Sears Tower Now Willis Tower

Sears Tower, Now Willis Tower

Copyright Creative Commons

This mail-order firm was one of the greatest single benefactors of mankind in the 19th century because it was targeted on its most overworked component – farmers’ wives. It made a huge range of goods readily accessible to isolated households and communities for whom good shops were remote, and it specialized in products, such as cooking-stoves, plows and washing-machines which were efficient, required little or no servicing, and lasted a long time – yet were nonetheless cheap. Richard Warren Sears (1863-1914) was a Minnesota farmer’s son who worked in railroads and suddenly made $5,000 in six months by selling watches wholesale. What struck him was the selling power, and therefore wealth-creation power, of sheer cheapness. In 1886 he founded the mail-order R. W. Sears Watch Company in Minneapolis. By 1891 he had set up what became Sears. It represented the conquest of geography using the postal system – and enormously helping it in the process – and turning the entire nation into a market.

Sears began with watches, then spread to everything and he remained ‘firm in his belief that the strongest argument for the average customer was a sensational low price. In 1897 Sear’s sewing machines ranged from $15.55 to $17.55 when branded, nationally advertised machines, sold in the shops, were three to six times more highly priced. This sensational price differential got country people – indeed everyone – wildly excited, when they realized they could afford ‘luxuries.’ By putting relentless pressure on manufactures, for whom it provided a highly prized market, Sears was able to cut the cost of its $16.55 sewing machine in 1897 by $3.05, which caused pandemonium in the industry. It called itself not just ‘the world’s cheapest supply house,’ which it was, but ‘the great price-maker,’ because it could push prices down throughout an entire industry or product range. It gave competitors a hard time and housewifes a good time. Sears extended the same principle to bycicles, baby-carriages, buggies, harnesses, wagons, stoves, and cream-separators. This last was important to America’s 10 million farmers. The standard shop model was $100. Sears had one at $62.50 which was not doing well. He decided to transform the market and in 1903 brought out three models at $27, $35, and $39.50. That caused an uproar, and market the point at which the separator became standard in the farming dairy. This ruthless and systematic exploitation of the capacity of the capitalist system to cut prices and save back-breaking labor at the same time was the reason why F. D. Roosevelt, when asked what single book he would put into the hands of a Russian Communist, replied: ‘The Sears catalog’.

God Bless America
Kate Smith