Word: ward
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Wood's faith in the expanding American economy-aided by the backlog of demand for goods built up during World War II-was more than justified. Last year Sears sold $2,777,277,096 worth of goods, more than twice as much as its closest rival, Montgomery Ward. Its estimated net profit was $113 million. Sears is now the sixth biggest corporation, in dollar volume of sales, in the U.S.* Besides its mail-order business, which is run from eleven plants, Sears has 691 stores in 47 states, Hawaii and four foreign countries...
...farm price break, Rosenwald saved Sears by lending it $21 million in cash & pledges to tide it over. He made another big contribution to the company's future three years later. That was when he hired General Robert Wood, who had started on a merchandising career at Montgomery Ward...
...close friend. Before long, Wood was ordered from France to Washington as acting quartermaster general, and promoted to brigadier general. In a short time, he reorganized the chaotic Army procurement. At war's end, Julius Thorne, a Wood aide who in civilian life was president of Montgomery Ward, took the general back there with...
...general merchandise manager for Ward, Wood spent the first few months merely asking questions. "It was an uncomfortably long time," he says, "before I ran into a young man who could answer straightaway, just like that, and with figures to support his answers." The young man was 24-year-old Theodore Houser, a merchandise controller; Wood made him his assistant. As a team, Wood and Houser concentrated on the tire division. In five years, sales increased tenfold, to twice as many tires as Sears, their archcompetitor...
...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...