Sear's Sizzling New Vitality

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ad for Sears. Thirty-eight years ago, on their radio program, George Burns and Gracie Allen used Sears for one of their routines.

Gracie: All successful people start at the bottom. Look at Sears and Ro.

George: Sears and Ro?

Gracie: When they started, they didn't have a buck to their name.

Sears customers span every socioeconomic level. Says Chairman Telling: "The Sears customer is everybody." Raymond Kennedy, vice president and general credit manager, says, "We are the telephone book." And a fat one. Three out of four American adults, 128 million in all, will enter a Sears store some time this year. Sixty-three million people have a Sears credit card, and 26.6 million use the card regularly. Average charges per year: $500.

Sears plastic is held by 70% of households with incomes of $50,000 or more. The typical Sears credit customer earns $34,000, about $3,000 above the U.S. average for a family of four. A survey of millionaires by two professors at the University of Georgia showed that the most frequently held credit card in that group is not American Express or Diners Club but the Sears card. One of the first customers of the financial center at the Sears store in Cupertino, Calif., in the heart of the Silicon Valley, was a man who opened a $ 1.9 million account at Dean Witter Reynolds, the stockbroker that Sears bought in 1981. At the other end of the scale, a third of American households earning less than $10,000 are Sears customers too. Sears studies show that 86% of its customers are married, 54% have children, 54% are white collar, 28% blue collar and 18% retired or unemployed.

Many customers are famous. Jimmy Carter's staff gave him a set of Craftsman power tools as a farewell gift when he left the White House. Said Carter: "The Sears people came down here and told me how to set up and adjust all the equipment." In May, in Rochester, Treasury Secretary Donald Regan was in a Sears store with his son-in-law when a salesman came up to him and tried to interest him in Sears financial planning.

The new gusto at Sears is a surprising change from the dowdy, even depressed company of only a few years ago. During the 1970s Sears was wandering. Recession, inflation and a plunging birth rate were assaulting its good, sturdy and traditional markets. Sears, like many of the American families that were its customers, was suffering an identity crisis. It was being squeezed between the pricey specialty shops and discounters like K mart and Wal-Mart. A secret document known as the "Yellow Book" that leaked out of the Chicago headquarters in early 1978 admitted the company's shortcomings and warned that Sears had to get back to its roots. Said the study: "We are not a fashion store; we are not a store for the whimsical nor the affluent. Sears is a family store for middleclass, homeowning Americans."

Sears had been stepping up its efforts to lure younger, wealthier shoppers, offering them higher-priced, more stylish merchandise, from clothing to sporting goods. But it did so under the Sears brand name, which was doubly deadly. The label turned off buyers who could afford higher-priced items but did not want the middle-class image of a Sears product. Customers stayed loyal to Sears for big items like refrigerators and air conditioners but deserted the company for such staples as