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Sears might be going belly up

Widebrim

I'll Lock Up
Yeah, lunch at the cafeteria was the high point of the shopping. Almost all of the malls had one. There was Harvest House at South Coast Plaza and up until several years ago there was a Clifton's at the Lakewood Mall. I used to always have custard for desert -- that's what I'll always associate with those wonderful cafeterias.

V.C., do you ever make it to Clifton's Cafeteria when you're over in downtown L.A.?
 

Undertow

My Mail is Forwarded Here
Messages
3,126
Location
Des Moines, IA, US
Well, bad news; the lady and I just realized Sears is a decent place to find ladies' quality "vintage style" underclothes. So here we have a new source for shopping and...they want to close the doors. Guess that's the way it goes!
 

Bruce Wayne

My Mail is Forwarded Here
So I have found out that some Craftsman hand tools are now made overseas. I remember when I first started in the mill they had a once a month Craftsman club sale where all hand tools were 10%off for club members. When I was first starting out I got close go $2000 worth of tools for a deep discount through various sales & discounts. I haven't even been in a Sears for a couple of years as the last time I was in the pickings were slim & the shelves were nearly bare.
 
Messages
10,883
Location
Portage, Wis.
We sadly lost our K-Mart, here, too. They closed down the Sears a couple years ago, and then the K-Mart last year Lots of good memories of working there in High School. I still shopped there, regularly. They just couldn't compete with the Walmart right across the street.

Ace Hardware in town started carrying Craftsman tools, at least.
 

St. Louis

Practically Family
Messages
618
Location
St. Louis, MO
A few random unconnected thoughts referring to posts above: Undertow, your lady friend might check the Naitonal online catalog for unmentionables.

Puzzled: why was Sears' radio station called WLS? If it broadcast from Chicago, wouldn't it have to be KWLS?

We have an old Sears tower in my neighborhood. I've only lived in St. Louis for about a decade, so I don't know when it disgorged Sears & became something else (it is now empty, as are many buildings in this town) but that deco-fortress architecture is unmistakable. There was always something so immediately comforting about seeing a Sears building in any town I happened to be visiting.
 

LizzieMaine

Bartender
Messages
33,728
Location
Where The Tourists Meet The Sea
K stations were generally west of the Mississippi. W stations were East. There were exceptions -- KDKA in Pittsburgh and KYW in Chicago were licensed prior to the Mississippi rule, and there were a few others. You'll also find a few W stations in the West that go back equally far -- WDAF in Kansas City and WBAP in Dallas being the best-remembered.

Sears sold WLS to the publishers of the "Prairie Farmer" magazine in the early thirties, but continued to offer a "WLS" line of radio tubes, batteries, and accessories in its catalog for several years after that.

Most Sears locations up to the late thirties were simply catalog outlets -- you'd go in and order things out of the catalog there and then the items would be shipped to the store for you to pick up. We had a lot of those around here up until the eighties, often located just across the street from the Monkey Ward catalog store. Sears started moving into full-service department stores at the end of the thirties, which led to the big downtown Sears operations that eventually evolved into the mall stores of today.
 
Messages
13,460
Location
Orange County, CA
The Original Sears Tower
-- All that's left of the original Sears Homan Square complex. At one time WLS used to broadcast from that tower.

searstower2.jpg


sears_1.jpg
 

LizzieMaine

Bartender
Messages
33,728
Location
Where The Tourists Meet The Sea
W-G-N was "World's Greatest Newspaper," showing that WLS had no monopoly on radio hyperbole.

Bob Hope made his first-ever radio appearance on the WLS Showboat Program in 1929, a hayseed predecessor to the more famous WLS National Barn Dance.
 

Stearmen

I'll Lock Up
Messages
7,202
K stations were generally west of the Mississippi. W stations were East. There were exceptions -- KDKA in Pittsburgh and KYW in Chicago were licensed prior to the Mississippi rule, and there were a few others. You'll also find a few W stations in the West that go back equally far -- WDAF in Kansas City and WBAP in Dallas being the best-remembered.

Sears sold WLS to the publishers of the "Prairie Farmer" magazine in the early thirties, but continued to offer a "WLS" line of radio tubes, batteries, and accessories in its catalog for several years after that.

Most Sears locations up to the late thirties were simply catalog outlets -- you'd go in and order things out of the catalog there and then the items would be shipped to the store for you to pick up. We had a lot of those around here up until the eighties, often located just across the street from the Monkey Ward catalog store. Sears started moving into full-service department stores at the end of the thirties, which led to the big downtown Sears operations that eventually evolved into the mall stores of today.

Makes you wonder, with the advent of the internet, and no need for a physical store, if sears would have been better off sticking to mail order only? In some respects, they were way ahead of their time.
 

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