When Sears Used the Market to Combat Jim Crow
After 125 years in business, Sears has filed for bankruptcy and may soon be closing its doors forever. This has elicited strong emotions, as Sears has been an integral part of America’s commercial history. But just like Blockbuster and Toys R Us, it’s time for Sears to embrace creative destruction and pave the way for newer and better services.
Sears will not soon be forgotten. But as we eulogize this beacon of American capitalism, we should also celebrate one of its lesser-known achievements: using markets to combat Jim Crow laws....
As the Washington Post reports:
“Before the advent of the mail-order catalogue, rural black Southerners typically only had the option of shopping at white-owned general stores — often run by the owner of the same farm where they worked as sharecroppers. Those store owners frequently determined what African Americans could buy by limiting how much credit they would extend.”
In many instances, store owners would refuse to sell items to their black customers until they were sure that the white consumers had completed their shopping. And often, black customers only had access to lower-quality items.... The Southern market was desperate for alternatives to their discriminatory local general stores, and luckily, the Sears Roebuck catalog filled that void.
In those days, mail order catalogs were as revolutionary as Amazon Prime’s two-day shipping is today. And not only did Sears provide all the basic household necessities, but it also provided an alternative for black consumers who feared being mistreated in public— a rather radical notion in the era of Jim Crow.
https://fee.org/articles/when-sears-use ... -jim-crow/
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There Are Four Lights!
12 Oct 2018, 11:36 am
