Sears, which is the shorter version for Sears, Roebuck, and Co., is a chain of department stores in America whose founders are Alvah Curtis Roebuck and Richard Warren Sears (hence the company name).
What started as a mailing company gradually began to open retail centers throughout the country based on their revenue, the first retail store being opened in Chicago in Illinois. In 2005, the company was brought by a major retail player called Kmart, which then became Sears Holdings after the merging formalities were completed.
Evolution
Richard Warren Sears was born in 1863 to a rich family in Stewartville, Minnesota, who later relocated to Spring Valley. His father died in 1879, only a few months after squandering the family money in a speculative stock trade. Sears relocated to North Redwood, then Minneapolis, to work as a train station agent.
A jeweler refused to deliver a cargo of watches while he was in North Redwood. Sears bought them and made a great deal of profit by selling them to the people, or often one can say, to agents, at a very low price than what the competition had to offer. In 1886, he founded the R.W. Sears Watch Company, a mail-order watch company in Minneapolis.
Just as he started getting name and recognition, he sold the company for a sum of $100,000 in 1889 (which currently, as per the conversion rate, sums up to a massive 3 million dollars)
He then again started in 1892 with a new name and started selling jewelry, watches, and other cosmetic items and started seeing improvement in their sales. In 1893, they recorded their sales of over $400,000 (the US $12 million in 2021), and just after two years, in 1895, they recorded sales of over $750,000 (US$20 million in 2021). By this time, they started expanding their product catalog even further.
In the 90s’, the company started to invest in other fields, too, apart from the retail sector. This proved to be a risky business decision for them as it made them lose focus from their niche, which let their competitors take advantage of, and companies like Walmart then understood the market and stole their monopoly. This led to the company’s decline, causing them to go bankrupt and had to be saved by an investor.
Achievements
Sears Company, or as one may say, Sears Holdings Limited has been in the market for quite some time now, and during its long history, it has been awarded several awards and accolades, some of them include the very recent Energy Star Partner of the Year award for magnificent contributions in Retail, Management, Energy Management, and Brand Owner Categories. It has, during its time, won several mini awards for excellence in various sectors.
Net Worth of Sears in ’2024’
The journey for the Sears company has been a rollercoaster ride throughout its presence in the market. It enjoyed a great amount of popularity during its inception and had a net income of about 30000 million dollars in 2016. Just like any other company, they would have thought of increasing this number manifold in the years to come.
However, sadly, this did not happen. The company had to file for bankruptcy and had to be saved by investors multiple times. As of December 2024, the company only has close to about $10 billion in terms of the total assets and net worth of the company.
Sears had established its name in the department store market for a long time. Although it had to rampantly decrease its number of stores throughout the country because of low funds and low sales, it still has a good name in the market.
People these days want everything quicker, so it’s convenient for the people if all their needs are available at a single point or place and you don’t have to travel or walk from one location to the next to obtain what you want.
Though this sounds fantastic in principle, you should be aware that a store this size might get a bit frustrating and overwhelming if everything isn’t well labeled, and if all things go through in the right way, they can still think of reviving their position in the market.