Background
He was born in Albuquerque on December 18, 1901. Cushman was the son of Charles Otis Cushman, a men's clothing retailer, and Lena Hughes.
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Austin Thomas Cushman
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also known as
Joe
Education
As a boy, Cushman attended the Culver Military Institute, then the New Mexico Military Institute. He learned about the retail business by working in his father's store. Cushman studied for three years at the University of California but left in 1926, before graduating, to work as a salesman for Montgomery Ward.
Career
Known as "a retailer's retailer, " Cushman earned a reputation for surrounding himself with enthusiastic and resourceful salesmen.
He convinced Sears's board to spend more money on opening stores in the West rather than other regions of the United States.
At Montgomery Ward, Cushman rose to the rank of department manager in Oakland. In 1930, when Montgomery Ward was laying off and demoting employees, he refused to accept a demotion and left the company. He joined Montgomery Ward's archrival, Sears, Roebuck, in 1931 as a part-time salesman in its Oakland store.
The following year he was named manager in San Francisco, and in 1939, only eight years after he had joined Sears, he was put in charge of all of the company's operations in the San Francisco area. He held a number of other executive positions until 1945, when he became general manager of Sears stores in the Los Angeles area. Four years later, Cushman was promoted to vice-president in charge of Sears's Pacific Coast territory.
By 1962, one out of every three American families was a Sears customer, and Sears had become the largest retail operation in the world. The company's sales had topped $4. 5 billion a year, and it offered 140, 000 items, from farm supplies to luxury goods.
In 1962, Sears's chief executive officer, Charles Kellstadt, retired. Instead of choosing the president of Sears to replace him, Kellstadt selected Cushman, who was then sixty years old, as his successor. The nomination was approved by the company's board of directors and 160, 000 stockholders. It was speculated that Kellstadt chose Cushman because he felt a common bond with him. Each man had gotten his start in the retail business by working in his father's store. Each had directed one of the company's five regional divisions. And each bought his clothes at Sears. Moreover, Kellstadt had left Cushman with a $210 million mission to expand the company's number of stores over the next three years. Shortly before he assumed the helm, Cushman said he had no plans for sweeping changes. But once in office, he exceeded Kellstadt's expectations. During his five years at the helm (1962 - 1967), Cushman opened 164 additional stores and modernized catalog merchandise distribution centers in an $800 million expansion. Cushman was the third Sears chief executive officer to have come from Montgomery Ward. The first was "General" Robert Wood, who replaced Charles Kittle, and the second was Theodore Houser. Cushman's promotion required him to leave California for Chicago, where Sears's head office was located.
Though people might have come first with Cushman, making money did indeed seem to be his favorite pastime. He once said of a forty-foot fishing boat he had owned, "The two happiest things about my boating experience were the day I bought [the boat] and the day I sold it. " The reason was that he didn't lose anything on the boat.
By 1964, Sears had a bigger sales volume than the tobacco or furniture industries. As shopping centers sprouted across the country, they often organized around the focal point of a Sears store. Sears even had its own shopping center development subsidiary, Homart Development, which was created in 1960. The price of Sears's stock soared.
Cushman used his annual bonus to buy shares at an average cost of $2 per share. By the time he retired as chief executive officer in 1967, he had 90, 000 shares of company stock, worth about $5 million. When Cushman retired at the age of sixty-six, he had increased Sears's sales by about two-thirds. He moved back to the West Coast and lived in San Marino, California.
Achievements
Views
Quotations:
His advice to other salesmen was: "A salesman has to be friendly, and he has to be sincere. He has to know his product and believe in what he is selling. "
"There are three important things: merchandise, money and men. And the most important are people. " "I'm not a dynamic character, " Cushman said, "but I'm a good businessman. I like people, I can sell, and I love to make money. "
Personality
Cushman had no tolerance for lackluster personalities. He would say often that there was no place at Sears for a man whose blood got tired.
He was noted for his passion for constructing huge, free-standing retail stores surrounded by enormous parking lots.
An associate said of him that he was "a master of the fireside-chat method of communication. " Cushman described himself in more modest terms: as a "clean-desk man" who liked to keep business in order and in motion.
Connections
He married Paula Hannah Paiver on November 6, 1926; they had one child.
