Death of a Salesthing

If you're a Gen X'er, like me, Sears loomed large in your childhood. They sent out this huge catalog that was full of cool stuff. When I was home sick from school, I wasn't allowed to watch TV (being sick wasn't supposed to be fun) and so I'd while away my time in bed with a calculator, a note pad, and catalogs, "spending" a million dollars. Sears got a lot of that imaginary money, because they had everything.

They were such a huge retailer that they had their own house brand lines of a lot of stuff. Craftsman tools, Kenmmore appliances, DieHard car batteries...all that was Sears.

As a teenager and into my early 20's, with a nascent sense of "coolness", Sears became associated in my mind with store-brand knockoffs. There was the Sears Tele-Games console, which was a re-labeled Atari 2600, Sears-branded cameras, and working my first gun counter job in a pawn shop meant I was constantly running across J.C. Higgins or Ted Williams-branded firearms.

By that time, Walmart was already eating Sears' lunch in the retail business.

Ironically, however, the company that started out as strictly a catalog business and didn't move into brick-and-mortar retail until it was well into corporate middle age got put into its death spiral by an online book store from the Pacific Northwest.

This week, what's left of Sears filed for bankruptcy. And so it goes.
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