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

calendar Jun 27, 2026 / · 7 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 by the millions. When Sears stopped producing it on January 25, 1993, the company 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 started in 1886 as a 22-year-old railway station agent reselling a shipment of unwanted gold watches, and in 1888 he issued his first catalog — a thin mailer featuring only watches and jewelry. The following year he moved to Chicago and partnered with watchmaker Alvah C. Roebuck, and with investor Julius Rosenwald joining in 1895, the watch business grew into a general mail-order firm that Smithsonian Magazine calls the Amazon of the Victorian era. Over its century-plus run the Big Book grew to well over 1,000 pages and more than 100,000 items: tools, hardware, apparel, appliances, furniture, sporting goods, auto supplies, buggies, bicycles, firearms and baby carriages.

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. Patent remedies and even tombstones rounded out a product line that had essentially no competitor in rural America before the rise of chain retail.

The holiday catalog came separately. The first Sears Wish Book was published in 1933, during the Great Depression, as a toy-and-gift catalog apart from the annual Christmas catalog, and it arrived each year in August or September. Children circled toy pages and the book's arrival marked the start of the holiday shopping season. The printing scale behind the catalogs was industrial: RR Donnelley, Sears's printer from 1928, built a plant on Chicago's West Arthington Street that turned out up to 7 million copies of the catalogs a year.

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 ceased production of the Big Book. The Wish Book survived in shrinking form, and Sears Holdings brought it back in 2017 as a 120-page print, online and mobile edition.

Sears moved online with sears.com, but 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 and Rakuten — 2% cash back — checked in October 2026, TopCashback's Sears page offered 2% back on online purchases, and Rakuten also listed 2%. Check the live rate on the merchant page before each order; portal rates change without notice.
  • Capital One Shopping — 1% in rewards — Capital One Shopping's Sears page listed 1% in rewards in October 2026, redeemable as gift cards. It runs independently of the cash-back portals, so comparing all three 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, Rakuten 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. In October 2026 TopCashback and Rakuten both showed 2% for Sears and Capital One Shopping 1%; rates move during bonus events, so the higher rate on the day you buy is not always the same portal — worth checking on an appliance, where even a half-percent spread is real money. 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's terms exclude your item type, check the others' terms before buying — each portal sets its own exclusions.

Bottom Line

Sears.com is not the 1,000-page Big Book. It is not the Wish Book that arrived 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% where one is listed, 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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