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Eyelashes & Hors d'Oeuvres. The 1952 spring and summer catalogue still offers such farm necessities as horse collars, castration clamps and animal feed (now reinforced with antibiotics). But there is also a choice of hors d'oeuvres dishes, television lamps and artificial eyelashes. The flamboyant old descriptions ("Astonishing Offer," "Biggest Bargain Ever," "The Best Cream Separator made in the World") have been toned down, and patent medicines virtually abolished. Instead of ads for rubber and celluloid collars and mustache cups, there are now lists of lipstick, perfume and hormone creams —plus 37 pages of foundation garments ("I dreamed I went shopping at Sears for more Maidenform bras"). Most expensive item: diamonds (up to $1,795) —on the cheaper rings, "magic reflector settings make diamonds seem larger."
The customers who pore over the catalogue have changed as much as the ads. Now city folk account for 64% of Sears' mail-order sales, and the company runs a 24-hour telephone service in four cities to take orders.
Air for Sale. The man who started cataloguing this cavalcade of America was Richard Warren Sears, a tall and dark promoter who, in the words of one admiring contemporary, "could sell a breath of air." Sears was a railroad telegrapher in tiny North Redwood, Minn, in the '80s—a time when shady manufacturers unloaded their stocks by shipping them C.O.D. to unsuspecting small-town merchants, then offered them cut-rate prices "to avoid return shipping costs." When a shipment of men's "yellow watches," hunting-case type, and gold-filled (value of the gold: 27¢) was refused by a local merchant, Sears got them for $12 apiece and sold them for $14. In six months Sears, then 22, cleared $5,000, moved to Minneapolis and then on to the rail center.of Chicago, and started a mail-order business.
Before long, so many defective watches were returned that Sears advertised for a repairman. Alvah Curtis Roebuck, 23, who had been earning $3.50 a week fixing watches in the corner of a delicatessen shop in Hammond, Ind., got the job. In 1891, Sears set up a partnership with Roebuck (Sears kept two-thirds control) and rapidly expanded sales by filling his catalogue with every come-on known to the sharp retailers of the day.
"Send No Money." "FREE, FREE, FREE!" cried Sears' catalogue in big bold letters—then added, in small type at the bottom of the page: "to see and examine at the Express office." Once he advertised a sofa and two chairs for 95¢; buyers were flabbergasted to get doll's furniture.
Despite such tricks, Sears, Roebuck built a solid reputation for supplying high-quality goods at low prices. Its cream separators sold for $39.50 v. $125 for competing brands. A farmer could buy a Sunday suit for $4.98, a couch for $5.45, a stove for $11.96, a six-room house ("machine-made, ready-cut") for $972, and a "single dog power churn" for $14.70. Sears was indeed the farmer's friend—to the end and sometimes beyond. Once a woman returned some medicine intended for her husband, because he had died before it arrived. By return mail she received Sears' condolences—along with "our special tombstone catalogue."