Sears Declared Bankruptcy And I Already Miss It
Sears was a fact of life when I was a kid. Everybody I knew shopped there, and for many families it was as if everything they owned came from a Sears store: clothing, furnishings, the Weather Beater paint on their house, the Die Hard battery in their car, all or most of the home’s appliances.
The retailer’s size, reach and out-sized effect on American society is hard to appreciate now with the rise of Amazon and its ilk. And today, under the pressure of that competition, Sears has announced bankruptcy. I’m not surprised, but I still can’t quite get my mind around it.
They closed my local Sears department store this year. Several years prior, the company shuttered a nearby Sears Paint and Appliance store. and of the two, that's the one that hit me like a ton of bricks. Without it, even the smallest nuts-and-bolt, grass seed, or paintbrush purchase means a longer drive that ends with elbowing my way around a full-fledged shopping center. I’m used to it now, but it's just not the same.
Part of me, I'll admit freely, is Old Economy: steel mills, coal-fired power, American-made cars. I understood that economy. We had a need. Industry filled that need. It was no more complicated than it needed to be. On that basis, Sears worked beautifully. I’m not much of a shopper, but Sears was nearby and it had my back. It wasn’t unusual for me to pick up a pair of pants, a toaster, and a couple of sockets or drill bits from the tool aisle in one trip. I was in and out before my credit card knew what had hit it.
That is, unless, I got sucked into the manly vortex of the hardware department and the bane of my existence, the tool aisle. It wasn’t unusual on weekends to find dazed men wandering around in there. While the family was busy shopping elsewhere, dad was eyeing yet another expansion to his socket set, or pondering whether he would treat himself to a radial-arm saw or a table saw like the one his father owned. You could always ask the clerks who manned the hardware department, and they really knew their stuff. They were tool addicts like their customers. I can still see them, with their neatly combed hair, shirt and tie, and a pocket protector bristling with pens of many colors. A bit more helpful than some recommendations from an inhuman algorithm.
So where does the bankruptcy leave us? As much as I hate to admit it, we're perhaps a bit wistful but otherwise not much worse for the wear. What department stores remain are far from their peak. On my last trip out for a pair of pants, I found little more than a complete disgrace, clothing piled up in something like compost heaps. I ended up finding what I needed, but my search would have been more efficient with a pitchfork to sort my way through. Had I ready access to a Sears, at least I could have bought the pitchfork.
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