In 1886 Richard W. Sears founded the R.W. Sears Watch Company in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to sell watches by mail order. He relocated his business to Chicago in 1887, hired Alvah C. Roebuck to repair watches, and established a mail-order business for watches and jewelry. The company’s first catalog was offered the same year. In 1889 Sears sold his business but a few years later founded, with Roebuck, another mail-order operation, which in 1893 came to be known as Sears, Roebuck and Company. In 1895 Julius Rosenwald, a wealthy clothing manufacturer, bought out Roebuck’s interest, and he reorganized the mail-order business. Sears meanwhile wrote the company’s soon-to-be-famous catalogs. The company grew phenomenally by selling a range of merchandise at low prices to farms and villages that had no other convenient access to retail outlets. The initiation of rural free delivery (1896) and of parcel post (1913) by the U.S. postal service enabled Sears to send its merchandise to even the most isolated customers. Rosenwald succeeded Sears as president of the company in 1909.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Sears-Roebuck-and-Company
Yeah, I was surprised to see the paint department go, too. The outdoor power equipment section is looking pretty poor now, too, compared with years past. Almost my entire family had Craftsman lawnmowers and edgers (one uncle was a Lawn-Boy man and would own no other mower). Ted Williams and J.C. Higgins were names seen in our tackle boxes and gun cabinets. I even had a small outboard motor from Sears. Not a fantastic product, but I'll bet somewhere, it's still running for someone today. Indestructible.
In some of the stores, they even had professional office equipment specialty departments. Cubicle workstation components, IBM PCs, HP printers and other peripherals - right about the time that Compaq and the other early PC "clones" were ascending and the Atari/Commodore/Tandy ships were beginning to sink. It's like someone there saw the future and reached for it, but they missed the brass ring.