On a cold October morning in 2018, news flashed across America that Sears, the company woven into the fabric of national life for 125 years, had filed for bankruptcy. Seventy thousand workers faced an uncertain future. Seven hundred stores faced closure. The empire that had changed how Americans lived, shopped, and dreamed had fallen.

To understand how it all came crashing down requires returning to a lonely railroad station in Minnesota and a young man who saw golden opportunity where others saw refused merchandise. Richard Warren Sears was born on December 7, 1863, in Stewartville, Minnesota, to a blacksmith father whose forge promised security until a failed farm venture cost the family $50,000. When Richard was 17, his father died, leaving behind debt. The boy learned telegraphy, mastered the language of dots and dashes, and took a job with the Minneapolis and St.

Louis Railway in North Redwood Falls. In 1886, a local jeweler refused a shipment of gold-filled pocket watches, the wholesaler having pulled an old scam. Richard contacted the wholesaler and agreed to keep any profit above $12 per watch. He then sent telegrams down the railway line to other station agents, offering the watches for $14.

They sold like wildfire. Within six months, he had made $5,000, more than most men earned in five years. At 22, he left the railroad and moved to Minneapolis to start the R. W.

Sears Watch Company. He moved to Chicago in 1887, the great railway hub, and hired a quiet, methodical watchmaker named Alvah Curtis Roebuck. On September 16, 1893, they renamed their company Sears, Roebuck and Company. The first catalog was humble, just watches and jewelry, but by 1894 it had expanded to 57 pages, offering sewing machines, bicycles, sporting goods, clothing, and musical instruments.

Rural America embraced it. Success brought chaos. Richard Sears was a promotional genius but a terrible businessman. Orders piled up faster than they could be filled, and by 1895 the company was drowning.

Roebuck sold his share for $75,000 to Aaron Nusbaum and his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenwald. Rosenwald, born in Springfield, Illinois, in 1862, had grown up watching his father serve customers with honesty. Where Sears dreamed in headlines, Rosenwald thought in systems. Within months, he brought order to the warehouse, established quality controls, and insisted on honest dealing.

By 1903, the two men had bought out Nusbaum, and the company belonged to the Dreamer and the Builder. They needed space, and in 1905 construction began on a complex in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood. It spanned 40 acres with a main merchandise building of 3. 3 million square feet and a 14-story tower.

When it opened in 1906, it was the largest commercial structure on Earth. Inside, 22,000 workers processed orders arriving by telegraph and departed by railroad. Conveyor belts carried goods to packing stations. From order to shipment took less than 24 hours.

The complex had its own power plant generating 7,000 horsepower, its own fire department, police force, hospital, three cafeterias, and a bank. It was a city within a city. That same year, Sears went public in the first major retail IPO in American financial history, raising $40 million. In 1924, it was added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, where it stayed for 75 years.

The catalog became known as the wish book. Starting in 1908, Sears sold mail-order house kits, shipping lumber and instructions by rail to anywhere in America. Thousands of those homes still stand. For rural families, the catalog was education, bridging distance and teaching Americans what modern life looked like.

Behind the success were shadows. Richard Sears was burning out, struggling with alcoholism and clashing with Rosenwald over advertising budgets. In 1908, at just 44, he resigned and retired to a farm. On September 28, 1914, he died of Bright’s disease, worsened by years of drinking.

He was 50. Rosenwald, now in control, continued building. In 1925, Sears opened its first retail store at the North Lawndale complex, pioneering stores in unconventional working-class locations rather than downtown shopping districts. The strategy worked, sparking a retail revolution.

During the recession after World War I, Rosenwald personally pledged $21 million of his fortune to save the company and protect jobs. He also gave away more than $60 million in his lifetime, funding over 5,000 schools for Black children across the South with Booker T. Washington, establishing the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, and supporting universities and medical research. When he died in 1932, his death made the front page of the New York Times.

His foundation closed in 1948, having spent every dollar as he wished. By 1969, Sears sales represented 1% of the entire United States economy. Two out of every three Americans shopped there. The catalog, the stores, the brands like Craftsman, Kenmore, and DieHard, all of it constituted a national institution.

But the seeds of decline were already germinating. In 1973, the company built the Sears Tower, the tallest building in the world, and moved its headquarters downtown. The North Lawndale complex was suddenly empty. Twenty-two thousand jobs vanished from the neighborhood almost overnight.

North Lawndale went into economic freefall, never fully recovering. Leaving was a symptom of deeper problems. America was changing. Suburbs and malls offered dozens of stores under one roof.

Discount retailers arrived. Walmart opened in 1962 and undercut Sears on price. Specialty retailers stole its customers. Sears was caught in the middle, too expensive to compete with Walmart, too bland to compete with specialty stores.

Then came the internet. Amazon created a digital catalog of everything, the model Sears had pioneered a century earlier, and perfected it. While Amazon invested billions in technology and shipping, Sears spent almost nothing. In 2017, Sears spent roughly $1 per square foot on upgrades while competitors spent eight to fifteen dollars.

The deeper cause was Eddie Lampert. In 2005, the hedge fund manager bought Sears through his company, Kmart Holding, for $11 billion and merged the two struggling retailers. Lampert ran Sears like a financial portfolio, not a retail business. He cut costs relentlessly, closed stores, and sold off assets.

In 2017, he sold the Craftsman brand to Stanley Black & Decker for $900 million. Stores became depressing places with dimmed lights, stained carpets, half-empty shelves, and peeling paint. Employees who had worked for decades felt embarrassment. A 2016 survey found women preferred shopping at Goodwill over Sears for clothing.

Then came October 15, 2018. Sears Holdings filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in federal court in New York, revealing debts of $11. 3 billion. Lampert stepped down as CEO.

The company announced it would close at least 142 more stores. Seventy thousand people faced unemployment. Liquidation companies arrived to strip the stores. Communities lost tax revenue.

Malls lost their anchor stores and spiraled into decline. Suppliers who had depended on Sears for generations went bankrupt themselves. After years of legal wrangling, Sears emerged from bankruptcy in October 2022 as a shell of about 20 stores. The company that had once been America’s largest retailer was reduced to a handful of locations.

The North Lawndale complex, designated a national historic landmark in 1978, was mostly abandoned and eventually demolished. The site became a redevelopment called Homan Square. The 14-story merchandise tower still stands, a lonely sentinel over a neighborhood that never recovered from losing its economic heart. The story of Sears is the story of American capitalism in miniature: rise, peak, and fall.

It failed to adapt. It failed to invest when Walmart built supercenters and Amazon revolutionized shopping. It forgot what had made it great. Richard Sears understood that business meant connecting with customers.

Julius Rosenwald understood that success required continuous investment and treating employees as partners. Eddie Lampert understood only numbers on a spreadsheet, a company to be harvested, not built. The empire that seemed eternal collapsed within a generation.

Today, the few remaining Sears stores feel like museums, and the name means little to young shoppers who never knew a time when one company’s catalog was the wish book of rural America, when a single retailer commanded one percent of the entire national economy.