Sears Holdings is an American Company with its headquarters in Hoffman Estates, Illinois. It was the mother company of Kmart and Sears’s stores which was purchased in 2005 after Kmart purchased Sears. The company was the twentieth largest retail company in 2015, but in 2018 the Company filed for bankruptcy. The Company which had been ranked the best retail in both small items such as earrings and huge such as houses finally collapsed.

The company was dedicated to excelling in different sectors; therefore, it launched a Christmas catalog to appeal to all family members. The catalog contained items such as housewares, toys, Jewelry, toys, holiday decorations as well as home appliances (Rumore). In the late 1960s, the company was already in trouble as it was faced with racism acts, especially in the hiring process. The activists fighting for welfare right were on their case, and they revealed that the once retail giant had discriminative credit policies. Worse of it all, there was gender inequality in the hiring of company staff. The Company faced allegations of racism directed both to the staff as well as the customers.

In 1967 the company added other items in their stock which were DieHard battery and other appliances. In 1969 the company started construction of Sears’ Tower which was the tallest skyscraper in the World at that time (Pridmore). In 1971 the company decided to install point-of-sale equipment and the computerized cash registers.  The building was completed five years later, but it seemed that this was the onset of its fall. In 1973, the 110-floor building was opened for operations, and four hundred employees were moved to this new work station.

The company had moved from three locations two in Chicago and one in Skokie to its headquarters which was the tallest building of the time. In 1975, Sears became the only retailer of ping pong game produced by Atari. Sears, Roebuck, and Co. implemented their plans for opening a company office and reshuffling (Isidore). The Company changed its name to Sears Merchandise Group and purchased Coldwell Banker who was a real estate Company and Dean Witter brokerage service in efforts to diversify the business. It also owned the Chicago bank at some time. In the same year, the company adopted the “socks and stocks” strategy.

In 1984 Sears in collaboration with IBM and CBS created prodigy a home internet service which was a pre-online portal that utilized private network (Pruitt). The web was different from the internet, but it offered services such as email, news, games, sports, and shopping as well as weather. In 1986 following year the company ventured in the credit card business to boost its financial services. The Discover credit cards were to be used nationally to compete with credit card giants such as MasterCard, American Express and Visa. To lure people into using the cards the company advertised in Chicago Tribute.

Pridmore, Jay. Sears tower: A building book from the Chicago architecture foundation. Vol. 625. Pomegranate, 2002.

Isidore, Chris. “Sears’ Extraordinary History: A Timeline.” Edition.Cnn.Com, 2018, https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2018/10/business/sears-timeline/index.html.

Pruitt, Sarah. “When The Sears Catalog Sold Everything From Houses To Hubcaps.” HISTORY, 2018, https://www.history.com/news/sears-catalog-houses-hubcaps.

Rumore, Kori. “Chicago Tribune – We Are Currently Unavailable In Your Region.” Chicagotribune.Com, 2018, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-sears-company-history-timeline-htmlstory.html.