The Sears Allstate, a Kaiser Henry J in disguise, was an unmitigated flop. The whole notion of Sears selling a car was a stretch to start with, but they might have found something a bit more appealing in any case. No wonder these women are trying to distract the reader from the poor little car.
It works. What car?
Amazing. Normally the photographer will have the girls looking at the car adoringly, or caressing the car, to bounce the viewer’s attention from girl to car. Here the girls are actively LOOKING PAST the car, in the same way that a cat actively ignores an unwanted object or human.
THERE IS NOTHING HERE. IT DOESN’T EXIST.
I’m going to guess this was a little photoshop magic (before there was photoshop) where photos of the models seem to have been superimposed onto an already existing photo of the Allstate.
It would explain why they’re not looking at the car but appear to be looking at each other, as if they’re trying to imitate each other’s pose. In fact, I’d wager you could find the original photos in some Sears catalog from the same timeframe in the swimwear section.
Yep, as we can’t see the feet of the foreground model (really hard to fake that), the background model is against a neutral grey all around, plus neither are placed where shadows would be in the shot.
It’s a pity that girls don’t appear in car ads anymore.
I remember going to an auto show and watching the beautiful women models trying to show the 92-98 Buick Skylark. That was probably the dumpiest looking car ever. No amount of sequins and curves made that car look good.
If they wanted to make it look sleek they should have parked it next to an Austin A40 Somerset.
Can’t polish a turd, no matter how hard one tries…
Ahem: “The whole notion of Sears selling a car was a stretch to start with….”
Sir: The Sears Roebuck company slogan was, “Sears has everything”.
My grandfather grew up in a Sears mail-order house.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-house-that-came-in-the-mail/
And, for what it’s worth the (see space between girls where car should be, above) wasn’t the first time Sears offered a car for sale….if you count motorbuggies as cars that is, and the ad even, sorta has a girl in it too….. maybe the grandma of the two in the 1952 ad!
That’s an excellent link, thank you. And thanks to Mr. Shafer as I know how to properly pronounce Cairo, IL, mentioned in the article. We had Sears houses around us when I lived in Oakland, CA and likely other places too, a very cool slice of history for the house aficionado.
And yes, I don’t think it’s that odd either that Sears sold cars, I fully expect Amazon to do so in the future as well, and what is Amazon if not really Sears 2.0. Sooner or later some manufacturer with spare capacity will build a Prime Bezos XLE to spec for Amazon and have it sold through them…Plenty of buyers just want a decent value and if it takes two days to be delivered on a trailer behind an Amazon ProMaster, that’s even better.
Lokki’s link has now got me wanting to dive down a rabbit hole. Here’s an article from http://www.searshomes.org about the mill. It seems Cairo has many Sears homes, many of which are still standing.
https://searshomes.org/index.php/2010/08/02/sears-modern-homes-and-the-mill-in-cairo-illinois/
Sears sold the mill after World War II.
Also, one of Sears first round of cars was on display at a museum in Branson several years ago. It was quite antiquated when new.
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/museum/museum-report-the-branson-auto-farm-museum/
I live in West Michigan and know there are a couple Sears homes in Saugatuck Michigan. Someday I want to drive by to see them. They have been listed in some tourist maps there.
On the Allstate car yeah they were dumpy and ugly but now so rare. Saw one intact at a junkyard where the penned off intact cars did not get parted out or junked. I was glad to see that. Ugly but still a piece of history. I don’t know whatever happened to it though. I think that’s the only Allstate I ever saw. Did see a few Henry J’s through the years though. Most of those cars were either turned into tubbed drag racers like ’70’s Chevy Monzas or just trashed and junked. Some have been preserved and make the car show circuit.
True, Sears did have a previous stint selling automobiles with the “Moto Buggy,” but that one didn’t last long either.
In many ways, Sears stores were not set up to be car dealerships. One big issue was they did not want to be in the used car business, so they did not accept trade-ins. Also, the Allstate was one model, a compact coupe. Sears had nothing for buyers interested in any other kind of car.
I was just reading this article yesterday about how Amazon is following in Sears’ footsteps from a century earlier: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-08-21/amazon-department-store-push-and-sears-history , as Amazon prepares to open updated versions of brick-and-mortar department stores. The parallels are uncanny: both businesses started out selling a single product (for Sears, watches; for Amazon, books) but quickly widened to other related categories, then to unrelated categories. Each waited several decades before starting physical stores. Sears during their growth period was always ahead of trends. They correctly predicted the growth of suburbs after WW2 made possible by affordable cars, and bought land when it was still cheap and built stores with huge parking lots there that attracted other retail and housing. When people moved to the suburbs, Sears was there waiting for them.
