Cataloging Sears’ woes
When former retailing giants such as Hess’s, Bright’s and now Sears bite the dust, the nostalgia meter cranks into overdrive.
I remember shopping at all three as a kid from Summit Hill, although I must admit that at my tender age I was a reluctant shopping associate. When we shopped for a new pair of shoes in August before the start of school, my mother would sometimes tell me to go play with the shoe X-ray machine while she talked business with the shoe salesman at Bright’s in Lansford, the most famous local retailer in the coal regions.
When I was an adult, I joked with my mother that she could have been unwittingly subjecting me to radiation poisoning when I was a preteen. The X-ray machine presumably showed whether the person needed a larger or smaller size shoe than the one being tried on, because it illustrated the positioning of the toes in relationship to the edge of the shoes.
I loved to travel to Allentown — the “big city” — on those rare occasions when my much-older brother would take mom and me to Hess’s, the best-known regional retailer of its day. My reward for hours of wearying shopping and being dragged along by mom was a big piece of Hess’s famous strawberry pie lathered in whipped cream and served in the Patio restaurant.
As for Sears, being a teenager with alleged raging hormones, my male friends and I became beyond excited when the annual humongous Sears catalog arrived in the mail. In a few days, and after my mother was done scanning its contents and dog-earing the pages where there might be products to buy, I would take the catalog to my bedroom to look over, among other things, the lingerie and beachwear ads, most of which were modeled by fantastically beautiful women with curvy figures.
It reminds me of a 1958 Four Lads song with these lyrics: “I’d like to get a girl from Sears & Roebuck, like the one that I saw, wearing short shorts, on page 44. …”
Now, Bright’s and Hess’s are long gone, and Sears has recently filed for bankruptcy, so its future is iffy. For the time being, the Whitehall Mall store remains open, but the company announced recently that popular stores in the Stroud Mall in Monroe County and at the Berkshire Mall in Berks County are among another 40 stores scheduled to be shuttered in February.
Kmart, which acquired Sears in an $11 billion deal in 2004, also announced that it will be closing an Allentown store, which means that the Walnutport Kmart will be one of the few in the area to remain open.
Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of amazon.com and the richest man in the country with a recent net worth of $160 billion, gets a lot of the blame or praise, depending on your point of view about these matters and your shopping habits. It’s a lot easier to order an item that you need on the internet, but there are trade-offs, especially for those of us who like the hands-on experience that a big-box retailer or small-town shop can give us.
Of course, when you think about it, Sears is like a yesteryear amazon.com without the instantaneous ordering component. You looked through the catalog, made out an order slip, mailed it to the company with a check or money order, and in a few days your ordered items appeared on your doorstep.
There are many reasons why Bright’s, Hess’s and now Sears failed, especially after their early successes. Each has its own place in history, and their narratives are much too long to recount here.
Sears attracted many residents from Carbon and Schuylkill counties when the Whitehall Mall opened its doors 52 years ago along the Golden Strip (MacArthur Road in Whitehall Township) with Sears as one of its anchors.
It was the first enclosed shopping center in Pennsylvania outside of Philadelphia, and it was at once a great curiosity and a fantastic place to shop.
Its ambience also attracted thousands of shoppers who could now stroll through multiple stores under one roof and not have to worry about going from place to place in bad weather. It had air conditioning and heating, plants and fountains. It was at once a shopping destination and a place for social gatherings.
According to the Smithsonian, by the early 20th century, Sears & Roebuck was already a household name across the United States, one that represented rural thrift and industry as well as material abundance and consumer pleasures.
Sears, Hess’s and Bright’s are all mirror images of the ups and downs of our economy and of changing shopping habits.
It is sad. We lament their passing. Those old enough to have been around in their heyday have many enduring memories. But that was then, and this is now. There are a new set of norms, and all of the nostalgia in the world will not change reality.
By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com
