Finance History | 924 South Homan Avenue — Forty-One Dollars and Sixty Cents on a Studebaker

People treat Allstate as a Northbrook insurer and a slogan about good hands.

The first policies were sold from this Sears mail-order plant on Chicago's West Side.

On 17 April 1931, in the second year of the Depression, Sears, Roebuck and Co. opened Allstate Insurance Company as a subsidiary.

The name was borrowed from a Sears tire brand chosen in a 1925 catalog contest.

The idea came from insurance broker Carl L. Odell, who proposed to his neighbor Robert E. Wood, then president of Sears, that auto cover could be sold by direct mail and through the catalog.

Cutting the agent commission was the point.

The first policy insured a 1930 Studebaker for 41.60 dollars in 1931 currency for the year. By the end of 1931 Allstate had 4,217 active car policies.

The first claim, in the company's telling, was a pried-off door handle walked into a one-room office inside this complex. In 1933 an Allstate booth at Chicago's Century of Progress fair made the first agent sale.

A permanent counter opened inside a Sears store in 1934. The catalog company had become an insurer that still used the catalog's rooms.

On 3 June 1993 Sears sold 78.5 million Allstate shares at 27 dollars each. The offering raised 2.12 billion dollars in 1993 currency, then the largest initial public offering in United States history.

Sears distributed its remaining stake to shareholders on 30 June 1995. Allstate became a free-standing listed company under the ticker ALL.

The pin is the public ground at the Merchandise Building, 924 South Homan Avenue.

The tower is a landmark. The interior floors are not a tour.

The mechanism is mail-order distribution applied to a regulated premium, so a retailer could underwrite cars without a branch network.

Photo: Teemu008, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Sears, Roebuck and Company Complex, Homan Square.