By the ’90s, Sears was perfectly positioned to take advantage of the emerging era of e-commerce. They already had a massive distribution network needed to ship out the catalog orders. All they needed to do was replace printed catalogs with a well-designed website and interface it was their existing distribution infrastructure. The tech for providing secure transactions was falling into place around that time, and many companies realized online retailing would become huge. But no matter how many orders came in via your online presence, you needed a way to fulfill those orders. The distribution network Amazon took decades to build, Sears already had. Sears should have been Amazon. Instead, Sears discontinued their catalog in 1993 and laid off 30,000 workers involved in the mail-order operation. Less than a year later, Amazon opened their virtual doors and effectively became what Sears could have, and should have been.
Will Amazon ever have their own car? Given that Apple is rumored to be designing a car, with Google and Samsung dipping their toes in, I wouldn’t write off the possibility.
Sears did try something like this in a partnership with IBM. Was called Prodigy. Shut down in 2000. My aunt Ilona worked for Sears back in the ’50’s. Back then they sold scooters and mopeds. I think the scooters were Vespas and the mopeds were made by Puch. She brought me a coloring book showing several models of each. I lost the coloring book.
Stephen Manes wrote a brutally funny column about Prodigy in PC Magazine, titled “It Don’t Get No Better Than This.”
So it seems!
Stephen Manes’ column in PCMag was hilarious. In another column from around that time he described the typical evolution of a new software app, which in those days often cost hundreds of dollars:
Version 1.0: buggier than Maine in June: eats data.
Version 1.1: eats data only occasionally; free ugrade to avold litigation by disgruntled users of version 1.0.
Version 2.0: the version originally planned as the first release (except for a couple of data-eating bugs that just won’t seem to go away). No free upgrades or the company would go bankrupt.
Version 3.0: the revision that was in the works when the company goes bankrupt.
Full column here: https://books.google.com/books?id=w1aA2lOwdNIC&pg=PA55#v=onepage&q&f=false
Prodigy was a good idea in that pre-Web era, but the execution was awful. The other problem was that the tech to display photographs (much less video), make secure credit card transactions, and much more wasn’t available yet, and everything was too slow over dial-up modems and too low-resolution to allow for online shopping or most else of what Prodigy tried to do. Sears took the wrong lesson from Prodigy’s failure – that people didn’t want to buy stuff or share things about their life online. Instead, they just needed to wait until the the internet to mature.
I have always said that Sears, or as it was once called Sears and Roebuck was internet shopping before there was internet shopping, or even the internet. It’s just mind boggling that they couldn’t figure out the plot. They wrote the book.
Yes, and on the other hand, the book they wrote—the Sears and Roebuck cattledog—was commonly used as outhouse toilet paper…!
Does Volvo still have the Amazon name trademarked?
No, and in fact Volvo almost couldn’t use the name anywhere because it in fact conflicted with another company’s trademark (Kreidler, the German motorcycle manufacturer). In the end, Volvo agreed to only use the name “Amazon” in Sweden…and the rest of the world (including the US) got the 120 series cars; which many people still refer to as “Amazons”.
Models Helen Jones and Sue Shaw posed naked on the Aston Martin stand at the 1964 (IIRC) Earls Court Motor Show. It worked too well: they drew attention to themselves, not to the cars.
https://www.sfgate.com/cars/slideshow/Getty-album-A-brief-history-of-models-at-motor-108441/photo-7884457.php
Sadly, the models were only at the press-preview day – when the punters were allowed in the girls were gone…..
The location is correct, but I think the actual date was October 19, 1971. Seems accurate, given the styling of the the auto (which I’m not sure is an Aston Martin, either).
Here’s link to a more revealing photo of those girls on a couple of TVRs (presumably at the same show).
(Warning: B&W but still not NSFW):
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-hOLGPhRsUU0/UQmbA-gbIpI/AAAAAAAAXxo/MBfupLPQRMc/s1600/original.jpg
Neither of them is hard on the eye, but I like the one on the hood/bonnet of the Tuscan V8 and roof of the other one. Which one is which?
I think the one on the Tuscan and the roof is Helen Jones. The one on the bonnet of the second TVR is Sue Shaw.
From what I can gather, neither was particularly bashful or camera shy.
The car seems to be a TVR Vixen.
Here’s a more G-rated photo of the girls:
Might as well get a Sears pancho to complete the picture…
The hard sell.
Look at the lighting and the shadows on the girls and then look at the Kaiser err Allstate. Obviously not the same in any respect.
That said, I’d rather have an Allstate than a Versa. It looks better by any measure.
Yet another car I’ve grown to like over the years, though I still think the frontal treatment on both the Sears and the Henry J looks a bit like a caricature of genitalia.
Still, mostly just an honest little transportation module.
It’s interesting that the early Allstates used the older Henry J tail lamps as body hole plugs, as well as the newer ones mounted to the fender tips. Later ones has two chrome plugs to fill the holes, or maybe reverse lights if you felt like luxury.
Sex sells unless it’s trucks.
Then chrome sells.