Retailing: New Boss at Sears

Two weeks ago in Los Angeles, Austin Thomas Cushman, 60, vice president in charge of the West Coast operations of Sears, Roebuck & Co., got a career-capping phone call from Sears Chairman Charles H. Kellstadt. Kellstadt, who four months ago reached Sears’s customary retirement age of 65, wanted to know whether Cushman would like to replace him in his $158,000-a-year job. It was quite a prospect: Sears, the giant Chicago-based retailing empire, counts one U.S. family in three among its customers. Last year it racked up sales of $4.5 billion on 140,000 items from mink coats to castration bands (for farm use). This week, in the Sears tradition that the outgoing chief taps his own successor, Kellstadt will submit Cushman’s nomination to the board of directors. Approval by Sears’s 160,000 stockholders next May is a foregone conclusion.

“I Can Sell.” Skipping over half a dozen other candidates, including President Crowdus Baker, 55, Kellstadt picked a successor who is remarkably like him self. Both Kellstadt and Cushman broke into retailing by working in dry goods and clothing stores owned by their fathers, both have headed one of Sears’s five big regional divisions, and both wear clothes that look as if they come off the Sears racks (and do). New Mexico-born, Cushman left the University of California after his junior year to join Sears’s archrival, Montgomery Ward, rose to a department manager in Oakland, but quit in 1930 rather than take a Depression demotion.* He joined Sears as a part-time salesman, by 1949 had climbed to command of the eight-state Western region.

“I’m not a dynamic character, but I’m a good businessman,” says Cushman. “I like people, I can sell, and I love to make money.” Among other things, Cushman sold Sears’s board on spending more for expansion in the West than in any other region, with the result that the company’s Western sales have spurted 200% since 1949 (v. a nationwide increase of 98%).

He also won a reputation for surrounding himself with salesmen as energetic as him self. “A salesman,” says Cushman, as he pops a piece of chewing gum into his mouth, “has to be friendly, and he has to be sincere. He has to know his product and believe in what he is selling.” “We Can’t Stop Trying.” Cushman’s chief job over the next three years will be to carry out a $210 million expansion program that is Kellstadt’s legacy to Sears and an even more ambitious growth plan than General Robert Wood’s $300 million, six-year (1946-52) expansion bet on a postwar boom.

Under the new plan, which is to be bankrolled out of earnings and depreciation, Sears will open 37 new stores, dress up 69 of its 741 existing ones, increase floor space by 14%. In addition, Sears plans more sales of services. It intends to expand its Allstate auto clubs and travel plans, is already dickering to buy its second savings and loan association and is investigating the idea of going into mutual funds.

Says Salesman Cushman: “I don’t think we’ll ever be in a position to get all the business in the world—but we can’t stop trying. I love to hear the sound of that cash register ringing.”

* Cushman will be the third former Ward’s employee to become chairman of Sears. The others: General Robert E. Wood, who was fired by Ward in 1924, and Theodore Houser, who quit Ward to follow Wood in 1928.