By
Terry Orr
(Sharing an
email – thanks Diane)
If you were in the market for a
watch in 1880, would you know where to get one? You would go to a store, right?
Well, of course you could do that, but if you wanted one that was cheaper and a
bit better than most of the store watches, you went to the train station!
Sound a bit funny? Well, for about
500 towns across the northern United States, that’s where the best watches were
found. Why were the best watches found at the train station?
The railroad company wasn't selling
the watches, not at all.
The telegraph operator was.
Most of the time the telegraph
operator was located in the railroad station because the telegraph lines
followed the railroad tracks from town to town.
It was usually the shortest
distance and the right-of-ways had already been
secured for the rail line.
Most of the station agents were
also skilled telegraph operators and that was the primary way that they
communicated with the railroad.
They would know when trains left
the previous station and when they were due at their next station.
And it was the telegraph operator
who had the watches.
As a matter of fact, they sold more
of them than almost all the stores combined for a period of about 9 years.
This was all arranged by
"Richard," who was a telegraph operator himself. He was on duty in
the North Redwood, Minnesota train station one day when a load of watches
arrived from the East. It was a huge crate of pocket watches. No one ever came
to claim them.
So Richard sent a telegram to the
manufacturer and asked them what they wanted to do with the watches.
The manufacturer didn't want to pay
the freight back, so they wired Richard to see if he could sell them. So
Richard did.
He sent a wire to every agent in
the system asking them if they wanted a cheap, but good, pocket watch. He sold
the entire case in less than two days and at a handsome profit. That started it
all.
He ordered more watches from the
watch company and encouraged the telegraph operators to set up a display case
in the station offering high quality watches for a cheap price to all the
travelers.
It worked!
It didn’t take long for the word to
spread and, before long; people other than travelers came to the train station
to buy watches.
Richard became so busy that he had
to hire a professional watchmaker to help him with the orders.
That was Alvah.
And the rest is history as they
say. The business took off and soon expanded to many other lines of dry goods. Richard
and Alvah left the train station and moved their company to Chicago -- and it’s
still there.
YES, IT’S A LITTLE KNOWN FACT that
for a while in the 1880's, the biggest watch retailer in the country was at the
train station.
It all started with a telegraph
operator: Richard Sears and his partner Alvah Roebuck!
