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As chairman of the board of Sears, Roebuck & Co., Robert Elkington Wood, 72, runs the biggest general store in the world. Last year Sears, Roebuck sold the astronomical number of 500,000,000 separate items—everything from a one-ounce sewing bobbin to a 2,200-lb.brooder house. But the biggest mail-order seller of all was, as usual, diapers. To Merchandiser Wood, this fact is significant. It illustrates his motto that a "business, to stay healthy, must grow with the nation."*
To keep abreast of the soaring U.S. birth rate, Wood took a cool and calculated gamble six years ago. While other merchandisers pulled in their horns in fear of the "inevitable" postwar recession, Wood launched the greatest expansion in merchandising history. He blueprinted the spending of $300 million out of earnings to open 92 new Sears stores in the U.S. and Latin America, and enlarged and shifted the locations of 212 more. If the recession had come, Sears would have been in deep trouble. But Wood's faith in the expanding American economy—aided by the backlog of demand for goods built up during World War II—was more than justified. Last year Sears sold $2,777,277,096 worth of goods, more than twice as much as its closest rival, Montgomery Ward. Its estimated net profit was $113 million. Sears is now the sixth biggest corporation, in dollar volume of sales, in the U.S.* Besides its mail-order business, which is run from eleven plants, Sears has 691 stores in 47 states, Hawaii and four foreign countries.
A West Point graduate and a brigadier general in World War I, Wood has a favorite phrase: "Let's charge." (He means it in the military, not the merchandising, sense.) Yet he vehemently castigates the "military mind" in business, which he defines as thinking from the top down instead of the bottom up. "The military mind," says Old Soldier Wood, "doesn't know what makes our country tick." Bob Wood is sure he does know: free enterprise, whose "basic purpose is providing people with the things they require, at the lowest possible prices."
The Wishbook. Last week Wood and Sears passed another notable milestone. Sears sent out the biggest spring and summer catalogue (1,298 pages) in its history to the biggest mailing list in ten years (7,200,000). Each catalogue was crammed with 100,000 items, at prices down an average of 3½% from last fall.
Sears' catalogue has been known on farms for half a century as the Wishbook, or the farmer's best friend. A scrapbook of America, it has mirrored the country's changing manners and habits. In the early days, Sears' ultimate in sophistication was a solid gold toothpick with earspoon combined, its recommendation for an evening's entertainment a stereoscope with "twelve splendid views portraying in the most vivid manner the story of our Savior's life before & after Crucifixion." Sickly Sears customers were urged to wear a "Heidelberg Electric Belt" for nervous diseases, headaches or backaches. There were "liquor cures" (i.e., knockout drops), and Sears' remedy for the "morphine and opium" habit. Pajamas were first carried for men only and its rouge would "never be noticed."