When I think of Sears, I think of the holidays when I was young and my dad would take me out for some last minute Christmas shopping for the other members of my family. However, this holiday season there will be no last minute gift runs as Sears is the latest casualty of the retail industry. But before they were a name associated with my holidays or a case study in “creative destruction,”  Sears seemingly filled a role as an equalizer in a segregated society.

A Washington Post article dives into the Jim Crow South to examine the anomaly in conducting business that the Sears Catalog was. At a time when segregation was a societal norm, reinforced by the laws that state governments had passed, certain businesses reaped great rewards from moving past these boundaries and courting a market that many in the South had spurned, African Americans. This article brings to the forefront the relationship between business, state, and society as Sears acted in a way that diverged from the norms of state and society at the time.

During this time, African Americans attempting to shop at brick and mortar stores faced many challenges:

…Store owners fiercely defended the white-supremacist order by making black customers wait until every white customer had been served and forcing them to buy lower-quality goods. “A black man who needed clothing received a shirt ‘good enough for a darky to wear’ while a black family low on provisions could have only the lowest grade of flour,” historian Grace Elizabeth Hale wrote in an essay published in “Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights.”

Things changed with the Sears catalog. The Sears Catalog enabled African Americans in the South access to the same quality of goods as their white counterparts without fear of antagonism and humiliation. In addition to this, the Catalog appealed to rural Southerners who were not as highly educated by allowing requests written illegibly or in broken English to be processed and have the goods shipped.

In addition to business, state, and society, we also see the appearance of unintended consequences  and unacknowledged assumptions. While the owners of Sears may not have been intentionally championing consumer equality, store owners in the South would have you believe that was their exact intention.Threatened store owners spread the rumor that Sears was actually being run run by “black men” who “could not afford to show their faces as retailers.” They took to organizing burnings of the Sears catalogs and offered rewards for those who brought the most to be burned. The company responded by publishing pictures of their owners, clearly showing they were white, to put down these rumors that (tragically) could have affected their operations.

We have talked in class about how firms adjusted their strategies to different groups in society dividing them along lines of gender, region, class, and ethnicity, however the Sears catalog strikes me as something different and perhaps as something revolutionary for its time even if that was not is intention. Justice in our society is often portrayed by Lady Justice wearing a blindfold as if to view each case impartially and not let certain biases cloud her judgement, “Justice is blind.” It seems that Sears created a somewhat similar effect in the marketplace. It did not matter who you were, what color your skin was, your gender, or even your education. The sears catalog simply provided goods to be bought, and if you requested goods and provided the money, you would receive the goods. In this way, Sears made commerce blind, and whether it was their intention or not, they challenged a societal structure rooted in discrimination and enabled a generation of African Americans an equal access to the market place.