Sears and Roebuck ......submitted by Larry Staker

If you were in the market for a watch in 1880, would you know where to get one? You would go to a store, right?
Well, of course you could do that, but if you wanted one that was cheaper and a bit better than most of the store watches, you went to the train station.
Sound a bit funny?

Well, for about 500 towns across the northern United States, that's where the best watches were found.
Why were the best watches found at the train station?
The railroad company wasn't selling the watches, not at all.
The telegraph operator was.

Most of the time the telegraph operator was located in the railroad station because the telegraph lines followed the railroad tracks from town to town.

t was usually the shortest distance and the right-of-ways had already been secured for the rail line.
Most of the station agents were also skilled telegraph operators and that was the primary way that they communicated with the railroad.

They would know when trains left the previous station and when they were due at their next station.
And it was the telegraph operator who had the watches.
As a matter of fact, they sold more of them than almost all the stores combined for a period of about 9 years.
This was all arranged by "Richard", who was a telegraph operator himself. He was on duty in the North Redwood, Minnesota train station one day when a load of watches arrived from the East. It was a huge crate of pocket watches. No one ever came to claim them. So Richard sent a telegram to the manufacturer and asked them what they wanted to do with the watches.

The manufacturer didn't want to pay the freight back, so they wired Richard to see if he could sell them.
So Richard did.

He sent a wire to every agent in the system asking them if they wanted a cheap, but good, pocket watch.
He sold the entire case in less than two days and at a handsome profit. 

That started it all.
He ordered more watches from the watch company and encouraged the telegraph operators to set up a display case in the station offering high quality watches for a cheap price to all the travelers.
It worked!
It didn't take long for the word to spread and, before long, people other than travelers came to the train station to buy watches.

Richard became so busy that he had to hire a professional watch maker to help him with the orders.
That was Alvah.
And the rest is history as they say.
The business took off and soon expanded to many other lines of dry goods. 
Richard and Alvah left the train station and moved their company to Chicago   -- and it's still there.
YES, IT'S A LITTLE KNOWN FACT -  that for a while in the 1880's, the biggest watch retailer in the country was at the train station.
It all started with a telegraph operator: 
Richard Sears and his partner Alvah Roebuck!
"SEARS and ROEBUCK" 

The Following comes from Wikipedia .....

..

Richard Warren Sears was born in Stewartville, Minnesota in 1863 to a wealthy family, which moved to nearby Spring Valley.^[5] In 1879, Sears' father died shortly after losing the family fortune in a speculative stock deal.^[5] Sears moved across the state to work as a railroad station agent in North Redwood, as well as in Minneapolis. While in North Redwood, a jeweler received an impressive shipment of watches which were unwanted. Sears purchased them, then sold the watches at a low price to the station agents and made a considerable profit.

In Minneapolis, he started a mail order watch business in 1886, calling it "R.W. Sears Watch Company." Within the first year he met Alvah C. Roebuck, a watch repairman. The next year, they relocated the business to Chicago. In 1887, R.W. Sears Watch Company published Richard Sears' first mail-order catalog – in this case, offering watches, diamonds, and jewelry. In 1889, Sears sold his business for $100,000 ($2.7 million today) and relocated to Iowa, intending to be a rural banker.^[6]

Restless, Sears returned to Chicago in 1892 and established a new mail-order firm, again selling watches and jewelry, with Roebuck as his partner, operating as the A. C. Roebuck watch company. In 1893, they renamed the company to Sears, Roebuck & Company and began to diversify the product lines offered in their catalogs. Before the Sears catalog, farmers near small rural towns usually purchased supplies – often at high prices and on credit – from local general stores with narrow selections of goods. Prices were negotiated, and relied on the storekeeper's estimate of a customer's creditworthiness. Sears took advantage of this by publishing catalogs offering customers a wider selection of products at clearly stated prices. By 1894, the Sears catalog had grown to 322 pages, featuring sewing machines, bicycles, sporting goods, automobiles (later produced, from 1905 to 1915, by Lincoln Motor Car Works of Chicago, no relation to the current Ford line),^[7] and a host of other new items. By 1895, the company was producing a 532-page catalog. Sales were greater than $400,000 ($10.9 million today) in 1893 and more than $750,000 ($22.1 million today) two years later.^[8] By 1896, dolls, stoves and groceries had been added to the catalog.

Sears Building in Chicago