The author, John Marek, is a writer and executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
The arrival of the Sears Wish Book in the mail was thrilling for any child of the ’60s and ’70s, but if you lived in rural Ohio where retail options were limited, at best, it was an event surpassed only by Christmas morning itself. We had a brick-and-mortar Sears a half-hour away in Sandusky, but the physical store stocked only a tiny percentage of the glorious toys, clothes and accessories found in the 600-plus pages of the Wish Book. And beyond the things I actually wanted from Santa, there were loads of things I found fascinating simply by the nature of their ebullient weirdness. There were two entire pages, for instance, devoted to pipe smoking and related endeavors, and the deluxe hookah, while not a practical item for my Christmas list, was just about the most exotic thing I’d ever seen.
I would pore over the catalog for several days and then create a list of things I wanted for Christmas. Initially, this was a note to Santa, but as I got wise to the holiday deceit, it became just a list. And it was an extensive list. Even as a small child who believed in the “magic of Christmas,” I understood Santa’s apparent financial constraints. Nevertheless, I would always include one or two “aspirational” items, like a mini-bike or a portable television. I knew full well I wasn’t going to get them, but I thought including them improved my odds of getting more of the moderately priced stuff on the list. I pictured Santa sitting up at the North Pole, agonizing over the numbers and deciding, “We just can’t swing that hovercraft for John, so let’s give him BOTH the GI Joe and the Spirograph.”
Sears published its last real Christmas Wish Book in 2011, although it sent out what was essentially a sales flier under that moniker in 2017. And Sears itself … well, that’s a very Grinchy tale, indeed. The once-dominant retail chain is down to just a handful of stores these days, some of which are only open because the lease agreements make it less expensive to pretend to operate a store there than to break the lease. The valuable in-house brands, like Craftsman and Kenmore, have been sold to other retailers; Lowe’s Home Improvement is now the home of the Craftsman brand.
The Sandusky Sears store of my childhood was on Water Street, directly across from the docks on the bay. I have only the vaguest memories of that location, but they are all of Christmas, the wind blowing the snow in off the water and Santa’s house on the square up the block. Sometime in the late ’60s, the store moved to a retail plaza on Perkins Avenue, where it shared space with a Woolworths, a Hills and a half-dozen specialty shops. In the ’80s, it moved a few miles down the road to the Sandusky Mall.
The odd thing about the company’s demise is that if one legacy retail operation was perfectly positioned to benefit from the internet and online shopping, it was Sears. Their catalog was the Amazon of its day, and more than any other national chain, including Walmart, they had the shipping and logistical expertise to fulfill millions of daily online orders. Where that all went wrong – executive incompetence or strategic misalignment – is anyone’s guess, but this is very likely Sears’ last Christmas.