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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 16, 2018)
NATION Tuesday, October 16, 2018 East Oregonian ALLEN: Owned the Seattle Seahawks, Portland Trail Blazers Sears, the Amazon of its day, files for bankruptcy By ALLEN G. BREED and ANNE D’INNOCENZIO Associated Press Before there was Ama- zon — or, for that matter, Home Depot or Walmart or Kmart — there was Sears. From its beginnings as a mail-order watch business in Minneapolis 132 years ago, the company grew to become America’s every- thing-under-one-roof store and the biggest retailer in the world. For generations of Amer- icans, the brick-like Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog was a fixture in just about every house — a miscel- lany of toys and clothes and furnishings and hardware that induced longing for this or that dream purchase. The Sears brand loomed as large over the corporate landscape as its 108-story basalt-like headquarters did over the Chicago skyline. “It was the Amazon of its day,” said Mark Cohen, a professor of retailing at Columbia University and a former Sears executive. But how the mighty have fallen: Plagued by falling sales and heavy debt, Sears filed for Chapter 11 bank- ruptcy reorganization Mon- day and announced plans to close 142 of its roughly 700 remaining stores and elimi- nate thousands of jobs in a bid to stay afloat, if only for a while. There is good news for Hermiston: Its Sears Home- town Store falls under Sears Hometown and Out- let Stores, Inc., a publicly owned company that sep- arated from Sears Hold- ings in 2012, according to a statement put out by the store. Sears Hometown and Outlets Stores is not part of the bankruptcy filing and, (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File) Sears filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Mon- day buckling under its massive debt load and stagger- ing losses. The company once dominated the American landscape, but whether a smaller Sears can be viable remains in question. according to the statement, “it remains business as usual at all of our locations.” As for the Sears Hold- ings, which operates both Sears and Kmart stores, analysts have their doubts it will survive. “In our view, too much rot has set in at Sears to make it (a) viable busi- ness,” Neil Saunders, man- aging director of Global- Data Retail, said in a note to investors. Its bankruptcy was years in the making. Sears diver- sified too much. It kept cut- ting costs and let its stores become fusty in the face of increasing competition from the likes of Walmart and Target. And though it expanded onto the inter- net, it was no match for Amazon. “In point of fact,” Cohen said, “they’ve been dead for a very long time.” In its bankruptcy filing, Sears Holdings listed assets of $1 billion to $10 billion and liabilities of $10 bil- lion to $50 billion. It said it has lined up $300 million in financing from banks to keep operating and is nego- tiating an additional $300 million loan. The company once had around 350,000 employees; as of Monday’s filing, it was down to 68,000. At its peak, it had 4,000 stores in 2012; it will now be left with a lit- tle more than 500. Sears was born in 1886, when Richard W. Sears began selling watches to supplement his income as a railroad station agent in North Redwood, Minne- sota. By the next year, he had opened his first store in Chicago and had hired a watchmaker named Alvah C. Roebuck. The company published its first mail-order cata- log in 1888. Together with companies like Montgom- ery Ward and J.C. Penney, Sears helped bring Amer- ican consumer culture to middle America. “It’s hard to imagine now how isolating it was to live in a small town 100 years ago, 120 years ago,” said Marc Levinson, author of “The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in Amer- ica.” “Back before the days of cars, people might have a ride of several days in a horse and buggy just to get to the nearest train railhead, nearest train station.” “What Sears did was make big-city merchandise available to people in small towns,” he said. There was a time when you could find just about anything for your house in the Sears catalog — includ- ing a house. Between 1908 and 1940, the company sold about 75,000 build-from-a- kit houses, many of which are still standing. Sears’ offerings could cover you from cradle to grave: It even sold tomb- stones. In between, there was everything from girdles to socket wrenches, dresses to guns, dolls to washing machines. The Sears catalog “was second only to the Holy Bible in terms of the house- hold importance,” said 71-year-old novelist Allan Gurganus, author of “The Last Confederate Widow Tells All.” He grew up in Rocky Mount, North Car- olina, and recalls the way tenants on his grandfather’s farm loved the catalog. When the new one would arrive, Gurganus said, the old one was con- signed to the outhouse as reading material and, well, toilet paper. He said they always started at the back of the book when pulling out pages. “That’s where the least important parts are — the plumbing fixtures and so forth,” he said with a laugh. “I was especially interested in the underwear ads.” Page 7A ences and institutions, and in doing so, he changed the world,” Nadella wrote on Twitter. Allen, an avid sports fan, owned the Portland Trail Blazers and the Seat- tle Seahawks. Allen and Gates met while attending a private school in north Seattle. The two friends would later drop out of college to pursue the future they envisioned: A world with a computer in every home. Gates left Harvard in his junior year to devote him- self full time to their startup, originally called Micro- Soft. Allen spent two years at Washington State before dropping out as well. Continued from 1A “But Paul wasn’t con- tent with starting one com- pany. He channeled his intellect and compassion into a second act focused on improving people’s lives and strengthening commu- nities in Seattle and around the world. He was fond of saying, ‘If it has the poten- tial to do good, then we should do it,’” Gates wrote. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called Allen’s con- tributions to the company, community and industry “indispensable.” “As co-founder of Mic- rosoft, in his own quiet and persistent way, he created magical products, experi- ACTIVE STRESS MANAGEMENT Address your stress before it's too late! Managing stress effectively can add years to your life. 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