From our overstocked archives
SAM SMITH, WASHINGTON POST, 1993 –
Eugene Talmadge used to campaign through Georgia saying, “Y’all got
only three friends in the world. You got the Lord God Almighty, you got
the Sears Roebuck catalog, and you got Eugene Talmadge. And you can only
vote for one of them.”
Eugene
Talmadge died long ago and this week Sears Roebuck announced its was
ceasing publication of what was, for many decades, America’s most
important publication. I hope God can handle it alone.
I
know it’s going to be tough on me. Not only has Sears dumped its
catalog, it’s going to close its store on Wisconsin Avenue with rooftop
parking so practical and inviting that the company has to warn away
those who would use it for ancillary purposes such as automobile
repairs. During World War II, the Sears on Wisconsin was where my father
would start coasting as much of the way to Georgetown as possible, an
exercise encouraged by gas rationing. The Indians used Wisconsin Avenue
in much the same way, a “rolling road” down which they tumbled barrels
of tobacco.
Like
millions of other Americans, I came to believe in Sears. It was not so
much quality that drew us, but consistency and utility. As recently as
this fall, when my wife and I decided it was time to replace our
30-year-old gas stove, I discovered that only Sears had a model in the
right color and a drip pan under the burners that prevented wok
splatterings and overboiled soup from congealing in inaccessible
recesses. It wasn’t the prettiest stove, just the one that worked best.
When
I read David Oglivie’s Confessions of an Advertising Man and learned
that this sophisticated Britisher bought his suits from Sears, I
followed his example until my friends and relatives ridiculed me towards
“at least Raleigh’s for chrissake.” I still went to Sears for slacks
because Sears sold clothes designed for the classic American male — a
man who actually performed physical labor — rather than for thighless
pencil-necked geeks whose greatest exertion was hefting a law brief. If
the store did not have my size, I could peruse the catalog and choose in
the privacy of my own home between the regular and the full-fit. the
tall and the big, without enduring the disdain the proportionally
impaired sense upon entering a traditional menswear store.
Above
all there were the tools. Even the name, Craftsman, made a weekend
project seem more appealing. Further, you knew as you adjusted the nut
on your Craftsman Skill saw that throughout this great land, millions of
others were asking the same probing question, “Is that tight enough?”
Sears was what America was meant to be all about: a place that gave you
the right tools to do what you wanted.
Beginning
in the 1980s, Sears found itself in trouble. The country was no longer
interested in utilitarianism. It wanted style, prestige and designer
labels. People found me odd when I suggested that if you couldn’t find
it at Sears you probably didn’t need it. Over the course of the next
decade Sears laid off close to 100,000 workers.
Sears,
it was said, had gotten out of step with the times, although times that
require the layoff of 100,000 employees because their firm has the sole
attribute of being useful may be a bit out of step themselves.
The
experts quoted in the papers the past few days say that our economy
isn’t about being useful anymore. I saw some of these experts on
television. They were fashionably dressed
and
quite self-assured about the failings of Sears, perhaps because they
understand that our new economy is much kinder to experts on Sears than
it is to people who work there.
People
like the red-vested man who worked the tool section as if it were his
own hardware store, the woman who didn’t mind telling which answering
machine was really best, and the grandmother who never could quite get
the optical scanner to work right
As
I drive the extra half hour to the Sears at Montgomery Mall, I shall
undoubtedly come to accept the omnipotence of the marketplace. But I’ll
be damned if I’ll be grateful for it.
