2024 03 29

Da Sears Tower! Da tallest building in da world! Da pinnacle of human ingenuity! …until it wasn’t. Chicago, Illinois. January, 2023. © Clayton Hauck

Another Tangent Idea post today inspired by Morgan Housel’s Same as Ever book. It was almost in passing, in a chapter discussing how things change and it’s harder to maintain a competitive advantage than it is to gain one, he brought up the death of Sears. Being a lifelong Chicagoan I’m very aware of Sears but even I don’t fully appreciate how big it was in its prime. It was so big they constructed a building larger than anything previously constructed to satisfy the demands of the company. Of course, things changed. Today, if you ask anyone under twenty years old, chances are they won’t even know what you’re talking about if you bring up the word Sears. Even this photo of this momentous building ended up in my scraps folder, discarded for another time, until Housel’s mention in his book passed my ears and spurred me to consider it again. It’s remarkable how such a grand idea can turn into such a monumental thing, something everyone knows, only to be completely forgotten a few decades later because the tides have turned and the wind is blowing in a new direction.

This blog post is merely me thinking out loud about a topic that would likely fascinate me for the rest of my life if I chose to really focus on it.

At it’s peak, the Sears company was so large, it owned portions of many famous American brands: from Allstate and Land’s End, to Dean Witter and Coldwell Banker. They were efficient and thought of as the gold standard in what an American corporation should aspire to be. But then they died. Globalization changed the dynamics of the world and they were forced to diversify into new business lines which they were not previously familiar with. Inequality rose and people either wanted things cheap or they wanted them luxurious. The core business of Sears, once quenching the insatiable-retail thirst of the American middle class no longer had a customer base.

Does a book exist which examines the Death of Sears in gripping detail? If not, it should! If not, maybe this is my life calling to write such a story.

-Clayton