the same genre of hubris.

Right-wing media screams about the supply shortage, but in the stores we say nothing and ask no questions. There is a grimness that I suspect stems from decades of stories about communism. Sometimes those stories include oppression. Sometimes they include secret police. But always--always--they include empty shelves. Our deepest, truest fear.

No empty shelves here, the stories implicitly promised us. Not in America, where the streets are paved with material goods. Whatever you want, whenever you want, as much as you want. As long as you work hard. As long as you have bootstaps.

There seems to be a supply shortage of those too, these days. Maybe there always was.

The failures of Sears Roebuck lay heavy upon me as I exit into twilight. No one has bothered to turn on the enormous neon sign. Why would they?

Beyond me, storefronts glow and glitter. All is not lost. But something surely is. 

The American dream never belonged to everyone. But, for the in-group at least, parts of it were true. You could feed a family on a single blue-collar salary, once. Stay at the same company for twenty years. Enjoy some kind of community. Once.

For most of us, that world is as dead as the neon sign behind me.

How long until the rest of the lights go out?

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