1940s Sears Heating & Plumbing Offering

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Sears Heating & Plumbing Offering

This 1940s catalog shows the broad range of products and services Sears had to offer homeowners at the time.

Read the full story here.

Intplm.

What a great old add.
Brings me back to when I was a kid and Dad would tell me to go fill the boiler.
We had a gas fired steam boiler in "Burgundy".
I was less than ten years old and my Dad had me starting as a boiler tender.

Steamhead

What a lot of people don't know is that Sears (and Wards too) did not manufacture these units. Dunkirk made a lot of boilers for both companies. Sears got their bathroom fixtures from Universal-Rundle, and I think Eljer was Wards' supplier.

rick in Alaska

I miss Sears.
Rick

EBEBRATT-Ed

I miss Sears as well.

Big box and cheap China junk ruined them as well as a lot of the good hardware stores.

Some of Sears stuff was a little odd but it was usually decent quality.

Maybe someday we will realize (hopefully before it's too late) that we need to make our own stuff in the USA.

Maybe it's too late already?

EBEBRATT-Ed

@Steamhead

The oil burner on Pg 5, is that a "quiet may"?

STEVEusaPA

4 digit phone number..

JUGHNE

I always thought that Sears could have been where Amazon is today.

They had the solid name, good products, warehouses, plenty of stores in good locations that could have been distribution centers.
Keep a few stores open and get tuned in online.

They apparently just did not have the right people in place for this to happen.

Or possibly because they would not sell the cheapest junk made.....more people want to buy this today, complain a little and then throw it away.

Steamhead

EBEBRATT-Ed said:

@Steamhead

The oil burner on Pg 5, is that a "quiet may"?

Looks like a Quiet-Heat.

STEVEusaPA said:

4 digit phone number..

Either a small step-by-step office or they still had operators doing everything.

jumper

JUGHNE said:

I always thought that Sears could have been where Amazon is today.

They had the solid name, good products, warehouses, plenty of stores in good locations that could have been distribution centers.
Keep a few stores open and get tuned in online.

They apparently just did not have the right people in place for this to happen.

Or possibly because they would not sell the cheapest junk made.....more people want to buy this today, complain a little and then throw it away.

Yes it boils down to management. Bezos hired people who did the job while Sears had employees who obviously did not care enough about their employer. Another example is how Sears insisted that Prodigy fail when Sears bailed out.

retiredguy

@STEVEusaPA; A 4 digit phone number? I do remember that we had to say the town we lived in and then a 4 digit number. We also used 2 cans and a string.

rick in Alaska

When I first got to Homer, it was small enough that there was only one prefix, so people would just give you the last four numbers. That took a bit of getting used to. And the village across the bay is small enough that they only give the last two numbers. Both areas have grown so much that it is not like that now. Times have changed.
Oh yeah; Homer still had ten cent pay phones!
Rick