Sears Boy comes full circle By the St. Louis Post-Dispatch – November 21, 2004 In the food chain on Retail Planet, the big fish eat the little fish – and each other, too. In the beginning, there was Sears Boy.
Sears Boy comes full circle
By the St. Louis Post-Dispatch – November 21, 2004
In the food chain on Retail Planet, the big fish eat the little fish – and each other, too.
In the beginning, there was Sears Boy. A sturdy lad who wanted nothing more than the Levis his friends wore, Sears Boy’s body type condemned him to Sears jeans, size 12 Husky, when he was 6 years old.
To make matters worse, Sears Boy was rough on clothing, so his mom bought his jeans with double knees, which made Sears Boy look like he was wearing shin guards under his pants. To this day, the smell of popcorn or the grinding of a key cutting machine or the mention of the word “husky” takes Sears Boy back to the Sears store in the neighborhood where he grew up. There was a key-maker’s kiosk outside the store and a popcorn stand just inside. At Christmas, Santa Claus would groan when Sears Boy sat on his lap. “My, you’re a husky one, aren’t you?”
Sears Boy sought out other Sears Boys. He became friends with a kid whose mother bought every garment his family wore, every appliance and every tool in the house from Sears. She referred to their family car as a Kenmore.
Later, after Sears Boy’s family moved to a neighborhood where there was a Kmart, he briefly became Kmart Youth. This was the pre-Martha Stewart Kmart. This was the Kmart of blue-light special malted-milk balls and perpetual lunchmeat sandwiches. Nobody in the family liked malted-milk balls, but at four cartons for $1, how were you going to pass them up? In college, Kmart Youth became Penney’s Man, since Penney’s sold the cheap corduroy jeans and polyester shirts that made Penney’s Man such a fashion icon. Penney’s Man married Catalog Woman and became L.L. Bean Man and Land’s End Man.
As a homeowner, Catalog Man reverted back to Sears Man. Deep in his genetic code was the belief that grass couldn’t be mowed or lumber cut or cars started unless the mower and the saw and battery bore the name “Craftsman” or “Die-Hard.”
When Sears Man discovered Sears had a Big Man’s (“husky” for grown-ups) catalog, everything became simplified. He was perplexed when he met a man whose teenage daughter had instructed him never to pick her up at the mall outside of the Sears store lest someone think she had been in Sears.
But America was changing. Sears Catalog Man had moved to the semi-sticks, where Wal-Mart had built a huge superstore. The store was equipped with a giant magnetic-force generator that sucked Sears Catalog Man into the store and then sucked the money out of his pockets.
Helpless in its spell, Sears Catalog Man became Wal-Mart Man. He bought groceries there, prescription drugs and eyeglasses. One day, he entered the store with a shopping list that included milk, fresh cilantro, adobo paste, socks, a garden hose, amoxocillin and a truck battery. He was out of the store in 15 minutes with every one of them.
Wal-Mart Man was profoundly conflicted. Yes it was handy. Yes it was cheap. But he suspected Wal-Mart wasn’t good for America. It had destroyed small town Main Streets. It had driven jobs overseas by mugging its suppliers. It had replaced manufacturing jobs with retail jobs that paid half the money and lousy benefits. When he went shopping, Wal-Mart Man was struck by the irony: Customers (and employees, too) who looked like they were living on the edge of poverty because they had lousy jobs, but who could feed and clothe their families because the stuff was cheap. Wouldn’t they be better off making more and spending more? And what about the Chinese, who may do as much as $30 billion a year in business with Wal-Mart? Sure it may be bad for America, but isn’t Wal-Mart good for Wal-Mart Man’s fellow man?
Then this week, Wal-Mart Man woke up to the news that Kmart had bought Sears for $11.5 billion. The Sears of his boyhood, which now owns the Land’s End of his adulthood, had been bought by the Kmart of his youth. The idea, at least on the surface, was to create one entity big enough to compete with Wal-Mart. Below the surface, the guy who did the deal – Kmart chairman Eddie Lampert – is an arbitrageur. He makes his money by buying companies and selling off the pieces. He knows as much about retailing as Carl Icahn knew about aviation. Wal-Mart Man is afraid the whole thing will turn out to be a victory for Wal-Mart. On the other hand, he’s looking forward to becoming Kmart-Sears-Land’s End Man. Does Martha Stewart make stuff in “husky”?
