Yes, I am in CT and a friend of ours was talking about Sear's houses. Seems you would pick a house plan and price and they would send all the building materials you needed to build the house. There is some way to identify if a house is a Sears House but I forgot what he told us.
Here is a link: http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1933-1940.htm
You can still do a version of this today:
https://www.84lumber.com/projects-plans/You can buy the plans or the plans and the materials.
Our local Sears and Kmart were pretty good right to the end. The stores were kept up and clean. DW and I bought all the mattresses at our house at Sears, our fridge, our dishwasher, our washer and dryer, our 42" LCD TV, some of my tools, a lawn mower, and a kitchen table. All those items have preformed well and we are picky value shoppers so the price/quality were good compared to what was available in our area. We used to have a Sears card as did the rest of our extended family.
The Kmart store seemed to frequently shoot itself in the foot as if it wanted to go out of business. When WalMart opened a super store here twenty years ago in a growing town and KMart hardly reacted. WalMart was so successful here that they built a second store and then a third store about 20 minutes away. And two more about 30 minutes away.
KMart kept toddling along when they should have remodeled the store, upped the quality of their inventory or built a "Super KMart". They lacked the efficiency and vision that WalMart has year after year.
They did keep the store clean but it was sort of like visiting the late 1980s. Not necessarily a bad thing. We shopped there alot to avoid the WalMart crowds and the WalMart shopping list creep. I need detergent, I only buy detergent.
I wholly blame upper management. They were late to internet sales. Meanwhile Walmart and Amazon among others ate KMart's lunch. KMart should have been catering to both the Dollar Store customer AND the customer who wants a bit of style and quality. I would have never bought any of their unknown brand merchandise. Who made that appliance or that TV? Why is this thing labeled with a long dead brand? Clearly made some in some far away factory and branded with a sticker promising no hope of support after the purchase.
The websites of Sears and KMart were last I looked very much riddled with third party sellers with hugely overpriced goods. I bought a small saw for my garage on clearance from another store for $150. I could buy more or less the same Chinese saw from Harbor Freight for $200. The Sears site had the same Chinese saw for $500 and up. It doesn't matter if it comes from a third party seller, some regular person who doesn't know how to get the most out of the website will see the $500 saw and decide that Sears is too expensive and move on even though it is from a third party seller. Sears/Kmart needs to rein in the third party prices. If there is some reason the saw is more than 20% more than what we all know they sell for at other retailers then it ought to be filtered out and the customer never sees it.
