A City in a Store
Sears, Roebuck Mail Order Operations
May 1943 Popular Mechanics

August 1937 Popular Mechanics

[Table of Contents] Wax nostalgic about and learn from the history of early mechanics and electronics. See articles from Popular Mechanics, published continuously since 1902. All copyrights hereby acknowledged.

The demise of Sears, Roebuck and Co. is very disappointing to me. As with many Americans (and Canadians) of my era and prior, I grew up with Sears being literally (in the true sense of the word, not the faux usage like "I literally thought I would die when she told me...") a household name. We had Kenmore kitchen appliances (some, not all), clothes irons and hair blowers, and of course Craftsman tools and a DieHard battery in the family sedan, Open Hearth wooden furniture, and some Toughskin clothes at the start of the school year. We never, to my memory, had a Silvertone radio or record player. It's not that the parents were Sears fanatics, just that our limited budget mandated buying durable goods at a fair price. My own workshop is dominated by Craftsman tools, many of which I have had for fifty years. Analysts say poor management and a failure to embrace online sales were the primary causes for ultimate doom. This "A City in a Store" article appearing in a 1937 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine highlights the catalog sales business of Sears, along with the amazing conglomerate of operations supporting both that and the brick and mortar retail sales locations. Just as The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a weighty, multi-volume tome analyzing the human failings behind the tragedy, this Smithsonian magazine article entitled The Rise and Fall of Sears assesses the Sears debacle. The conspiratorial side of me suspects globalist true believers are directing and facilitating the breaking down of Western stalwart institutions in order to erase history. The schools nowadays do not teach the accomplishments and heroic parts of our past - only atrocities like slavery and child labor. Flooding the country with aliens having no connection to our (or your) country's past helps accomplish the goal. Anyway, read this and marvel at the ingenuity and industriousness of Sears. Amazon was not the inventor of massive catalog ordering and shipping.

Sears, Roebuck Mail Order Operations

Most hidden cities have been dead for hundreds of years. You know the kind in explorers' yarns that begin: "I stumbled over a stone, pulled back the lush growth of jungle vines and there before us just as the Aztecs left it was the hidden city."

Four miles west of Chicago's Loop is a different type of hidden city. It's a bustling place confined within four blocks. Brick walls instead of jungle vines hide it from the "explorers'" eyes. Life within this city reaches into every county in every state in the nation. It is the home office and Chicago mail order division of Sears, Roebuck & Co.

Many stories have been written about this gargantuan mail. order house, its catalogue, its testing laboratories and the far-flung operations of the company's branches. But the story of the self-sustaining "city" within the home plant has never been told.

This city makes its own electricity and pumps water from its private well. (The "population" of 9,500 requires 300 gallons of water every minute.) It has its own fire department, watchmen and traffic cops, post office and telephone system. It boasts a hospital, bank, newspaper, service station, park, subway, private bus, retail store and restaurants.

If a rubberneck sight-seeing tour were conducted through the city, the first stop might be at the fire department on the second floor of the big merchandising building.

"We've got everything here but the fire engine," explains Fire Marshal E. J. Kamin, "and that's in a little house by itself just around the corner."

The fire department not only guards "Searsville" day and night, but its "suburbs," the retail stores and warehouses scattered over the city of Chicago. Once Marshal Kamin called the manager of a warehouse and asked about a fire in his basement before the manager knew of the fire. This was possible because all Chicago fire alarms are received in the marshal's office and are traced quickly with a card index system.

The office has an elaborate automatic signal system that records any disturbance in the plant's sprinkler system. If the sprinkler heads in this system were placed half a mile apart they would go around the world at the equator with 10,000 to spare. In the plant they are placed eight feet apart. Several hundred alarm boxes are located in the buildings and 10 men are constantly on patrol. There are 21 volunteer employee fire companies. The members are trained with great care and each is instructed to perform a specific duty at the sound of an alarm.

Aside from the fire engine and hundreds of feet of hose, the protective equipment includes more than a thousand extinguishers and pumps.

"We're prepared for everything including failure of two sources of water supply," says Mr. Kamin. "If our own supply and the city supply fail us, we have three reserve tanks that hold 190,000 gallons and a secondary surge tank of 250,000 gallons.

In case of an air raid, men are trained to man 13 special watch posts, including roof stations. Each post is connected with the marshal's office by "blackout" telephones separate from the company's private system. The blackout phones have red bulbs on the base which light up when the bell rings. Alarms are located throughout the plant to give a wavering note for warning and a steady ring for "all clear."

The marshal, who recently celebrated his 37th anniversary with the company, modestly points out that the largest fire loss has been less than $2,000.

