“Sears revolutionized American retail not once but
twice, and made a lot of Americans immeasurably better off,” Megan
McArdle writes in Bloomberg. “But Sears built a great business for an
America that no longer exists.”
Sears, Roebuck was a good Illinois company that was lifted
into greatness by a Springfield native and which reshaped life in small town
and rural Illinois.
I have written critically of the current
management here and here.
My anger about the current owner’s bungling owes in some part to my own
affection for the Sears I knew as a youth in Springfield. I wore Sears clothes
and rode a Sears bike that I repaired with Sears tools, and thought the store
on South Grand was rivaled in magnificence only by the statehouse and
Centennial Building. It deserved a better end.
This article appears in Dec 8-14, 2016.
