Edward McClelland argues that the decline and oncoming fall of a great American company tells us a lot about the changes in American society. Excerpt:

You shopped at Sears. You wore Toughskins jeans. You paged through the Fall/Winter catalog, thumbing frayed edges onto the toy section. You mowed your grass with a Craftsman lawnmower, and ate hamburgers off a Kenmore grill.

I know you shopped at Sears, because everyone shopped at Sears. In the history of the United States, there has been no more ubiquitous, unifying experience — religious, entertainment or retail — than shopping at Sears. For a culture that defines itself by consumption, it’s only fitting that this should be a department store. In 1972, the year Sears began building the world’s tallest building in downtown Chicago, three out of every four Americans visited one of its locations every year — a larger proportion than have seen “The Wizard of Oz.” Half of all households held a Sears credit card — more than go to church on Christmas. Sears’s sales accounted for 1 percent of the Gross National Product.

In an internal merchandising plan written later that decade, a Sears executive identified the company’s audience, and its identity: “Sears is a family store for middle-class, home-owning America. We are not a fashion store. We are not a store for the whimsical, nor the affluent. We are not a discounter, nor an avant-garde department store…We reflect the world of Middle America, and all of its desires and concerns and problems and faults.”

Unfortunately, it’s been all downhill for middle-class, home-owning America since then, and it’s been all downhill for Sears, too.

Yes, that was me. That was our family, in the 1970s. I remember exactly where I stood once as a child, inside the kids’ jeans department at the Cortana Mall Sears, waiting on my mother to arrive so we could buy new Toughskins (husky size — “husky” being the Sears euphemism for “fatty fatty toad boy”) for me, to start school that fall. There is a special quality of 1970s consumer culture despair, knowing even as a kid that these clothes are going to look like crap on you, but this is as good as it gets, and at least there’s comfort in the fact that everybody else you know is wearing the same stuff, looking equally crappy. When I was thinking about that stuff just now, the jingle for the Optical Department at Sears came to mind. It took about 10 seconds to find it archived online; see above.

Anyway, read the whole thing. The sociological analysis is intriguing. A year ago, I wrote about the death of Montgomery Ward, the steep decline of JCPenney, and the slow-motion collapse of Sears. I said then:

I don’t have anything philosophical or insightful to say about these places. They died in part because people like me quit shopping there, for whatever reason. Still, I get a little sentimental when I see news that JCPenney is in serious trouble. It’s like hearing that your childhood Sunday school teacher or your Little League coach, someone you haven’t seen in 30 years, but who once meant a lot to you, is in hospice care.

Same thing today. I don’t know what to say about the death of Sears, but it makes me sad, even though the last time I shopped at Sears, in the fall of 2012 (which was the first time I’d been at Sears since I was a teenager, probably), it was junky as hell, a place I’d never return to. I don’t think I know anybody who shops at Sears. As McClelland points out, most people today either shop at discount stores like Walmart, or at more specialized retailers. I don’t know about you, but I almost never go to department stores, even the more upscale ones, like Nordstroms. When I do, it feels nostalgic, but not in a pleasant way. It’s like riding around in a 1980s-model Lincoln Continental, but not one old-school enough to be cool. It’s not so much the merchandise as it is the form. Somehow over the years, I grew accustomed to buying stuff either over the web, or at specialty stores.

I’m fumbling here for something to say to express sadness over the loss of a childhood institution that I am not willing to support, for good reason. I imagine a lot of people my age feel that way about the churches they went to as kids.

UPDATE: “Chic in the times of Kojak”: James Lileks on the 1973 Sears catalog. I was six years old. This was my childhood! Thanks to the reader who pointed this out.