The Internet Archive has scans of Sears catalogs from when it was a major mail-order retailer. For example:<p>1911: <a href="https://archive.org/details/sears-roebuck-catalog-122-spring-1911" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/sears-roebuck-catalog-122-spring...</a><p>1922: <a href="https://archive.org/details/SearsRoebuckAndCoCatalog1922_201812" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/SearsRoebuckAndCoCatalog1922_201...</a><p>When I was young, they were especially known for their tools:<p>1974/1975: <a href="https://archive.org/details/SearsCraftsmanPowerAndHandTools197475" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/SearsCraftsmanPowerAndHandTools1...</a><p>More here:<p><a href="https://archive.org/search?query=title%3A%28sears+catalog%29+AND+mediatype%3A%28texts%29&sort=date" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/search?query=title%3A%28sears+catalog%29...</a>
At one point Sears owned an ISP, a bank, and a nationwide stock tracking and distribution system.<p>They were Amazon before Amazon, but just didn’t realize it.
It's even more ironic than that, since Sears <i>was</i> the Amazon of 1800s: they were America's largest mail order business and even IPO'd (1906) long before they opened their first brick and mortar storefront. You could buy anything and everything by mail from the famous Sears Catalog, up to and including entire homes: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Modern_Homes" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Modern_Homes</a>
Mildly related, but I think this is a good time for our yearly moment of silence for Radioshack.<p>The OLD Radioshack, obviously.
The fact that Amazon exists is a testament to the stunning mismanagement of Sears’ corporate leadership in the 90s and early 2000s. They had all the ingredients and instead simply set the company on fire.
Oh yeah they from what I recall they slowly dismantled it after what’s-his-face became ceo. Too big to fail before that.<p>By the end, in a lot of their stores they would have people with iPads walking around accepting payment right there in the aisles.<p>People also forget that what helps build sears’ reputation was their supply chain and curation, they mostly sold brands of good-quality stuff, a lot made in America too! They would rebrand good but basic quality items (like a wrench or sewing machine, or a shotgun or a guitar) and keep it running for years or decades.<p>My dad was given a shotgun in the 1950s, a Remington made sears-brand. It was, apparently, great! He used it a lot for like half a century.<p>I feel like a big part of the downfall was the huge lumbering corporate culture unable to cope with JIT supply lines and race to the bottom economies of consumer goods.<p>Oh well!
> I feel like a big part of the downfall was the huge lumbering corporate culture unable to cope with JIT supply lines and race to the bottom economies of consumer goods.<p>i think its simpler than that. they got so big that they didnt pay any attention to all the waste, e.g. all the ad time that they spent on the old "I'll call today" A/C commercial.
i think the infamous "I'll call now" air conditioner commercial in the '90s was a canary/sign of the mismanagement that was occurring. This commercial played during every commercial break on cartoon network, nickelodean, and the disney channel. Ive long wondered... how many kids bought AC units from sears?<p><a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4rqZZgVxnCk&pp=ygUMaWxsIGNhbGwgbm93" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4rqZZgVxnCk&pp=ygUMaWxsIGNhbGw...</a>
The internet was a paradigm shift… full of unknowns. I think you are underestimating those challenges. We only speak about Amazon now because it was the one that survived.
pets.com also failed to make it through the "carcinization" of online retail, but wasnt nearly as notable a failure because it was attempting to start an online retail business from the ground up, versus Sears' failure to adopt online retail to their already-successful B&M model. I think the Sears mode of failure is much more spectacular because it had previously thrived on a business model that's almost analgous to Amazon's, threw it away, and failed to recognize it could be effective again.
Intentionally destroyed to get access to its real estate. I dunno how the CEO is not behind bars for what he did.
I think it would have been hard to recover but yeah when Lampert got involved it was all about the financial engineering rather than the operations. I bought the shares around then but sold soon after, turned off by the conflicts and the lack of focus on ops.
Our obligation is to personal profit at the expense of everything else.<p>This is empirically the default operational behavior. It should always be assumed as opposed to our current strategy of always being baffled and shocked that it happens.<p>We could be serious about this and restructure incentives away from naked kleptocracy to avoid it.<p>I mean we never will, but we could...
If the passive investor class wanted more and better options to collect profits with low long-term risk they would actually support that kind of restructure - but alas it's all very short=sighted profit taking now that actually hurts long term growth.<p>It's no small irony that Buffet's retirement aligns with the close out as an iconic holdout of long view valuation - even his more recent moves I think showed some retreat from his previous values. Perhaps not really his direct fault, but he had fewer and fewer good investment options as time went by.
<a href="https://archive.ph/AVfou" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/AVfou</a>
Meanwhile Sears is still thriving in Mexico under different ownership.
What did they sell? A bit of everything?
Literally almost everything, up to and including entire houses. I've lived in two Sears houses, great quality stuff if not a bit small by modern tastes.<p>When I was a kid it was normal for parents to let their kids read the huge yearly Sears catalog to get ideas or pick gifts. By then they'd stopped selling items like firearms and houses but had pretty much everything else.<p>If they had the foresight, they should have become a better version of what Amazon is now.
Ironically they had the foresight, they were just too early/didn't execute. They ran an online service (co-owner with IBM and CBS) called Prodigy that competed with AOL and CompuServ, and they tried to do online shopping there.
The original Sears was the Amazon of the 20th century.
I would argue that they were a lot like Walmart (when Walmart was starting out)... clothes, electronics, sporting/seasonal goods... then they ventured out into additional services like family photography, optometry, pharmacy... really, the only difference was the mail order catalog.
I was there, 3000 years ago when Walmart didn't even sell groceries, I still remember mom commenting "It feels weird buying food at Walmart now and not even going to [regional grocery chain]".<p>And now, decades later everything is full circle. I avoid Walmart and Amazon like the plague and try to only shop at smaller outlets, whether brick-and-mortar or online. It might be slightly more expensive but I assume that's just the tax you pay to avoid a corporate monopoly hellscape.
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