A pneumatic-tube station in the Sears, Roebuck & Company mail-order plant in Chicago, as depicted in a circa-1918 retouched photographLibrary of Congress




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Then, after one of the most successful half-centuries in U.S. corporate history, Sears did something really crazy. It opened a store.

In the early 1920s, Sears found itself in an economy that was coming off a harsh post-World War recession, according to Daniel M. G. Graff and Peter Temin’s essay “Sears, Roebuck in the Twentieth Century.” The company was also dealing with a more lasting challenge: the rise of chain stores. To guide their corporate makeover, the company tapped a retired World War I general named Robert Wood, who turned to the U.S. Census and Statistical Abstract of the United States as a fount of marketing wisdom. In federally tabulated figures, he saw the country moving from farm to city, and then from city to suburb. His plan: Follow them with stores.

The first Sears stores opened in the company’s existing mail-order warehouses, for convenience’s sake. But soon they were popping up in new locations. Not satisfied with merely competing with urban department stores like Macy’s, Wood distinguished new Sears locations by plopping them into suburbs where land was cheap and parking space was plentiful.



Sears was not content to be a one-stop-shop for durable goods. Like Amazon today, the company used its position to enter adjacent businesses. To supplement its huge auto-parts business, Sears started selling car insurance under the Allstate brand. One might say the shift from selling products to services is analogous to the creation of Amazon Web Services—or even Amazon’s television shows. Analysts have wondered, why would Amazon want to sell books, diapers, and TV? But even the company’s seemingly eccentric decisions are centered on Sears’s old expertise: becoming an inextricable part of consumers’ lives.

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So how might Sears’s experience predict Amazon’s future?



Third, Amazon may find, like Sears, that size can be both an advantage and a bull’s-eye. Sears evolved to become a microcosm of the American economy, with its corporate operations spanning retailing, manufacturing, marketing, and transportation. Warehouses filled 100,000 orders a day, 16 Sears-operated manufacturing plants built name-brand kitchenware and furniture, and a New York branch concentrated in apparel marketing. Amazon is already on this very road; in fact, on Thursday, the company announced that it is adding several thousand marketing jobs in its New York office. But just as Sears attracted the ire of displaced merchants, particularly in rural areas, Amazon will find—and has already found—it impossible to expand without garnering animosity from retailers or regulators.

