Melancholy Retail: Where America Shopped

~ snakesinthegrass2014

“Every cloud must have a silver lining
Just wait until the sun shines through
Smile, my honey dear, while I kiss away each tear
Or else I shall be melancholy too”¹

 

Detroit Sears store at Grand River and Oakman. My dad worked at this location in the 1950s and 1960s.
Source: Wayne State University Libraries

On a long drive last week, I listened to an NPR story about the uphill battle for survival that the Sears department store is facing. The odds of it succeeding are long. There is speculation that the company’s current management is purposely dragging out its demise so that it can continue to sell off valuable assets before eventually closing all the stores for good. It reminds me of a corporate version of the Bataan Death March.

The decline of Sears is sad for me because I have so many fond memories of the place from my childhood. Even as I relentlessly mocked it sometime around the mid-eighties, it was mostly out of love and affection for its former place in my life. I had a nonsensical belief that I alone was allowed to tell Sears jokes because I was as much Sears as Italians are Italians, Poles are Poles, Irish are Irish, etc.

Sears & Roebuck was a big deal to my family. My father worked there starting in the early 1950s selling shoes, and eventually became a manager of the shoe department at Detroit’s Grand River store. For a brief period he was groomed to be an executive and sent on trips to its headquarters in Chicago for meetings.

He never really made it as an executive, though. Dad pissed off upper management one too many times for not marching in lockstep with the other gray flannel suits. He just wasn’t boardroom material. Family lore has it that he ultimately told management to “stuff it” in favor of going back to the friendlier confines of the sales floor. By the time I was a toddler in the early 1960s, he was transferred to their Lincoln Park store selling TV’s, radios, and stereos.

He retired at age 55 sometime in the mid seventies. Any resemblance to certain bloggers, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Of course, as an adult I now understand that Dad had been demoted. His career as an executive was curtailed because of his mouth. The many versions of whitewashed stories we were repeatedly told over the years made him out to be Dilbert long before Scott Adams invented the comic character. Whatever disappointments Dad may have harbored about his Sears career, they were discreetly kept under wraps in favor of spinning yet another yarn about how he once stuck it to the corporate Man. Indeed, those stories were hilarious.

In spite of his thoughts about the company’s management, though, my dad believed in Sears as an institution which catered to the public at large. He thought highly of his colleagues and even more so for the products they sold.

We were a Sears family. It was represented everywhere in our house by the clothes that hung in our closets, the shoes on our feet, the clock radios next to our beds, the appliances in our kitchen, the tools on Dad’s workbench (including the workbench itself), and all the outdoor gear such as hoses, lawn chairs, lawn mowers, and grills. The cars we owned were all Chevy’s, Fords, Dodges, etc., but you can be damn sure they had Diehard batteries in them. And, of course, they were insured by Allstate.

Like so many other homes of that era, ours was a microcosm of the post-war American experience for the middle class. This was still the period when the phrase “Made in Japan” was said in jest. Chinese manufacturing hadn’t yet hit the U.S. radar. American-made products were omnipresent, and Sears was where America shopped.

Source: Grayflannelsuit.net

Stepping inside a Sears store was definitely fun for a pre-teen in the mid-sixties. Probably for the adults too. You entered an environment where the aroma of freshly popped popcorn, chocolates, and warm nuts hit your senses immediately. Parents may have been forcing you to try on snowsuits, but your mind was only on getting them to take you to those goodies before exiting to the parking lot. If you were really lucky in those pre-Toys-R-Us days, you might even manage to somehow get ten minutes of browsing in at what was then considered to be a pretty respectable toy department.

Sales staff worked strictly in the departments for which they had been hired. This was important because it made them experts on the merchandise being sold. Don’t see the item you were hoping to find? No problem, they would nearly always go in the backroom and look for it. And while all of this was happening, those unusual store chimes were paging managers in a secret code that only employees understood (for some inane reason, my father never explained it to us).

