(6 of 11)
Just how far Sears plunges into the financial arena depends on Congress. Legislators, in the current fuss over banking deregulation and rising worries over the stability of the banking system, might force Sears out of some of the new fields it has entered.
Sears is still working to broaden its business horizon. The company has set up the Sears Communications Network, which is going to sell computer-data transmission and communications services. The company is already offering long-distance telephone services through MCI Communications, one of the new competitors of A T & T. Customers may charge calls to their monthly Sears bill. In California the company is experimenting with a telephone bill—paying service linked to its credit card. In February, Sears launched a joint venture with IBM and CBS to develop a home-information service called Trintex, which will probably involve bill paying, banking and shopping and other services through home computers.
A far-flung Sears was very much on the mind of its founder, Richard W. Sears. A supersalesman, he saw no reason why Sears could not sell anything. He even set up a banking department with savings and checking services in 1899 that paid 5% interest on deposits, then folded the operation in 1903. But that was later. In 1886, then a restless 23-year-old railroad-station agent in North Redwood, Minn., Sears bought a consignment of gold-filled pocket watches that had been rejected by a local jeweler, resold them to other station agents at a $2 profit apiece and founded the R.W. Sears Watch Co. A year later he added a watch repairman, Alvah C. Roebuck, to his staff. In 1888 came the initial catalog, containing only watches. In 1894, though, the first real Sears, Roebuck catalog appeared. The cover of its 507 pages blared: "Cheapest Supply House on Earth. Our Trade Reaches Around the World."
Not quite, but it did reach at least to American farmers. At the time they did most of their shopping at inefficient, local general stores, where they paid high prices and had limited choices. But a growing rail and post office network, with Chicago as the hub, was beginning to turn farmers into a cohesive market. Montgomery Ward had published a catalog for them since the 1870s, but Richard Sears perfected the technique beyond anyone's imagination. Using the expanding rail system that he knew so well and capitalizing on the rapid growth of post-Civil War America, Sears turned his catalog into a powerful link between makers of goods and customers.
Sears talked to farmers in simple and earthy language that sometimes stretched reality. In 1902 the Seven Drawer Drop Head Minnesota Sewing Machine was described as "the highest of high grade in everything." Couches and sofa beds were the "greatest values the world has ever seen." Dr. Rowland's System Builder and Lung Restorer was described as the "greatest vegetable medicine of the age for the thousand ailments common to the masses." Some copy was thorough to a fault. A