Richard Warren Sears, American businessman, co-founded Sears (born 1863)

Richard Warren Sears was an American businessman who co-founded the department store Sears, Roebuck and Company with his partner Alvah Curtis Roebuck.

Sears, Roebuck and Co., commonly known as Sears, is an American chain of department stores and online retailer founded in 1892 by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck and reincorporated in 1906 by Richard Sears and Julius Rosenwald, with what began as a mail-order catalog company migrating to opening retail locations in 1925, the first in Chicago. Through the 1980s, Sears was the largest retailer in the United States. In 2005, the company was bought by the management of the American big box discount chain Kmart, which upon completion of the merger, formed Sears Holdings. In 2018, it was the 31st-largest. After several years of declining sales, Sears' parent company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on October 15, 2018. It announced on January 16, 2019, that it had won its bankruptcy auction, and that a reduced number of 425 stores would remain open, including 223 Sears stores.