Sears also used to have a fantastic toy department. I ordered a lot of my GI Joe collection from their catalog, which had all kinds of accessories from companies other than Hasbro (up to and including an appropriately scaled armored car and F9F), along with full sets of figures and equipment.
The construction was farmed out, but the cars sold under the Allstate Brand.
http://cartype.com/pics/6776/full/sears_allstate_ad_53.jpg
Link goes to a pic of an Allstate 53.
Yep. They even had their own version of the Atari 2600 for awhile.
IMO, their decline really started when the toy department ceased being year-round. I still remember being shocked the first time I saw gardening supplies where the toy department was supposed to be.
Remember Major Matt Mason, from Mattel? I would love to have one of those complete Moon base sets you could order from the catalog, the ones with the battery-powered crawler.
Saying something came from Sears back when was the similar to saying you bought something off the internet now. There were plenty of Sears stores but they couldn’t carry everything in their catalog. You could order by mail, later phone, or go to the Sears store to order anything in their catalog.
You could probably replace ‘Sears’ with ‘the internet’ for many things used in the jokes referred to by the OP.
In the world of TV, this was probably most notable in a MAS*H episode where the episode spans a year and various items the cast orders from the Sears catalog act as plot devices throughout the episode. They ordered the components for a dialysis machine from there, except for sausage casings, which they instead ordered from Klinger’s favorite hot dog place in Toledo.
Ebay.
You can own one.
Many guitarists “of a certain age” learned on Sears Silvertone guitars. The coolest one, an electric, had the amplifier built into the case!
The bit I’m thinking of is more recent. Maybe 80s or 90s. The way I remember it being delivered made it seem like the joke was old, so it’s possible. It’s also possible that I’m conflating bits.
On the pilot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cordelia tells Willow (referring to her outfit), “I’m so glad you’ve seen the softer side of Sears.” (That was a Sears advertising slogan years ago, and was a slam at Willow for not wearing designer clothes.)
There’s a scene in Mean Girls where a snotty saleswoman says that her store doesn’t sell anything above a certain size, and then adds “You could try Sears”, before marching off. I’m pretty sure that line was used as a GIF.
This Calvin and Hobbes strip was the first thing I thought of.
The story I heard was that a Seersucker suit was names so because it came from Sears and looked really spiffy (gadzooks!) until the first time it was cleaned and it pretty much fell apart.
The Sears/Cox was played up in “Sophies Choice”. Fresh-Off-Boat Polish immigrant Sophie sees her upstairs neighbour all dressed up and says “I see you are vearing ze coxucker suit.” Her boyfriend who has obviously been teaching her some English words, has to correct her, “No, that’s seersucker”.
This was I’m sure because the snotty brand-conscious types associated Sears back then, like Walmart, with cheap and hence lower class clothing compared to upscale stores and brands.
Kinda. I’m rembering an old Muppet Babies episode where a door appeared out nowhere and Piggy asked where it came from and Rowlf replied Sears. Then I saw the EXACT SAME joke in a Power Rangers parody fanfic I read (exactly the same right down to it being about a door appearing out of nowhere) And there is also an old Simpsons episode where Homer is looking for Lisa’s stolen saxophone and sees a guy playing a saxophone on the street and asks him where he got it (thinking he might be the guy who stole it) and the guy says Sears
Hey, I had that motorcycle. Bought at Sears in St. Ann Missouri in 1967.
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There were also specialty catalogs. I think it was their farm catalog that we got the bees from. We found out that if two pounds of bees in a screen-sided box comes into a suburban post office on a Sunday, the postmaster will drive it to its destination personally to get it out of the post office.
Now I’m thinking:
“Aargh! Where did those bees come from?”
“Sears.”
Time was you could buy a house from Sears, all the tools to put it together, and then everything to put in it.
Back in the day, you could actually buy live animals from Sears. There always these little burros for sale. I think they were $49.99, I wanted one of those burros so bad, I put it on my Christmas list every year. Never got that cute little thing. I didn’t care we lived in the suburbs, or our mean old neighbor lady complained if I dropped a gum wrapper on the street, I just didn’t care. The heart wants what the heart wants! I think I’ll ask for one this year, hmmmm!
Don’t know if it originated with him, but it was a recurring motif in Tim Allen’s stand-up comedy, on which he built his character for Tool Time. He would be doing a story about some handyman project or another and then he’s work to the point where he needed a tool. Then he’d say, something like, “So you know where I went?” And the audience would yell “Sears”. And he would say “Damn right! Sears!” or something like that.