# Sears Without Roebuck?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sears-without-roebuck/800899>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [November 6, 2017, 5:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sears-without-roebuck/800899 "2017-11-06T17:44:58Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\
**Post date:** [November 9, 2017, 4:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sears-without-roebuck/800899/21 "2017-11-09T16:50:58Z")

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> [@Little\_Nemo](#):
>
> If you wait ten minutes, you can verify this story on Wikipedia.

😃

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**Author:** ![MacLir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9e8a1a/32.png) [@MacLir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MacLir)\
**Post date:** [November 13, 2017, 11:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sears-without-roebuck/800899/22 "2017-11-13T23:45:24Z")

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> [@Senegoid](#):
>
> Didn’t Hiawatha kill the Roebuck?

Doubtful.

Hiawatha was Native American, and roebucks are European. So far as I know they were never introduced to North America.

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**Author:** ![Powers](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/edb3f5/32.png) [@Powers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Powers)\
**Post date:** [November 14, 2017, 7:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sears-without-roebuck/800899/23 "2017-11-14T19:08:13Z")

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Sears sells a house brand of denim called “Roebuck & Co.”  
Powers &8^]

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**Author:** ![cochrane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cochrane/32/10441_2.png) [@cochrane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cochrane)\
**Post date:** [November 14, 2017, 7:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sears-without-roebuck/800899/24 "2017-11-14T19:25:53Z")

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> [@glowacks](#):
>
> I played an online game once back in the early days of the internet set at a time that Sears was a fairly young company. The game heavily implied that it was correctly called “Sear’s” by spelling it that way. However, the writer of the game was English (or at least British) and so it appears he just assumed that the ‘s’ was possessive. From that short bit of flavorful text in the game, I had assumed that’s how the company was originally named. I didn’t bother checking it against anything as it was a totally trivial point of knowledge, but now that someone else has presented information that contradicts it, I have indeed confirmed that the guy’s name was Sears, and not Sear.
> 
> Unless there was some other mail-order company around the same time called “Sear’s”, but it seems unlikely.

> [@snfaulkner](#):
>
> Might that have been done to cleverly avoid using the trademark? I know Illuminati uses a lot of just vaguely similar joke names of real things. Instead of MTV they had Empty Vee and so forth…

I have played video baseball games that renamed the General Motors fountain (now known as Chevrolet Fountain) in Detroit’s Comerica Park to “Admiral Motors” for precisely that reason, as well as removing the giant John Hancock sign from the scoreboard in Fenway Park.

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