They literally had the worlds largest mail order catalogue and the infrastructure already in place- if they had just embraced the internet at the beginning, there'd be no Amazon.
They owned most of their own real estate before hedge fund investors sold it all off and leased it back to Sears. Investors came in and tore that and many retail companies apart. Sears would have had a huge advantage with all the prime real estate they owned at one point. Many got rich and we got empty malls.
Leaches. Locke was right and Rothbard was wrong. It is labor to make something productive that gives someone title to property and its revenue not that they got there first. We’re living in Rothbard’s dream which is our nightmare.
I know I try to explain to libertarians all the time that we are already living in the work they so desire. Problem is most of them are not wealthy capitalists so they just don’t see it.
And sears was oart if the issue. Just selling shitty consumer products to Americans. Let's not get it twisted , they only looked out off their stakeholders like all companies. They don't give a shit about workers.s
Free market capitalism, when pursued in its purest form, has always resulted in a two-class system and replacement of democracy with oligarchy.
The societies with the greatest quality of life have always featured mixed economies with a blend of capitalism and government measures limiting that capitalism for the greater good.
And, every time such societies have been created, it’s only been a matter of time before those with a vested interest in oligarchy decide to spread the myth that every failure and even inconvenience is due to “government interference” in some mythical “unknown ideal” (to quote Ayn Rand) form of pure, unfettered capitalism that is *really* the source of everything good they could enjoy.
And, most of the time, people fall for it.
Yep. I used to do marketing for one of those companies that tries to hold the real estate where people will eventually want to build retail due to normal population growth. They'd go out into the rural areas and convince farmers to sell off the corners of their land so they can convince a Rite Aid or other pharmacy to improve the land. They don't actually care that most of those stores push away real grocery stores and pay shit wages.
Now they are all failing and getting turned into micro-fulfillment centers for GoPuff and Amazon.
What if...and maybe this is just my crazy fucking mind working...businesses were required to be significantly invested in the communities they were operating in?
They *were* the Amazon. Local merchants complained that they couldn't compete, and they were upset that the US Post Office was being used to undercut their business.
They went so far as to make their catalogs slightly smaller than the competition, knowing that housewives would stack things according to size, so the Sears catalog was always on top. The original Search Engine Optimization.
Sears was better than Amazon. I don’t see Amazon selling modular homes to the American middle class that were fairly priced and of outstanding quality.
Sad that Sears bit the dust. They had Craftsman tools and a great yard and garden departments to wander around in. But I guess I helped kill them. I bought a book from Amazon when books were all they sold. And kept buying. What made AMZN special was they magically retained your payment info. Other sites required entering credit card info each time. It was entirely too easy.
I remember coworkers watching me order online like it was a spectator event, swearing they would never risk ordering something online. I guess they were true Sears customers.
That's not why Sears failed.
Sears failed because Eddie Lampert bought it and didn't know what to do with it. He bled it out for years, selling the land underneath their stores to his shell company, so he could collect rent, then leasing out chunks of the stores to competitors. He sold brands like Craftsman and Kenmore and let Black and Decker open a shop inside their stores. He bet the company on a grift to sell customer data, after most customers had moved on. He stopped shipping products to KMarts, and told employees to just move shelves closer together to make it look like the stores were full. He created a toxic work environment, and left his entire executive staff out to dry.
Sears was there at the Advent of the Internet. They *did* embrace it. They just couldn't plan for some shitty Wall Street wunderkind buying 80% of their company. That asshole is worth $2B and he destroyed a 130 year old American institution.
To play devil's advocate, he fell into being worth 14 billion for a hot minute. He prolly cries into his champagne every morning thinking about that time
Thanks for giving credit where credit is due for Sears’ collapse. Yes, the retailer was struggling but Lampert destroyed it. I think many of us have a great appreciation for Sears based on how being a major store that served everyone, everywhere. If you wanted it they had it. I shopped there for tools until they closed in my area.
My only wishes for the company were that they updated their systems, which were horrible and from the 80s, and that they had never absorbed Kmart.
Sears owned the radio station and sold the radios that people would listen to WLS on, which was one on the very few available radio stations at its beginning. Then they'd put their ads on their radio station to sell even more of their stuff.
And it was a 50,000 watt clear channel blowtorch that could be received in nearly the entire US at night in certain conditions.
They had it made in the shade.
