Sears, Roebuck and Company

Before there was online shopping, there was the Sears catalog. Founded in Chicago in 1893 by Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck, the company built its fortune on a thick mail-order book that reached into the farthest reaches of rural America. Carried by the railroads and the postal service, the catalog let a farm family in a remote county buy the same goods at the same prices as a city dweller, and it grew so central to American life that people called it the Consumers' Bible.

The catalog sold nearly everything imaginable. Tools, clothing, sewing machines, firearms, musical instruments, and even entire houses shipped as kits of numbered parts arrived by rail to be assembled on the buyer's own lot. For millions of Americans isolated on farms and in small towns, Sears was the great connector to the wider consumer economy, and its low prices and money-back guarantee helped standardize what Americans owned and how they shopped.

As the nation urbanized and took to the automobile, Sears followed its customers into the cities. Beginning in the 1920s it opened department stores that anchored downtowns and, later, the new suburban shopping centers, becoming the largest retailer in the country. Its ambition was written on the Chicago skyline in 1973, when the Sears Tower rose as the tallest building in the world, a monument to a retailing empire at its height.

The empire could not adapt to what came next. Discount chains like Walmart and then online sellers like Amazon — which perfected the mail-order idea Sears had pioneered — steadily eroded its business. The famous general catalog ceased publication in 1993, and after decades of decline the company filed for bankruptcy in 2018. Its long arc, from the catalog to the shopping mall to collapse, traces the whole history of American consumer retailing.