In all of my previous visits to this store, I had never noticed that there was an HR office accessed directly off the salesfloor in this corner, along with a bulletin board displaying some sort of (presumably boring) internal information. This is a bit of an unusual sight -- I'm not sure how many stores have their own HR offices (I guess that's another sign of how big a deal this store was back in the day), and I imagine ones that do normally have them in a much less prominent location!
Generally these offices were hidden away in some back area, but sometimes they were publicly viewable or at least partially publicly viewable. The Sears at the former Westwood Mall in Houston is a good example of that. The store office corridor was very visible from the sales floor as seen in this photo from Je's Louisiana & Texas Retail Blog: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS3Z9w8t-ZT_2ZCLeSOZykE6iM-j4OexXYsnIouogGpIl1aEHm-tLrnT_m_89pj_K80OfPBAQx1Iim4Zd_SGPWbdHCoZRkFEI5ZrZKaMaAdCd8Kd8FhQ8g1Ulk03HwIls7PEkFUMuEMHo/s1600/20170924_171357.jpg
ReplyDeleteThat kind of long hallway was used in the early 1980s made for TV movie 'Adam' which was filmed at the Westwood Mall Sears. For Houston Sears fans, it was a big deal, lol.
Sears stores from this era had a lot of office space because a lot of the merchandising and marketing was done at the store level and so managers had offices to do their tasks. Obviously, over time, things became more centralized, so I'm guessing a lot of these offices were probably not in use in the Lampert era. The HR offices were probably still in use though.
Interesting, I guess I've just never noticed all of the office space in other Sears stores. These stores must have had a ton of employees back in the day before those functions were moved to central offices!
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