Will Sears' new tune prove to be a hit? - Sears, Roebuck and Co.'s new marketing policy - Taking Stock - Column

Discount Store News, April 5, 1993 by Arthur Markowitz

The shutting of the Sears catalog operation sounded a coda to a retailing era.

The retailing period during which Sears' Big Book was a powerful merchandising tool was a bygone America of isolated rural communities and small towns knitted together by railroads and the U.S. postal system. Sears' catalog was the merchant in these islands of consumers, with the trains and mails filling the role of the stores, distributing and delivering the merchandise.

Sears' genius during this era was knowing what its customers wanted and developing the technology and systems that insured the catalog would fill their changing needs.

As rural, farm America became urban, industrial America, Sears kept pace with its customers and their new lifestyles. Sears evolved from just a cataloger to a retailer with stores, first small outlets, then larger stores and finally anchors in shopping centers. Sears at first was still able to gauge the shifting and evolving desires and demands of its shoppers and seemingly responded successfully.

But as Sears planted more mirror-image stores across America, it became less responsive to the divergent merchandising desires of its customers. It became a monolithic, fossilized merchandising bureaucracy, rather than its former innovative and imaginative self. And it failed to recognize seismic changes underway in retailing: the advent of discounting followed by the arrival of category-killer specialty retailers.

Sears' festering problems came to a head during the past few years. Its response was to first correct its past errors by down-sizing, slashing back its overgrown merchandising staff, deploying new technologies and closing its now outdated catalog operation.

Sears then addressed the future by staking out its new missions: filling what its sees as a vacant retailing niche by becoming the full-line anchor in shopping centers to accompany the apparel specialty department stores that are its co-anchors.

Sears was once an exciting, electric retailer with an intuitive sense for the marketplace. Has Sears with its new merchandising arrangement scanned the future tempo of retailing right or has it again failed to feel the upheaval underway in retailing? Will Sears' new refrain be another coda or the start of a new symphony? Listen closely, the music has begun.