What Happened to the Sears Catalog? (And How to Earn Today)

calendar Jun 27, 2026 / · 9 min read · catalog history cashback shopping portals Sears  ·
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What Happened to the Sears Catalog? (And How to Earn Today)

For most of the twentieth century, the Sears catalog was the way a large portion of American households shopped. Not browsed — shopped. Farm families in Iowa thumbed through its pages for work boots and seed planters. Suburban households in the 1960s ordered appliances from it. Children in December circled toy pages with red pens. At its peak the Sears Big Book ran to more than 1,000 pages, listed over 100,000 items, and was printed in quantities that rivaled the most widely distributed publications in the country. When Sears discontinued it on January 25, 1993, the company quietly closed a 105-year chapter in American retail history — one that began not with furniture or appliances but with a single-product mailer for watches.

The story ends more than a century later at a Chapter 11 filing and a much-reduced sears.com that still takes orders today. For the catalog-nostalgia shopper who wants to earn something on a purchase there, the path is clearer than the company's balance sheet ever was: a cashback portal, a rewards card, and a clean click-through are all it takes.

How It Works

Richard Sears launched his business in 1886 selling watches for $14 each, and by 1888 had produced his first catalog — a thin mailer featuring only watches and jewelry. His partner Alvah Roebuck came aboard in 1887, and with investor Julius Rosenwald joining in 1895, the enterprise rapidly expanded beyond a specialty mailer into what historians now describe as the Amazon of the Victorian era. By 1895 the catalog exceeded 500 pages. By its peak years in the mid-twentieth century the Big Book listed more than 100,000 items: tools, appliances, firearms (sold by mail until 1968 regulations ended the practice), furniture, farm equipment, sewing machines, sporting goods, auto parts, and entertainment centers.

The range was genuinely extraordinary. From 1908 to 1940, Sears sold prefabricated home kits through the catalog — between 70,000 and 75,000 complete kit houses in 447 designs, ranging in price from $744 to nearly $6,000. Buyers received all the lumber, hardware, doors, windows, and millwork needed to build a house, shipped by rail. That program ran for more than three decades and left a physical mark on American neighborhoods that is still documented today. Medical and veterinary supplies, musical instruments, bicycles, baby carriages, and a 1906 dedicated tombstone catalog rounded out a product line that had essentially no competitor in rural America before the rise of chain retail.

The holiday catalog came separately. In 1933, during the depths of the Great Depression, Sears published its first dedicated Christmas catalog. It became a cultural fixture — children pored over toy sections, adults folded down pages on appliances and jewelry, and the annual arrival of the catalog was treated as the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season. By 1968, when the catalog received its official name, the Sears Wish Book ran to 605 pages: 225 pages of toys and 380 pages of adult gifts. RR Donnelley printed up to 7 million copies annually at their Chicago facility. The Wish Book was not just a catalog; it was a medium for aspiration in a pre-internet era where product photography and printed copy were how most Americans first encountered new goods.

The decline that ended both the Big Book and the Wish Book in 1993 had structural roots stretching back to the 1970s. The rise of big-box retailers — Walmart, Home Depot, Circuit City — pulled catalog shoppers into physical stores where prices were competitive and delivery was not required. Regional malls with anchor department stores drew the apparel and home goods shopper. Sears itself moved aggressively into physical retail, opening mall locations and acquiring other chains, which both reduced its catalog emphasis and loaded it with real estate commitments that became liabilities when foot traffic declined. On January 25, 1993, Sears announced it was closing its catalog division. The Big Book — just short of its centennial — was done. The final Wish Book followed that same year, ending a six-decade holiday tradition.

Sears launched wishbook.com in 1998 and sears.com in 1999, attempting to translate the catalog model to e-commerce. A 2004 merger with Kmart and a series of subsequent asset sales — including the Lands' End and Craftsman brands — failed to reverse declining revenue. Sears Holdings Corporation filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on October 15, 2018, in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, listing approximately $6.9 billion in assets against $11.3 billion in liabilities. The filing was triggered by an inability to meet a $134 million debt payment. At the time of filing, 687 stores remained open and approximately 68,000 employees were on the payroll.

