The Crittenden Automotive Library

Sears

Sears
Retail Store Chain

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Official Site: Sears.com Wikipedia: Sears Sponsored Events Sears Auto Center 150 Hooters Pro Cup Series Sears Auto Centers 200 Hooter’s Pro Cup South Page Sections History Documents

A store and catalog retailer founded in 1892. In addition to basic automobile supplies, Sears sold vehicles made by the Lincoln Motor Car Works (an automaker based in Chicago and not related to the current Lincoln marque) as the "Sears Motor Buggy" from 1908-1912. The name Allstate was used for a brand of tires and as a marque for badge-engineered Kaiser Henry Js from 1952-1954.

In addition to the Sears department stores, Sears operated a chain of tire & battery service centers located near the department stores called Sears Auto Center.

Sears also created the Craftsman brand of tools, which sponsored the NASCAR SuperTruck Series by Craftsman/Craftsman Truck Series from 1995-2008.

Other private label brands incuded DieHard (batteries), Dashmate (automobile radios & tape players), Penske (automobile testing tools), and Permanex (gas cans).

History

The following section is an excerpt from Wikipedia's Sears page on 17 July 2020, text available via the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Sears, Roebuck and Co., colloquially known as Sears, is an American chain of department stores founded by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck in 1893, and was reincorporated by Richard Sears and Julius Rosenwald in 1906. Formerly based at the Sears Tower in Chicago and currently headquartered in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, the operation began as a mail ordering catalog company and began opening retail locations in 1925. The first location was in Chicago, Illinois. In 2005, the company was bought by the management of the American big box chain Kmart, which formed Sears Holdings upon completion of the merger.

Through the 1980s, Sears was the largest retailer in the United States; Walmart and Kmart surpassed Sears in sales in 1990. In 2018, Sears was the 31st-largest retailer in the United States. After several years of declining sales, Sears' parent company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on October 15, 2018. Sears announced on January 16, 2019, that it had won its bankruptcy auction and would shrink and remain open with 425 stores. Nevertheless, the trend of Sears and Kmart store closures continues, with only 61 Sears stores expected to remain open after a wave of store closures announced in July 2020.

Documents

Date	Document Name & Details	Documents
2011	TIRE RECALL NOTICE Sears Auto Center NHTSA Recall 11T002000	PDF - 405KB - 3 pages