SEARS, ROEBUCK AND COMPANY

one of the world's largest retailers of general merchandise, with retail stores and mail-order operations in the United States and several countries of Latin America. Its headquarters are at Hoffman Estates, near Chicago (where the headquarters were located from 1893 to 1989). In 1886 Richard W. Sears founded the R.W. Sears Watch Company in Minneapolis to sell watches by mail order. He relocated his business to Chicago in 1887, hired Alvah C. Roebuck to repair watches, and established a mail-order business for watches and jewelry. The first catalog was offered the same year. In 1889 Sears sold his business but a few years later founded, with Roebuck, another mail-order operation, which in 1893 came to be known as Sears, Roebuck and Company. In 1895 Julius Rosenwald, a wealthy clothing manufacturer, bought out Roebuck's interest, and he set the mail-order business on a systematic basis while Sears himself wrote the catalogs. The company grew phenomenally by selling a range of merchandise at low prices to farms and villages that had no other convenient access to retail outlets. The initiation of rural free delivery (1896) and of parcel post (1913) by the U.S. postal service enabled Sears to send its merchandise to even the most isolated customers. Rosenwald succeeded Sears as president of the company after the latter resigned in 1909. In 1924 General Robert E. Wood joined the company and became its guiding genius for the next 30 years. Wood noted that the automobile was making retail outlets in urban centres more accessible to consumers in outlying suburbs and rural areas. To exploit this opportunity, he opened the first Sears retail store (in Chicago) in 1925, and the number of stores increased so rapidly that by 1931 retail sales had topped mail-order sales. Sears flourished in the economic boom after World War II and was not seriously challenged as the United States' largest retailer until the 1980s, when the Kmart Corporation surpassed it in total sales. In 1981 Sears acquired two large financial-services companies, the Coldwell Banker Company and Dean Witter Reynolds Inc., and in 1985 it introduced the Discover credit card. In 1992, however, Sears began selling off its financial-services subsidiaries in order to concentrate on its lagging core retail operations. In 1995 it spun off its largest subsidiary, the Allstate Corporation, a large insurance company founded by Sears in 1931. Sears, Roebuck and Company owned Encyclopdia Britannica between 1920 and 1943, when the company gave the encyclopaedia to the University of Chicago.