Sears.com continues to operate today, selling appliances, tools, clothing, mattresses, and related categories. It is a smaller, restructured version of what the company once was — but it is a functioning e-commerce storefront, and the cashback portals have kept pace with it.

What You Can Earn

  • TopCashback — 2% cashback on Sears purchases — TopCashback lists Sears as an active retailer and currently offers 2% back on qualifying purchases, withdrawable as bank transfer, PayPal, Venmo, or gift cards. TopCashback passes its full commission through to members, so the headline rate is actual after-fee cashback rather than a gross-before-fee figure. Check the live rate on the Sears merchant page before each order, as portal rates are subject to change without notice.
  • Capital One Shopping — portal rewards on Sears purchases — Capital One Shopping is a free rewards portal that lists Sears among its merchant offers; when an active rate is showing, clicking through earns portal rewards redeemable as gift cards. Rates are merchant-specific and displayed on the Sears offer page, so confirm the live rate before each order — it can change without notice or show as temporarily unavailable. It runs independently of TopCashback, so comparing both is worth a minute before a large purchase.
  • Rewards card on the full charged amount — A flat-rate rewards card (typically 1.5–2% on all purchases) earns on the total charged at sears.com regardless of which portal delivered you to the site. Cards with elevated online-shopping bonus categories can improve on the flat rate; Sears does not fit neatly into department-store or home-improvement bonus categories on most cards, so a flat general-spend card is the most reliable fallback. The portal cashback and the card rewards are earned from separate parties and are fully additive — both pay on the same order.

How to Stack

The sequence is what makes the two outside layers — portal and card — pay simultaneously rather than canceling each other out. Start at the cashback site, not at sears.com directly. Search for Sears on TopCashback or Capital One Shopping, confirm the live rate and the qualifying categories for your item, and click through to sears.com within that same browser session. Do not navigate away to a bookmarked URL or let a coupon-finder extension fire a competing referral click; either will break the tracking cookie the portal relies on for attribution. Add items to cart and complete checkout without applying promotional codes that did not come from the portal's own merchant page.

Comparing TopCashback and Capital One Shopping before committing is worth a few minutes on larger purchases. TopCashback currently shows 2% for Sears; portal rates diverge on specific categories and during promotional periods when one portal runs a bonus event, so the higher rate on the day you buy is not always the same portal. A portal-rate aggregator can surface a third option that outpaces both on a given day — especially useful when buying appliances, where the dollar amounts make even a half-percent spread worth checking before you click. The same sequencing rule applies whichever portal wins: click through from the portal's own merchant page and skip external coupon codes that could interfere with attribution tracking.

Pay with the rewards card that earns most on general online spend. The portal rebate is a delayed credit that arrives weeks or months after the purchase settles; the card rewards accrue in the current billing cycle. Neither is contingent on the other, and they compound cleanly. A $600 appliance order earning 2% portal cashback and 2% card rewards returns $24 in combined delayed value — not transformative on any single purchase, but consistent and repeatable on spending you were already planning to make.

One practical note on sears.com's current category structure: the site reflects the leaner company that emerged from the 2018 bankruptcy restructuring. The core categories where cashback is confirmed — appliances, tools, mattresses — are where the site concentrates its inventory. Clothing and footwear carry fewer listings than the peak catalog era. If one portal shows your item type as ineligible, run the same order through the other — TopCashback and Capital One Shopping define their qualifying categories differently, so a category excluded on one may still earn on the other.

Bottom Line

Sears.com is not the 1,000-page Big Book. It is not the Wish Book that 7 million households received every August. It is a restructured online retailer that survived $11.3 billion in liabilities to continue selling appliances, tools, and mattresses under a name that still carries more cultural weight than almost any other in American catalog retail. For the shopper buying there anyway — particularly on a large-ticket appliance or tool purchase — the value layer is legitimate and easy to execute: click through a cashback portal at 2%, confirm qualifying categories, pay with a flat-rate rewards card. The 105-year catalog is gone, but the cashback on its successor site is real.

References

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