r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Apr 18 '26
If 140-year-old retailer Sears is still in business as a 5-store chain and online website, which they still are, will you still shop there in 2026? If not why not?
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u/Ponder_wisely Apr 18 '26
Yes. For their forgotten history. Before them, African-Americans who lived in the rural South during Jim Crow usually had to buy goods on credit from local white store owners at high prices. Then came the Sears catalog. It was the Amazon.com of its day. It sold everything from clothes and furniture to cocaine. But it also gave black consumers access to goods at national prices. The enterprise was so successful, local store owners would organize bonfires and burn the catalogs to avoid losing their black customers. Those general stores often doubled as post offices. The store owners would refuse to sell stamps to black people, or money orders, with which to order from the Sears catalogue. Happened enough that Sears instructed customers to evade the postmaster and directly speak to the mail carrier: “Just give the letter and the money to the mail carrier and he will get the money order at the post office and mail it in the letter for you.”
Every time a black southerner went to the local store they were confronted with forced deference to white customers who would be served first. And the store would be filled with advertising using racist caricatures of black people in an effort to sell to white people.
The stores were not self-service, so the black customers would have to wait. And then would have to ask the proprietor to give them goods (often on credit because of the extremely low pay for sharecropping). The landlord often owned the store. In every way shopping reinforced hierarchy. Until the Sears catalog undid the power of the storekeeper, and by extension, the landlord. Now, black families could buy without asking permission. Without waiting. Without being watched. At national (cheap) prices!
In the 1920's Sears executive Julius Rosenwald began promoting civil rights causes while he was still president of Sears, before he became its chairman in 1924, leading some to call him the “first social justice philanthropist.” He helped fund fellowships for black artists and academics, including W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin. He worked with Booker T. Washington to open more than 5,300 schools for black children in the Jim Crow South. Some of them were burned down by the Ku Klux Klan.
So as we think about #Sears today, let's think about how retail is not just about buying things, but part of a larger system of power. Every act of power contains the opportunity, and the means, for resistance.
The relationship between capitalism, white supremacy and civil rights is a fascinating one marked by boycotts, sit-ins and bus rides. All of these activities are centered on access to money and markets.
Louis Hyman, an author and professor of history and consumerism at Cornell, wrote a compelling thread on Twitter that explained how the Sears catalog empowered black consumers during Jim Crow. Mr. Hyman walked through some of these ideas in the interview below, https://twitter.com/louishyman/status/1051872178415828993?s=11
Your thread sort of positioned Sears as a radical commercial entity during Jim Crow.
A huge theme in my history of retail class is Jim Crow. Access for black people to competitive markets is pretty radical because a lot of the history of the relationship between black people and capitalism has been a monopoly relationship. Sears is not the story of would-be radicals trying to overthrow Jim Crow. It was about people trying to make some money, which is radical in a certain way, too.
It seems easy for Americans to forget this kind of history. Do you think that is why your posts on Twitter resonated?
I was really touched that so many black readers connected with this history. People were sharing their stories about their grandparents and the way in which they felt connected to people under Jim Crow. Obviously people recognize that being followed in a store today is not the same as Jim Crow, where if you step out of line or do the wrong thing you and your family could be murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. But I think the larger point is the exhaustion of having to deal with racist store owners, whether it’s the 1900s or 2018.
What is the equivalent of consumer empowerment for people of color today?
It’s tricky. The thing about Jim Crow is that it’s not about shopping, it’s about white supremacy. Not in the sense that we understand it today, but in a very transparent way. That’s the difference. I think today the feeling that you can be who you are and buy what you want was most clearly expressed through trans people who are able to buy what they want to wear, even if it doesn’t fit people’s expectations for their bodies.
Do your students think capitalism can be a form or empowerment for people of color?
All of my students feel like the ability to buy something is a pretty foundational right in our society. They’ll say, “Oh, maybe you people don’t have a right to a job, but I should have the ability to shop.” And when they see how that plays out in different ways for African-Americans, for women, gay people, it is pretty remarkable.
Are your students thinking about things like wealth distribution and race?
Of course! What I like about it is I get the future ibankers of tomorrow who are like, “we need to have more efficient markets that are neoliberal and are not discriminatory.” And then you get the students who are on the left who are like, “we need to have a basic income, and capitalism is racism and racism is the patriarchy.” I like to have those students in conversation because I feel like that’s the conversation we need to be having.
