Sears Sold You a House by Mail

In 1888, Richard Sears, then a young railroad clerk in Minnesota, printed a 24-page mail-order flyer for watches. By 1894 the catalog ran 322 pages. By 1895, 532. Rural America, with no department stores in walking distance, learned to buy by mail because Sears made the postage cheaper than a wagon ride into town.

The most ambitious thing in the book was a house. The Sears Modern Homes program ran from 1908 to 1940 and offered, by the company's own count, 447 different floor plans, from a $695 two-room cottage to a $5,000 colonial with stained glass. You picked one out of the catalog. A few weeks later, a freight car arrived at your local rail station with about 30,000 pieces of pre-cut lumber, a 75-page instruction book, and the nails. Sears estimates between 70,000 and 75,000 of these houses were built. Many are still standing in old streetcar suburbs around Chicago and Cincinnati.

The catalog also sold gravestones, bicycles, opium tonics (until 1916), prefab barns, and, briefly in the 1900s, a delivery wagon for your goods. The company called the book "the Consumers' Bible." In 1908 it weighed five pounds.

What killed it was not the internet. The catalog division was losing $130 million a year by the early 1990s on $3.3 billion in sales — Walmart had passed Sears as America's largest retailer in 1991, and the suburbs Sears had helped build now had a Walmart in them. On January 25, 1993, Sears mailed its last Big Book and laid off the 50,000 people who filled its orders. Mail-order sales nationally grew almost 10 percent a year for the rest of the decade. Just not at Sears.