The cherry on top of the shopping sundae for this Sears family of mine is that Dad was entitled to an employee discount. It mattered not if the item was on sale, employees still received a flat 15% discount on clothing items and 10% on everything else. This cut both ways, however. As I reached my early teens, my desire for name brand clothes instead of the proprietary Sears brands started to materialize. A test of wills commenced over whether I could have Levi’s jeans purchased at another store, or continue to wear the Sears Toughskins I had worn since grade school. The compromise that was ostensibly offered– that I “graduate” to the more expensive Sears Roebucks jeans went over like a lead balloon.

It took me till age 14 before I finally got my first pair of Levi’s. I remember it being an absolute nightmare having to wear those damn Toughskins to school.

Source: Sears Archives

Eventually after my dad retired, he finally eased up on the requirement that we had to first consider Sears before other retailers. Not working there everyday eventually gave him a healthy separation.

The country was also changing, with national department store chains having less of a hold on consumers. Where stores like Sears and Montgomery Wards might have once offered a sense of comfort and security to consumers, other retailers and brands were becoming more creative. When beer of all things was being sold as a positive lifestyle choice, that probably didn’t fare well for stodgy old Sears and Roebuck.

As my siblings and I began to marry and have homes of our own, we still took advantage of Dad’s discount, shockingly still offered to retirees as late as the early 2000’s. All of us at one point or another used him to purchase big-ticket appliances such as refrigerators or washers and dryers for that additional 10% off, and then we would immediately pay him back after we left the store. The company later eliminated the discount, or Dad was simply too old and frail to help us anymore. I can’t recall which happened first.

By now we all pretty much know the current condition of their stores. A hilarious Family Guy parody lampooned what it’s like to actually walk into a Sears now. It’s not quite like that, but it’s an awfully depressing experience all the same. Shelves are empty, cash registers are placed in center aisles away from each department, and you’re lucky to find an employee who has much knowledge about a particular item. There is a feeling of doom and finality. This company is breathing its last breath.

It’s sad only when I think about it, and I really don’t think about Sears much anymore. Still, the NPR report did make think about my dad and how disappointed he’d be to see what’s happened to his former employer. But at least I have those wonderful whitewashed old stories of his.

Until next time…

¹ My Melancholy Baby, songwriters: E. Burnett / G. Norton, 1912.

35 thoughts on “Melancholy Retail: Where America Shopped”

  1. I read parts of this to my husband. Even though we haven’t bought anything from Sears in years, it will be sad to see them go. Almost all of my dresses came from Sears back in the day.
    Great post.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  2. We were a Sear family too. No one worked there but I dog eared the catalog with wants and needs (mostly wants). Going there was an outing and there always were some treats for us. It’s sad to see all the department stores losing ground yet I enjoy the ease of internet shopping no matter how guilty I feel about it.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  3. While I don’t have any sympathy at all for most of the stores in trouble these days, I do for Sears. It’s part of America. It was WAY too expensive for us when I was little, though.

    Nice nostalgic feel to this piece, Marty.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  4. MAKE SEARS SILVERTONE AGAIN …Fine post. Sears should just give up the ghost. They just closed and sold a building ‘bout a mile and a half from me. For damn near two decades when I’d venture into a Sears store I couldn’t help but wonder if this how citizens of the former CCCP felt when they empty shelf’d it at the GUM store.

    Your Dad sounds like the real deal. And I would have jumped all over that 10%. Especially back in the day, when all wannabe Stones, Fab Fours, and Boys Beach wanted to fun fun fun…you’d stoke that Silvertone Twin 12 …Great stuff,

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Those Silvertones gave Marantz and Fisher a run for their money — great video.

      Dad indeed was the real deal. He couldn’t fathom the corporate claptrap, so he bailed on the extra money. I think he had a few regrets, but the respect he earned from his co-workers down below made up for it. Many thanks for reading and for your thoughts, Doug.

