Word: maile
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...type, and gold-filled (value of the gold: 27?) was refused by a local merchant, Sears got them for $12 apiece and sold them for $14. In six months Sears, then 22, cleared $5,000, moved to Minneapolis and then on to the rail center.of Chicago, and started a mail-order business...
...room house ("machine-made, ready-cut") for $972, and a "single dog power churn" for $14.70. Sears was indeed the farmer's friend-to the end and sometimes beyond. Once a woman returned some medicine intended for her husband, because he had died before it arrived. By return mail she received Sears' condolences-along with "our special tombstone catalogue...
...recession of 1920-21, when Ward was caught with top-heavy inventories, Wood found a way out. He persuaded the management to open retail stores, and within a year cleared out the inventories. That was enough to convince Wood that the real future for mail-order houses lay in expanding into the retail field. But Ward's management couldn't see it. "[They] regarded the retail outlets as funnels through which to drop the lemons from the mail-order inventory," Wood says. "I'm afraid I developed a profound contempt for [them]." Apparently, the contempt was mutual...
...stores were a success from the start. As a reward, Wood was made Sears' president in 1928. He opened more stores, and by 1931 Sears' store sales topped its mail-order business...
...small companies had justly complained that the take-it-or-leave-it attitude of big mail-order houses was squeezing them out of business. Wood went to work to correct this. He encouraged small companies to become Sears suppliers. "Squeeze a producer," says General Wood, "and he'll take it out on the product. But help him . . . and the result is not only advantageous to the distributor but advantageous to the most important person in the picture, the consumer...