Chicago's Greatest Year, 1893: The White City and the Birth of a Modern Metropolis

3. Sears, Roebuck and Company

57 N3 O Sears, Roebuck and Company Ahuge city like Chicago affects many more people than the ones who live in or near it. For example, Chicago’s aggressive and efficient meat packers transformed the High Plains prairies into cattle country, induced farmers to turn millions of acres over to the raising of corn for feeding animals, and put independent cattle raisers in the East out of business. Another profound effect came from Chicago’s insatiable need for lumber, which denuded the Great Lakes region of its white pine forests. A third was how Chicago’s mail-order houses linked the city and the country in new ways and transformed rural life. Historically, one of the biggest divides between the country person and the city dweller was their ability to buy goods of almost any kind. In the colonial era, many of the manufactured goods purchased by farmers were sold by peddlers, whose wares were few and of variable quality. Many of these itinerant vendors settled down in towns and opened small general goods stores, where prices were high, choices were few, and satisfaction was definitely not guaranteed. It was different in the cities, where department stores emerged in the mid-nineteenth century . Marshall Field, Chicago’s most famous department store owner, came to the city in 1850; he first went into partnership with Potter Palmer and Levi Leiter and opened his own firm in 1881. Other important Chicago department stores of the period were Schlesinger and Mayer, the Fair, Carson Pirie Scott, and 58 Sears, Roebuck and Company Mandel Brothers. They gave urbanites an extensive choice of goods, but unless a farmer (and his family) came to the city, these stores did not do the same for country people. That was the job of the great mail-order houses, another unique feature of Chicago. Sears and His Catalog Sears, Roebuck and Company was incorporated on September 16, 1893.1 Its founder, Richard Warren Sears, had been in the retailing business, in one form or another, for some seven years. When Sears, Roebuck and Company. was incorporated, Sears was not quite thirty years old, having been born in Stewartville , Minnesota, on December 7, 1863.2 His father died when Richard was fourteen, and the lad went to work for the Minneapolis and St. Louis Railroad as a telegrapher. Soon he became the manager of the railroad station two miles from Redwood Falls, Minnesota, and it was there he began dabbling in sales. The railroad gave him, as station agent, special rates on such commodities as coal and wood, and he began selling to locals at attractive prices. As the story goes, in 1886, a jeweler in town received a shipment of watches from Chicago but found the merchandise unsatisfactory . The shipper offered the watches to Sears at $12 each, and he began retailing them for $14 to other station agents, who were then free to sell them for whatever they could get. This is the narrative given in Send No Money by Louis E. Asher and Edith Heal, the first book-length narrative about Sears, Roebuck and Company, and it has been repeated in dozens of publications. Because Asher became general manager of Sears, Roebuck in 1906 and corresponded with and was a friend of friend of Richard Sears, this story presumably came from Sears himself. However, in an interview with a reporter from the Chicago Tribune in 1907, Sears told a somewhat different tale. The reporter, Hollis W. Field, related that Sears himself received a $9 watch C.O.D. along with “a suggestion from the shipping house that the young telegraph operator could make a nice profit selling them to agents and railroad men throughout Sears, Roebuck and Company 59 the northwest.” Sears knew that railroaders, who relied on good timepieces, normally purchased watches for $20, so he contacted the shipping company and agreed to take a batch of slightly better watches at $9.40 each. Then by means of Western Union, Sears wrote “forty letters to forty men in forty different towns” offering the watches at $11.90. He soon had made himself a profit of $200.3 Whatever the exact details, within six months Sears had made $5,000,moved to Minneapolis , and opened the R. W. Sears Watch Company. He quickly decided that Minneapolis was too small and too remote, and a year later he was in Chicago. As part of his business...