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Sears did not hesitate to call his goods the "best in the world" because he knew his customers would never be able to judge him by that standard. But at the same time he backed up his claim by assuring buyers of "satisfaction guaranteed or your money back." As early as 1911, Sears offered credit.
Small-town store owners were threatened by the upstart. Some of them held burnings of Sears catalogs and denigrated the company at every turn, ridiculing it as "Shears and Sawbuck." In self-defense, the company began sending its catalogs in plain brown wrappers.
Alvah Roebuck was quickly worn down by Sears' energy and sold out to him in 1895 for a mere $25,000. Roebuck went into other ventures, including early movies and Florida land, but then rejoined Sears in the 1930s as a traveling promoter. Local Sears managers discovered that the presence of one of the founders was a good Depression-era drawing card. At Roebuck's death in 1948 at 84, he was again the holder of Sears shares he had acquired as a member of the employee stock-ownership plan.
By the turn of the century, Richard Sears' store was America's largest mailorder house. Sears, who died in 1914, was succeeded as president by Julius Rosenwald. In 1928 the era of Robert Wood began. Wood, who went to West Point (class of 1900) because he could not afford Yale, his first choice, became a brigadier general at 39 and ran the Army's Quartermaster Corps in the waning months of World War I. That was good training for large-scale retailing. One of his civilian aides, Robert Julius Thorne, was president of Montgomery Ward, and he invited Wood to join the company after the war as a vice president. Wood and Montgomery Ward, however, did not mix, and in 1924 he jumped to Sears.
Between 1928 and his retirement in 1954, Wood was the absolute ruler of Sears, hammering out all aspects of the modern firm. Sears had opened the first retail store in 1925, but Wood pushed the company toward selling from stores as well as through the catalogs. The general led Sears into insurance with Allstate, arousing the ire and suspicion of traditional insurance companies. Sears actually sold houses in its catalogs from 1908 until 1939, at prices ranging from $600 to a then princely $5,000, and even provided mortgages. But it got out of that business because it was foreclosing on too many of its own loans during the Depression. Wood had Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser produce the short-lived Allstate automobile, which was sold in Sears stores for only two years, from 1951 to 1953.
After World War II, Wood's strategy was aggressive expansion. Sears followed customers to the exploding suburbs. At this point, the company left rival Montgomery Ward behind. Ward Chairman Sewell Avery believed that a postwar depression was inevitable, just as economic decline had followed so many previous wars. He held back on investing in new stores, and his company lost out to Sears on prime postwar suburban locations.
Sears today resembles in many respects the company Wood left