Richard Warren Sears and Sears, Roebuck, & Company
Richard Warren Sears was born on December 7, 1863, in Stewartville,
Minnesota. He was the son of James Warren and Eliza A. Sears, both of English ancestory. His father led anything but a happy life. He had failed in his quest for gold during the California Gold Rush of 1849 and was a bitter soldier in the
Civil War, which he blamed on politicians. He had earned a sizable sum of money working as a blacksmith and a wagonmaker, but he lost it all in a stock-farm venture. Richard's father gave up soon afterwards, leaving Richard to be the family breadwinner at the age of 16.
Richard worked in the general offices of the Minneapolis and St. Louis
Railway in Minneapolis to support his family. He then decided to move Redwood
Falls, Minnesota, where he thought that he could earn more money because of the small town setting. There he worked as a station attendant, doing chores for his board and sleeping in the loft of the railroad station. In his spare time, he learned how the mail-order business worked.
Richard got his opportunity to get into the mail-order business in 1886 when a shipment of watches from a Chicago wholesaler was refused by a town jeweler. Therefore, the shipment sat in the railroad station until Richard contacted the wholesaler, who offered him the watches for twelve dollars each.
He bought the watches and sold them by sending letters to other station attendants describing the watches and offering them at the discount price of fourteen dollars each. He sold those watches and ordered more to sell. To sell these he advertised in a small way in St. Paul newspapers. He made a large profit from this operation.
In a few months Richard made such a profit that he abandoned the railroad business entirely and started his own mail-order business under the name of the
R.W. Sears Watch Company. In one year he made so much money that he was able to begin advertising in magazines with a national circulation and move the business to Chicago.
On March 1, 1887, he set up a shop on Dearborn Street in Chicago with a staff of three people, one to handle bookkeeping and correspondence and two stenographers. Soon after the opening of his new shop, he found a need for a watchmaker to repair watches returned by customers. This watchmaker was a young man by the name of Alvah Curtis Roebuck from Hammond, Indiana.
Richard Sears became even more successful by opening up the huge rural
market.
1925: He went to New York City, working odd jobs, including manual labor for the
to Alaska and was in the frontier. Unfortunately he was unable to survive, dieing of starvation.
years in a log cabin near Lac Ste.-Anne, sixty miles northwest of Edmonton. He rarely
can be traced by to his grandmother who provided him with a powerful moral and
Bruce Levine, on the other hand, points to economics as the main reason for the Civil War. He points to two different economies between the North and South which had greatly different needs.
war often, for the sake of his country, but when he did he put in a
How did the election of Lincoln to president in 1860 lead to civil war in the United States of America?
Later he returned back to the US and decided to run for the Republican nomination for the 1880 election but was defeated by James Garfield. After that he invested most of his money in the bank firm Grant and Ward, that his son and partner owned but Grant did not know that Ward was involved in a fraud which caused all of the firm's money to be lost. After the fraud he lost all of his money and was now broke, so in order to make some money he started writing newspaper articles about what he went through during the civil war. He soon found out that he liked writing and decided to start writing his story, the company to which he was working for offered to publish it but he declined the offer and instead took the offer his friend Mark Twain had given him. While he was writing his book he discovered that he had severe throat cancer from all the years he had spent smoking. He soon lost his voice and only continued to write his story, just days before he died he finished it and it was a such success that his family did not have to worry about anything financially. He died on July 23, 1885 and was buried in
resulted in the doubling of the debt of the United States. He used the money for
revenge on the rebels who had taken everything from him by taking part in the fight against
late father. He was also not ready to face the fact that his Uncle marries his mother
In Lincoln, he became involved in the famous Lincoln County War. This was a time of political strife and financial power struggles. In most cases, one must kill or be killed.
He left home at 15 to become a "printer's devil" at a small Ohio newspaper.
At first he stuck to the standard fair-delivering newspapers, working in a flower shop and making special deliveries on his bike, for the post office.