Near the fire marshal's office is the "police station" located conveniently near the thriving Sears Community State Bank. Uniformed policemen, who serve primarily as traffic cops, keep such a wary eye on the bank that no bandit has ever been tempted to "do business" there. Incidentally, the bank is used by nearby residents as well as Sears employees.

The next stop in the sight-seeing tour is the powerhouse. Its size, nearly half a block long, never fails to amaze visiting engineers.

"Here's where we produce the heat, light, power and water," says Edward Buhrmester, chief engineer, with a wave of his hand that takes in six whirring power generating units, air compressors and pumps. "Until 1938 we generated all of our own electric power. We still make 60 percent of it which amounts to more than a million kilowatt hours a month."

Four of the power units are engine driven and two are driven by turbines. Steam for the engines and turbines is considered "free" in winter, for it is also used to heat the two main buildings and several smaller ones with a total floor space of about 4,000,000 square feet.

Water is pumped by air pressure from a well 1,870 feet below. The well was drilled in 1905 when the company, then 19 years old, moved to its present site.

"In those days there was just prairie and marsh land around here and no utilities to speak of," says Edward J. Lempera, plant engineer. "They had quite a time drilling the well. In one place they hit a crevice 100 feet deep, probably an underground river. The water is fine for drinking. Its mineral content, however, is too high for our boilers. We use city water in them."

The air compressors also supply the power for some five miles of pneumatic tubes in the plant. Through these tubes 3,500 carriers make 96,000 trips a day.

Three huge pumping units operate accumulators weighing 50 tons each to supply pressure for the institution's hydraulic elevators. They maintain a static pressure of 800 pounds. Everything in the power house operates with precision, from the big turbines to the electric eye in the chimney that warns of smoke density.

The hidden city tour winds through block-long corridors, past shelves loaded with the 100,000 items of merchandise, past miles of conveyors piled with thousands of packages, and into the shipping room. Here orders are assembled, wrapped and started to the weighing room. Life within the city moves on a 15-minute schedule. Some 1,900 orders (6,000 individual packages) bearing the same "time mark" must move forward at each 15-minute interval to the next operation. The schedule system is part of the reason the company can handle 100,000 orders received daily (in the Chicago house only at the Christmas peak) and speed the merchandise on its way. The Sears' employees, themselves, order 3,000 items daily that are delivered to their desks.

Four times daily, in the busy shipping and weighing rooms music is heard through a loud speaker system.

"They don't have to wait for the Saturday night band concert in our 'town'," says Paul W. Briggs, manager of the shipping department. "Music relieves fatigue and the workers love it. We use both radio and records. The music is on for half hour periods the first thing in the morning, before lunch, early in the afternoon and just before they go home."

Mr. Briggs says the packages really sail along to the tune of "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition," but he had to abandon "Deep in the Heart of Texas."

"They all stopped to clap their hands," he explains.

The Sears post office is one of the world's busiest. Pouches loaded with packages move in an endless stream to the loading platform where they are then carried to the mail trains. Canceled stamps are provided to save time. They are applied in the weighing room and one day's supply costs $15,000 in a busy season.

Sears' catalogue advertising department is a veritable publishing house that turns out 15,000,000 catalogues annually, including summer and winter editions, also produces 117 other sales publications. These include a semi-annual midseason sales-book (17,000,000 copies); the "bargain bulletins" (26,000,000) and a special Christmas supplement (6,000,000). Thousands of workers are employed in this publishing enterprise, millions of dollars are spent and the product created is given away. In return, some 11,000,000 customers order millions of dollars in merchandise in a single year.

Another publishing activity is the city's newspaper, a tabloid called the Sears News Graphic. It has its "local" staff, "foreign" correspondents (located in nine mail order branches) and is circulated "nationally." It carries the news about employee activities, special features, several columns and has an inquiring reporter department and "letters from the people." Recently it has featured news about the more than 6,000 former Sears employees now working for Uncle Sam in the armed forces.

The two main buildings of the plant are connected by a subway for pedestrians. A second subway, that few employees have ever seen, leads from the powerhouse and extends under the merchandising building. This subway facilitates the servicing of equipment and carries steam pipes, electric cables and pneumatic tubes.

On every executive's desk are two telephones, one for outside calls and the other connected with the Sears system. The system has dial phones and an automatic control room which handles 7,500,000 calls a year.

Scattered through the plant are various recreation rooms and across the street from the administration building is the "city park." It has fountains, pools, benches and is landscaped with beds of flowers.

This is about where the rubber-neck tour of the hidden city would end. Everyone would rush to a bench and somebody would have out his pencil figuring how 9,500 persons could use up 300 gallons of water every minute.

Posted November 24, 2023