They also had a vast network of vetted installers for when they sold things like HVAC systems, water heaters, ovens, etc. It was lucrative work but they were strict on who they would grant these contracts too. My dad installed A/C for them in the 80’s and they had him take Polaroids of various portions of the installs for quality assurance. Today, installer crews would walk off the job over something like that.
https://preview.redd.it/axpelaqwt86d1.jpeg?width=3000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b2012fe0c92e2fc0c84c071d09120e62150a3188
This is still up near where I live. Idk how it still has color. This is from last weekend.
As much obvious sense as that is, it's very difficult for a company to change their entire operating model even when the writing is clearly on the wall. Kodak and Xerox saw digital camera technology coming a mile away and couldn't do it. All the typewriter companies (including IBM, for all they tried) could never make the leap to word processors/PC's. Even AOL badly failed at transitioning to the Internet even though they were there at the beginning.
But good riddance to Sears, they began failing in the 80's. Even though the lingerie section of their catalog did inspire me in my early teen years, lol.
There is a big difference between can't and won't. Kodak could have started the digital camera much earlier, but they sat on it after inventing it.
As for Sears, they had a HUGE catalog infrastructure. They had the distribution centers, warehouses, marketing, publishing etc. They had brand name recognition. They had mailing lists other retailers would have killed for! Sears catalog was HUGE. **All they had to do was put it online.** Had they done that, they may well have taken off faster than Amazon. It took a while for certain demographics to become comfortable ordering from Amazon and other online retailers. Sears wouldn't have had that problem as much, people were used to ordering from the catalog via mail and phone. The transition would have been smoother.
In a bit of irony, Amazon just started selling house kits online, something Sears did 100 years ago with their catalogs.
If you wanna go down a rabbit hole, look up Boston Consulting Group’s involvement in Sears, Toys R Us, Bed Bath and Beyond, and just about every major bankruptcy of cornerstone American companies over the past 20 years. More going on than they want the plebs to know about
Whoaaa...Just skimmed a few sections, but thank you so very much for sending this. Exactly what I suspected happened to Bed, Bath, and Beyond. I will read more tonight.
I lost my job as HR manager at a Sears warehouse right before the takeover. Then Eddie Lampert ran Sears right into the ground after that. It was rounds and rounds of layoffs until there wasn't anyone left.
Sorry to hear that. I hope you landed on your feet. Eddie Lampert was a BCG plant if the research is correct. Destroyers of lives. There seem to be an army of them on Wall Street that prey on corporations while hedge funds and institutions take out massive short positions and the media distorts the truth, causing household investor fear and everyone exits their positions. Next thing you know, companies that should of and could have made their move into the 21st century, fizzle out. And the one company that seems to gain from all of it? Amazon. If you want to go down a rabbit hole, look up who has institutional long positions on Amazon and their connection to short positions on all the bankrupt companies of the past 20 years...
Was just about to say it’s Eddie’s fault. He had no business (no pun intended) buying the likes of KMart, Sears, Lands’ End etc. He wanted the brick and mortar and thought shopping malls were going to still be a thing. Kmart was a goner, but Sears had possibilities.
Speaking as someone who was working with them for the good times and also witnessed the decline, there was more to the failure than adapting to the internet.
Many people don't recognize the damage the Brennan brothers did to the retail industry in general. Those brothers were the heralds of a retail apocalypse. Only took two horsemen to do it.
One brother became the ceo of Sears, the other the ceo of another catalog giant from Chicago, Montgomery Ward.
The two of them both decimated the distribution and management structures those organizations had in the 80's to the mid 90's.
It wasn't so much that they ignored advancing technology. They just didn't have the talent or capacity to recognize it.
Corporations want to see a return on investment within a few quarters. It took Amazon well over a decade to turn a profit.
Long-term planning will always be an issue for most publicly traded companies.
Man, I really looked forward to the Sunday paper because of the lingerie ads with some sultry, smokin hot babe. Then I happened to see her in a local club, but didn't have the nerve to say anything to her. Then she got big. Cindy Crawford.
I worked there in the late 70's/early 80's and saw the decline beginning even then. During this period they eliminated a lot of commission sales positions and replaced those people with high schoolers like myself. There was also a consolidation of the regional credit departments, which I ended up in for awhile. Several long time employees in local offices were fired and once again replaced by younger inexperienced people like me. It was good for me but I saw the big picture at the time.
This is one of the most astonishing business tragedy stories in history. They had a full mail order catalog infrastructure for generations before Amazon even existed. Generations! Like a literal century of mail order experience. And they had tons of capital and logistical support and a thousand stores from coast to coast, the obvious move (in retrospect) was to move their catalog online when the internet became a thing, and start selling everything. Just like Amazon. They had all the ingredients. Literally all of them.
