(8 of 9)
Every Man a Capitalist. Sears does more than help small capitalists. Says Wood: "The best way to make capitalism work is to make more capitalists. That's what we're doing at Sears." In the low-paying retailing industry, Sears pays clerks an average of $60 a week, considerably above the retail average. But the real device for making capitalists is Sears' profit-sharing plan, which was started by Rosenwald in 1916 and has become the wonder of the pension world. Thousands of Sears employees have retired with small fortunes. Sample: a woman clerk who never made more than $3,900 a year and contributed only $3,400 to the retirement fund in 35 years retired last year with $117,580 in cash and securities.
Since the fund began, employee and company contributions and earnings have totaled $377 million. Currently, 80% of the fund is invested in Sears stock, of which it holds by far the biggest block. In effect, the employees, through their trustees, have working control of the company. Outside pension experts sometimes view this with alarm; if Sears goes broke, the employees would lose heavily though cash and Government bonds protect the employees' own contributions. But Wood thinks that it makes employees work hard for Sears, and is thus the best insurance against the company's going broke.
Wood's policy of promoting from within the company has also boosted morale and given Sears a strong team ready to run the company when he retires. The two top men: 1) Fowler McConnell, 57, a University of Chicago graduate who joined Sears as a stock boy in 1916, worked his way up through both the mail-order and retail ends of the business, and has been president since 1946; and 2) Merchandising Vice President Theodore Houser, now 57, Wood's old assistant at Montgomery Ward, who moved to Sears when Wood became president and is regarded by him as "the greatest master of mass merchandising in the U.S."
Southward Ho. For all his business statesmanship, General Wood has not shown the same insight and judgment in political ventures. As boss of the America First Committee in the early days of World War II, Wood gathered together some sincere men who thought they could keep the U.S. out of the war. But the committee also attracted a rag, tag & bobtail of anti-Semites, pro-Nazis and others whom Wood now sadly recalls as "crackpots." Since those days, Wood has tempered his economic nationalism and is no longer sure that the Americas can let the rest of the world go hang. He is still a bear on Europe. He thinks Europe is about finished unless it exports "10,000,000 or 15,000,000 people." For that reason Sears expansion plans call for no stores there.