Posted on 05/17/2016 12:12:08 PM PDT by PROCON
Not long ago, the Sears, Roebuck and Co. mail-order catalog was the ultimate marketplace, much like Amazon is today. You could even buy a house straight from the catalog. Just pick out the home you like, and voila, Sears would deliver it just for you. (The best Amazon can do is either a DVD box set or houses that, uh, would have some size and space issues for most people.)
These Sears homes weren't cheap low-end houses. Many of them were built using the finest quality building materials available during that time. It's not uncommon to find Sears homes today with oak floors, cypress siding, and cedar shingles. As with most old homes, the tough part is finding one that has been well maintained, and with the youngest of Sears homes going now eight decades old, they all require a significant amount of care. From 1908 to 1940, Sears sold between 70,000 to 75,000 homes, so there are plenty out there, you just need to know where to look.
(Excerpt) Read more at popularmechanics.com ...
rented one for a while back in the early 2000s.
Neat old house dating from the end of the 19th century or early 20th century. Might have actually been a pattern built before the sears home era but matched the planes of one I saw a decade ago. makes sense that Sears would not have reinvented the wheel but taken existing designs fro their program.
Had one heating grate in the whole hose, right at the front door. Convection heating of the upstairs with small grates in each room to allow the hot air to go up. worked surprisingly well and was not at all inefficient, though the upstairs were a few degrees cooler in winter.
All the plumbing (one bathroom) was in one corner of the house, kitchen below bathroom (on second floor). crawl space with dirt floor and concrete pad for heater. very easy to get at everything and maintain it.
Insulation was old newspaper.
Not a lot of room but it was a pretty comfortable house. Never had an air conditioner nor did I really need one. The way it was designed if you opened the top windows the air would sort of convectively cool, really worked well if you had one window fan in the upstairs. Attic was also well designed so if you opened that door and the windows on the bottom floor it sort of sucked cool air in during the evening.
Fairly high ceilings compared to modern homes. I think that was part of what made the rooms comfortable.
It was a very livable house and kind of an eye opener to me how efficient you could make a house in terms of comfort with minimal modern conveniences.
Well that explains a lot.
I did not realize that Kmart changed their name to Sears holding . Sears went downhill right after that
Excellent observation!
Here’s a repository of the Sears homes from 1909-1939:
http://www.arts-crafts.com/archive/sears/
Neat to see how the home designs changed with the times and changing views of what a home should be.
Good friend of mine has one of these in NJ:
http://www.arts-crafts.com/archive/sears/page68.html
Yes, their current CEO is a “market uber allus” type former head fund manager, that has the various departments fighting amongst themselves for ad space, money, resources etc... survival of the fittest.....
Stupid. This is a great idea in the MACRO economic idea, but beyond stupid in the micro, if everyone isn’t collectively working together for a common goal, the company will fail... and has been... not only that, its been failing for so long now, an entire generation of people now exist that Sears has absolutely no identity to them as a brand anymore.
Original......on sale in Texas.
Ahh, yes the glory of the days of Outcome-Based performance management. Now workers expect a trophy just for showing up on time and everyone, especially the employer, must defer to each employee’s ‘identity’.
As a contractor over the years, I've pulled out some real old newspapers during remodels.
Interesting to read the news of that day.
When my dad was a ranch kid in Colorado he ran a trap line like most rural boys did then. He said he would bundle his furs and send them to Sears & Roebuck on the train. They would send him a letter telling him how much credit he had for catalog ordering.
Pretty sure Amazon won’t do that!
My uncle Jack was in charge of a mail crew that sorted mail on the train. I always thought he worked for the post office but when my aunt passed away I helped go through her things and the retirement he got was from the railroad not the postal service.
Yes the mail was far more efficient than it is now.
And Ford made airplanes:
$2K was a lot of money in the 20’s. That didn’t include labor cement brick and plaster which was estimated at $6700, or 5.6 years at a Henry Ford wage of $5.00 a day, which was also a lot at the time.
Yes they thought catalog sales were in the past and did not understand they could have used their catalog system to move to online shopping. It has not been that long ago that people were saying online shopping would never catch on. If they had invested in online shopping instead of Kmart things would be far different for Sears today.
Wait... your telling me the offer is no longer good?
Beginning of the end for Sears was their automotive repair service rip-offs that killed that part of the company. It went down-hill from there.
The steamboat Arabia which sank upstream of Kansas City in September 1856 had two prefab houses as part of the cargo.
The Steamboat Arabia Museum is a great place to see if you visit KC.
ping
Don Draper’s father designed the Sears catalog.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.