End of a Merchandising Era: Sears Closes the Big Book

▪ 1994

      When Sears, Roebuck and Co. announced in January 1993 that it would close down its mail-order catalog operation at the end of the year, the news marked the passing of one of the great icons of Americana. Over the 97 years of the Sears catalog's existence, its arrival in millions of American homes was an eagerly awaited event. The "big book," as it became known, displayed everything from lingerie to prefabricated houses in its more than 1,000 pages. Children and adults alike scanned a cornucopia of products, covetously ogling toys, fashions, firearms, and every conceivable item for the home, all at temptingly low prices. In addition, before the era of television the catalog was valued as a medium of entertainment in isolated pockets of rural America, and it was also educational. Early editions gave many a young boy his first—albeit somewhat distorted—idea of the female figure from line drawings of wasp-waisted, corseted women.

      In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, before the tightening of food and drug laws and copyright standards, the catalog offered unwary consumers a cure for virtually anything that ailed them. The 1900 edition advertised "Dr. Rose's Dyspepsia Powders," "Reliable Cure for the Opium and Morphia Habit," and "Dr. Hammond's Nerve and Brain Pills," which claimed to cure "lifelessness" and "a constant feeling of dread." Few of these remedies actually worked, of course. Some customers, however, might have received powerful relief from an item in the 1897 catalog—laudanum, an opium-based sedative and headache cure.

      The catalog served so well as a barometer of the lifeways and styles of the times that it would become an invaluable reference for set and costume design in theatre, film, and television. Virtually all of the catalog merchandise was illustrated—first by line drawings, then by photographs, and finally by pictures of models. Some of those models even became Hollywood stars, including Jean Arthur, Lauren Bacall, Joan Caulfield, Anita Colby, Susan Hayward, Fredric March, Norma Shearer, and Gloria Swanson. Many aspiring writers also cut their literary teeth writing Sears catalog copy, notably Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the popular Tarzan series of books.

      It all began in 1886 when a young railroad agent in North Redwood, Minn., named Richard Sears purchased a shipment of watches that was refused by a local jeweler. Sears sold them himself and soon began selling timepieces and jewelry through printed mailers that bulged into catalogs. In 1887 he moved his operation to Chicago, where he hired Alvah C. Roebuck, an Indiana watchmaker. The chemistry of that combination exploded into one of America's great retailing success stories.

      In 1893 numerous items were added to the catalog in addition to watches and jewelry, and in 1896 the company produced its first large general-merchandise catalog. Nearly 100 years later, however, with the company facing stiff competition from superdiscount stores and experiencing a plummeting market value, Sears' executives determined that it was time to restructure. The decision to strip away the financial division, coupled with the catalog's yearly after-tax losses of some $135 million-$170 million in 1990-92, sealed the fate of the big book. (MARVIN MARTIN)

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