The Big Store: Inside the Crisis and Revolution at Sears

Donald Katz was given extensive access to Sears, Roebuck during the mid-1980s and produced this account of a company attempting to reinvent itself after losing its position as America's dominant retailer.

The historical material covers Sears at its peak, when it sold a substantial share of everything Americans bought, and the sources of that position: the catalogue, the move to suburban stores, the ownership of its suppliers, the Allstate insurance business it created, and the profit-sharing plan that made employees the largest shareholder group. Katz then covers the decline, as discounters and category specialists took share from a general merchandiser whose costs were built for a different competitive era.

The reinvention he covers is Edward Brennan's attempt to make Sears a financial services and retailing conglomerate, adding Dean Witter and Coldwell Banker to Allstate and launching the Discover card, on the theory that the customer relationship could be extended across categories. Katz reports the internal conflicts, the resistance from the retail organisation, and the difficulty of changing a company whose culture had been formed by decades of dominance. The strategy did not work and Sears divested the financial businesses in the 1990s. The book's value is the detailed portrait of a large organisation's internal resistance to change, observed as it happened rather than reconstructed afterward.