This is the Atlas Obscura podcast. I'm Johanna Mayor and right now I'm in Brooklyn at the corner of Bedford-Ab and Beverly Road in the flat bush neighborhood.

It's a busy corner right along a bus route.

And I'm looking at this old Sears store. It's closed now and it's really big. It's got

all these art deco designs on it, kind of like what you'd see on the Empire State Building.

And there's this big tower that says Sears robot and company.

Inside this store, 50 years ago, a group of teenagers went to work.

And inside this store, their lives changed forever.

So today, we're going to meet them, and we're going to go inside.

Come for the deals, stay for the love story, after this. When shopping you must go a hunting price is low

says robot fires are bargain flies.

And shopping you must go.

Sills robots,

Sures robot, Sures robot,

more value for what you pay.

Sills robot, Sills robot, Sills robot,

Sills robot, Sills robot,

real value every day.

For a couple generations of Americans, Sears and Roboc was the biggest name in retail.

Sears actually started as a mail order catalog back in the late 1800s.

The business model was that you could buy any item that you could possibly imagine all in one place.

Vacumes, clothes, guns, even entire houses.

People could shop without ever leaving their homes, kind of like Amazon, before Amazon. The first brick and mortar store was built in 1925 and they expanded quickly.

...