This is the Atlas Obscura podcast.

I'm Johanna Mayer and right now I'm in Brooklyn at the corner of Bedford Ave in Beverly

Road in the Flatbush neighborhood.

It's a busy corner right along a bus route and I'm looking at this old sear's 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.

For a couple generations of Americans, Sears and Robot 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, vacuums, 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.

It was back in 1932 that Sears opened their store here in Brooklyn, New York.

Eleanor Roosevelt gave a speech at the opening and she made the first purchase, a pair

of baby shoes.

And despite opening right smack in the middle of the depression, this Sears in Brooklyn

became one of the top stores in the country.

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