Easterling was at the Sears in her hometown of Jersey City, New Jersey, one of only 15 full-line Sears stores still open. The two started a catalog business selling watches and jewelry in 1888, incorporating under the Sears Roebuck name in 1893. The Sears catalog was the way many Americans first started to buy mass-produced goods. File photo/AP People shop inside a Sears store in Morton Grove, Illinois, in 1961. AP Soldiers guard a Sears store in Baltimore after riots broke out following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

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