Executives: Pick of the Rack

For a retailing man, the pick of the rack is the chairmanship of Chicago-based Sears, Roebuck & Co. With annual sales of $6.4 billion, the company is the world’s biggest merchandiser, ranks fifth among all U.S. corporations, counts one out of every three U.S. families a Sears credit card holder. Last week Sears Chairman Austin T. Cushman, who reaches mandatory retirement age (65) next month and will step down at the end of January, announced a successor to his $225,000-a-year job. Passing over President Crow-dus Baker, 60, Sears chose Gordon M. Metcalf, 59, vice president in charge of Sears’s Midwestern operations since 1957. No man to relish a lame-duck term, Cushman introduced his successor at a press conference by saying: “I’d like to say that I’m still chairman until Feb. 1.”

Through the Ranks. During Cushman’s 41 years as chairman, Sears has accomplished a rare feat among corporate giants: it is not only the largest company in its field but the fastest-growing as well. Sears sales have increased 50% since 1961 while profits have grown 47%, to $323 million, in 1965. At the same time, under a $750 million expansion program, Sears has opened 160 new retail stores, which by year’s end will total 890 on four continents. Sears’s main asset has been a canny appreciation of its changing market, increasingly affluent and largely suburban. Among the innovations are the

Vincent Price Collection of original art and, this year, Sears’s National Treasures Collection of reproductions of Early American furniture. Sears catalogues are as slick as fashion magazines and offer such things as women’s pants suits, scuba gear, a 17-ft. cabin cruiser. Among a total of 120,000 items, Sears makes a modern virtue out of sticking with many of its antique bestsellers, including cattle dehorners and spare parts for Model A Fords.

As Sears Midwestern chief, Gordon Metcalf had 550 stores in twelve Midwestern states that last year rang up sales of $1.5 billion—as much as sales of such corporate giants as General Foods and Eastman Kodak. The son of a Sioux City, Iowa, minister, Metcalf like Cushman came up through the company’s retailing ranks. He joined Sears in 1933, sold men’s ties, socks and shorts at a Bay City, Mich., store. After six weeks Sears made him assistant manager and boosted his pay from $27.50 to $30 a week for what the company called “an executive job.” Metcalf soon found that that meant he “could work 80 hours a week for the company for an extra $2.50.”

On with the Spread. Executive Metcalf has been doing better since. On top of his current $140,000-a-year salary, he has picked up, in options and profit-sharing over the years, 30,000 shares of Sears stock worth $1,400,000 at current market values.

Metcalf’s main responsibility will be to keep profits increasing through expansion. Already strong in Canada and Latin America, Sears plans to do much of its spreading in Europe, starting with a pair of retail stores in Spain. Though Metcalf admits that the U.S. economy is “a little soft,” he sees no reason why, with normal growth, Sears should not be doing $9 billion to $10 billion in annual sales within the next five years.