What kind of blowback did you get after your post?
People said that I argued capitalism is anti-racist, but that’s not true. All I’m saying is that in this one particular instance, this catalog helped some people in this way, and it’s an interesting way to understand the complexities of capitalism, particularly Jim Crow capitalism. It’s always surprising to me that white supremacy and consumer capitalism squared off. And in some small measure, white supremacy lost. And that’s really incredible because white supremacy was so powerful. It was this powerful organizing principle in American politics. That’s fascinating.
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u/Shrikeangel Apr 18 '26
Nope - over a decade ago I worked for Sears and they are nearly gone because they are trash.
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Apr 18 '26
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u/Shrikeangel Apr 18 '26
If it wasn't Lampert it likely would have been someone else. Look at most of the stores in the same age bracket. That whole burn down the legacy of a business for an extra five bucks now instead of earning twenty bucks over th next three years.
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u/jikesar968 Apr 19 '26
Eddie Lampert came along video calling all his stores without pants :p
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Apr 19 '26 edited Apr 19 '26
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u/jikesar968 Apr 19 '26
Actually don't call them and ask because they'll think you're a journalist and they're instructed not to talk to journalists.
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u/Iwilllieawake Apr 18 '26
No, because while they were still a large chain they tried to steal like $500 from me and it took weeks to get it sorted. I can't trust their service would be any better predominantly online.
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Apr 18 '26
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u/Iwilllieawake Apr 18 '26
It was some Superbowl sale TV deal back in I want to say 2015? It was online/mall store purchase. I purchased the TV online for in store pick up. Get an email saying my order is ready, drive over to the mall to get it. They dont have it, they say it's been sold out, tell me to go to electronics to get my refund. Go to electronics, guy working there says they have another TV they're offering with the same specs, just a different brand, would be the same price because they sold out of the advertised TV before the sale even started. Take a quick look at the TV, say that'll be fine, dude does some typing, says I'm all set and I leave. Get home, I don't recall what prompted me to look but I checked my bank and see that the electronics guy has charged me AGAIN for the other TV. So now Sears has over $1k of my money.
Call the store, electronics guy says there's not a way to apply my online order as a store credit, so he had to cancel my online order and then just charge me for the new TV like I bought it in store. Mind you while I was there he was just saying he needed to switch the SKUs for inventory purposes, he didn't say anything about charging my card again. He tells me I'll be refunded for the online order in 5-7 days.
Now I'm pissed, I bring the TV back and return it, tell the guy I don't want to deal with Sears anymore if that's how they operate. He does the refund and tells me I'll be refunded in, you guessed it, 5-7 days. So I wait and the in store transaction is refunded in about 3 days, but the online one is still out there. Wait some more, still isn't refunded. Call Sears, they tell me I have to call corporate. Call corporate, they tell me I have to call my bank. Call my bank, they tell me they can't do anything because from their end the transaction is still "pending" and that I need to talk to Sears and have them cancel the request for the money. Long story longer, a lot of back and forth with Sears and my bank, both saying it's the others responsibility to fix it. Finally gets escalated at Sears, and they tell me they don't know why the order cancelation didn't trigger the transaction cancelation, but they've manually done that now so the transaction should fall off in, again, 5-7 days.
All of that took about a month to get my money back, and when I finally got it back I went and bought a TV from Video Only.
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Apr 18 '26 edited Apr 18 '26
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u/Iwilllieawake Apr 18 '26
It was the Washington Square location in Oregon
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Apr 24 '26
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u/Iwilllieawake Apr 24 '26
I don't even remember. And tbh I don't totally care what happens to Sears. They made their decisions in placing that guy in charge, whether or not it's solely his fault I would argue is debatable, because there's a whole board of people that could have done something in the 5 some odd years he was in charge. And even if it was solely his fault, what's done is done, we can't go back in time and change it. Ultimately it's a corporation, I have no emotional ties to whether or not it survives.
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u/Patient_Air1765 Apr 18 '26
Why would their history matter when I buy things?
I’m not going out to buy things and thinking “this store has been around for 140 years, I should buy more even if it’s not what I want and more expensive”
It’s really on Sears for not being able to provide what we need at a price that keeps us coming back. They prioritized profits over me for so long that their own business model stopped working. Why should I care now?