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

  5. I worked at Sears for a while…in the credit department when you had two options…SRC or EP. They paid our salaries in cash which I thought was great.
    In the seventies, it was damn near impossible to get a credit card with them, but since I worked there, they gave me one with the massive limit of $100.00.
    I quit shopping there more than thirty years ago….but I still have my white credit card with gold letters.
    It will be sad to see such a mighty landmark of my youth lay down and die…but even the mighty fall.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

    1. I tried to find a way to talk about those gold-lettered charge cards, but the post was getting too long. Before I left California, after many years of never entering a Sears store, I pulled out my old charge card and tried to use it. The cashier looked at it and then at me. She was dumbfounded. Apparently they had long ago stopped issuing those. 🙂 A $100 credit limit, eh? How generous of them!

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  7. Thanks for another great trip down memory lane. Although I grew up on the Canadian side of the border, my family regularly took a Saturday or Sunday shopping trip in Detriot to Sears (as well as to other key stops along the way). Your talk of “popped popcorn, chocolates, etc.” got me longing for these special treats that I associated with these trips including Vernors soft drink and Saunders Hot Fudge Sundae Sauce (that we couldn’t get in Canada). Those were the days!

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Many thanks for your comments, Donna. The funny thing is, I recall our going the opposite way and heading over to Windsor to shop at Simpsons and even getting haircuts! We loved our treks there. But, yes, you couldn’t get Vernors and Sanders hot fudge in Canada. 🙂

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  8. This seems to be the story of so many large retailers (some small ones too, I guess). People’s shopping habits have changed and the large stores can’t compete anymore. We have a Sears in a local mall. It’s still fully stocked, but it certainly doesn’t feel vibrant. Funny, in the same mall is a new brick-and-mortar Amazon store.

    I remember pouring over the Sears catalogs at Christmas time and circling all the things I wanted to find under the tree. Of course, most of the stuff didn’t appear but it was fun to dream!

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. I really wanted to also discuss malls because so many Sears stores were placed in them, but I noticed other bloggers have already mined that part of their story. But, yes, I think malls are an incredible part of their history — for better or worse. It was both a blessing and a curse for them. It’ll be really interesting to see how much longer they last.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  9. Great story. Thanks!

    I am not from “here”, so Sears was new to me when moving to North America. I never understood that people had this loyalty to a store (chain) I saw was selling out-dated fashion arranged in a messy way. Now I get it, it was youth sentiment and of course, so many people had ties to the stores due to having worked there themselves or a family member. Many had the Sears cards. They cancelled that in Canada 2 years ago.

    Sears is probably comparable to the HEMA or V&D in the Netherlands. I wonder how they are doing in the age of Internet shopping and couch surfing.

    Elisabeth

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. We’re such a consumer-oriented society, and I think that began being pervasive starting in the sixties. Now it’s just completely out of control, but there’s a whole generation for whom brands, status, etc., is just second nature. I look back now at my own materialist desires from back then, and they seem so quaint by comparison. 🙂

      Thanks for reading, Elizabeth!

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

      1. Thank you Marty!

        Kids were ridiculed when they were not wearing certain clothing. I think it is still more-or-less happening, but now there is more choice and kids can look cool even on a small budget.

        Liked by 1 person

  11. Here in a small town north of the border, the death of Sears is a huge blow. We literally have no options left. I’m so textile I can’t really get into online shopping, and even if I could, Canada’s online shopping options are just as dismal. On the bright side…our bank account balance thanks us!

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    2. Elizabeth is right, I can really empathize how the closures of major retail businesses affect small towns. It’s sad because it takes away something to which you’ve grown accustomed. But, yes, there is at lest less spending. 🙂

      Like

      Reply

  12. Interesting! A glimpse back into the days when middle class Americans and their employers had loyalty for each other (your Dad’s work problems notwithstanding). I can’t quite imagine my friends and family caring this much about the companies they work for, unfortunately. Jobs and people have become disposable.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply
  13. Pingback: The Scapegoating Transformation – Snakes in the Grass
  14. Pingback: Hiatus Interruptus: “Go Back Where You Came From!” – Snakes in the Grass
  15. Pingback: Chanukah: Pleading Guilty on the Gelt – Snakes in the Grass
  16. Pingback: Vincent Price, Keeping Me Safely in My Tax Bracket – Snakes in the Grass
  17. Pingback: Wait, You Told Me You Knew How to Fly This Thing! – Snakes in the Grass

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.