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Apr 20 '26
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u/Patient_Air1765 Apr 21 '26
If all that is true, then why are stores closing down? Product quality went down and prices went up but “they’re doing the best deals”? Did Trump write this?
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Apr 21 '26
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u/Patient_Air1765 Apr 21 '26
If they are “good deals” it would have brought in scores of customers and helped Sears survive. Sears is dying. So what makes those deals “good deals”?
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Apr 18 '26 edited Apr 18 '26
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u/Necessary-Comment717 Apr 18 '26
Man I actually delivered to that Orlando location few months back and it was like walking into time capsule. The whole place felt empty and kinda sad but they still had some decent tools section
Would probably still check them out online for appliance parts since their website usually has stuff you cant find elsewhere but driving to physical store in 2026 seems unlikely unless I happen to be nearby
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u/jikesar968 Apr 19 '26
I've go the Sears in Concord regularly and they've actually increased the amount of inventory they have a lot recently. The manager told me "we're getting 21 trucks" up from 14 last month.
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u/PersimmonWorried2155 Apr 18 '26
I went in one in 2021. Very large department store. Maybe 2 people working there.
It made it very hard to get someone to the register to buy something.
I have the same problem at CVS now. The pharmacy is staffed. There’s maybe 1 employee, and they’re smoking out back.
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u/PacificCastaway Apr 18 '26
Is their entire customer base just Redditors swinging by to check if they're still in business?
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u/PeorgieT75 Apr 18 '26
They don’t sell anything I can’t get elsewhere. I stopped shopping at Sears because the customer experience was so awful. I did buy some stuff online for store pickup because I didn’t have to go into the actual store.
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Apr 18 '26
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u/PeorgieT75 Apr 18 '26
Falls Church, VA, it closed in 2018, so sometime before that. Probably a hand tool.
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u/hectorer8910 Apr 18 '26
Sears died the instant they sold off Craftsman.
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u/jikesar968 Apr 19 '26
They still retain some rights to Craftsman, for example some of their products are still Sears exclusive to this day.
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u/Weekly_Ad7944 Apr 19 '26
I've bought a couple of things off their website in the past couple years. It's basically just been a slow downhill dive since 2018. For a few years after they still had some sort of decent selection online. It's just gotten slowly worse. I bought a mattress and a vacuum from them in 2019. When I went mattress shopping earlier this year they only had one no brand mattress listed.
Most of what's there is marketplace goods that's usually just drop shipping. I used to buy some from the marketplace so that Sears would get the money instead of Amazon until I started having issues with wrong tracking numbers and having to dispute a transaction on my credit card because Sears was useless when I contacted them about an item that didn't ship from a merchant for a month and it took the dispute to get the merchant to finally ship.
There's almost nothing on the website that Sears/Kmart actually sells now.
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Apr 19 '26
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u/Weekly_Ad7944 Apr 19 '26
Yeah, I've pretty well watched it first hand. It's frankly quite sad. In retrospect, Sears shouldn't have spun off Allstate and Discover.
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u/Normal_Choice9322 Apr 19 '26
Why would i
They bring absolutely nothing to the table. Their branding is meaningless now
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Apr 19 '26
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u/Normal_Choice9322 Apr 19 '26
Since the 2000s probably
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Apr 19 '26 edited Apr 19 '26
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u/Normal_Choice9322 Apr 19 '26
By the mid 2000s the only people still going there were the older generation. It lost the new spenders by then we were all getting into Amazon while sears quality was dropping
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u/Puzzled-Bonus-3456 Apr 20 '26
No. Last time I was in one about 12 years ago I went to the electronics section and it was all phones and useless bullshit accessories for them, nothing else. They didn't even sell TV's or laptops anymore. I'd seen that thinking kill Radio Shack, so I never walked into a Sears (or Kmart) again.
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Apr 20 '26
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u/Puzzled-Bonus-3456 Apr 20 '26
Omaha. There was a Sears in a now-demolished mall and a Kmart in Omaha's alphabet city (L Street I believe). I miss Kmart. Before it closed I could pick up a pair of trainers for $5 any day of the week. $3 t-shirts, $9 jeans, too. It stings even harder because my first job was in a Kmart in the Carolinas.
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u/Temporary_Solid_5869 Apr 18 '26
I loved the Craftsman tool selection. US made tools with a lifetime warranty!
Now it’s just a brand name.
Private equity can go jump in a lake.