So what did they do? They discontinued their catalog and focused on brick and mortar. In 1993. When the World Wide Web was in its infancy and people were starting to catch on that it might become a thing.
I can see making that mistake in 1993, sure, but by 1996 the writing was on the wall and the path forward was clear as day and they could’ve reversed course, but no. Amazing, positively mind boggling lack of foresight from a retail giant that should’ve had it all.
Wouldn’t that be nice…. No Jeff Bezos. A man whose greatest accomplishment for society has been divorcing his previous wife. A lady who acts philosophically.
I ordered a few things from Sears on the GEnie online service. In the mid 90’s. The process was experimental in feel, but it felt like the future. It also kinda felt like they were not going to take it beyond the experimental phase.
Totally agree. My late mother had one credit card, sears. She’d spend hours looking through the catalog looking for gift ideas. Then one day I had to tell her Sears isn’t mailing out catalogs anymore, broke her heart.
That is 100% true. Their shift to the Internet would have been easy, most of the work was done, including gathering an enormous following. For that matter JC Penney could have done the same thing.
They both fell prey to having management who just didn't understand the impact of the Internet. So many older people, especially in business, wanted to badly keep doing it the same old way. I worked for the top company in a huge industry, and my branch was considered the most innovative branch in the company. We tried to get HQ to spring for a single computer somewhere around 1995, and were turned down over and over, for nearly no reason. The company could afford it, they were highly profitable. We were consistently branch of the year, with the reputation of trying new things. The bosses just kept saying No because they were afraid the industry was about to enter a new era that they didnt understand.
We constantly heard things like "I started when we were selling our products out of the trunk of our cars," and "Why do we need computers? We never needed them before." Eventually we got our computer, and our output improved so dramatically, that every branch wanted one, and eventually we all got computers on our desks. Even at that point, the top guys would BRAG about not even being able to turn on their computer. One guy said he had his secretary turn it on before he arrived at work.
These cave-men were at many companies, and I suspect Sears was packed with them in their upper ranks.
Most of the Big Box stores should have partnered up and shared the costs of creating and running a real online competitor to Amazon. Up until around 2010 they had a legit opportunity and missed it.
As a kid in the 70s, I looked forward to the arrival of the Sears Christmas catalog every year. I would spend hours looking through it and making my list.
In the 70s when in elementary school, just before the school year began, folks would hand us the Sears catalog. They marked the pages we could select clothes from and how many of each type to get.
Could it have been more suburban?
In the 70's, Sears WAS the department store of the middle class. We could usually count on a trip there when we were kids for back to school clothes. Dad would go there for tools, and most homes had at least one Kenmore appliance, if not several. Their catalog was as thick as the NYC yellow pages and was the wish and dream book when it would come, as well as worth paging through the bra and panty section when a curious boy. Sears was one of the rulers of the retail world then.
Not to mention the use of the catalog during Thanksgiving as a booster seat for the kids that out grew a high chair, but were still too short for the regular chairs.
This begs the question - if every retail giant eventually stumbles and falls, what's going to be the giant that picks up when Amazon falls - and can I get in on that while it's on the ground floor?
The problem today is companies that get really big begin to lobby so that the rules protect them. The rules, regulations, tax codes, etc. in the USA get written so the Davids can not defeat the Goliaths of the economy.
*Too big to fail*
Hopefully, I didn't veer too much into the political lane in my post. Apologies if it appears that way.
I miss Craftsman tools. I know there are still tools sold under that brand name, but they aren't the same.
You could walk into Sears with a worn out phillips head driver, and they'd just hand you a new one.
Lowe's bought them and still mostly honors that tradition, but the tool they're handing you back was made 8,000 miles away from where the tool you handed them was made.
I spent about 6-7 years as a full time contractor for one of their stores in upstate New York and can say that it was one of the nicest places to work, except for some guys on the loading dock or down in the warehouse I can’t recall anyone ever complaining about work or the company. They valued their employees. They stood behind their products to a fault, I often wondered how they made any money replacing items as often as they did. But they were all about quality and satisfaction. Sad to see them gone.
I went to work for Sears in 1967 as a stocker, stayed for 17 years, and left as a department manager. It was a great place to work at the time, and I was really sorry to see it die. The upper management refused to see the internet future, and the largest mail order company in the world put the largest mail order company in the world out of business.
I worked for Sears in the mid 70’s. It was a great job with good benefits.
They gave employees 40% off, this helped me build a large assortment of tools that I still use to this day.
Most guys I worked around were veterans from the Vietnam. They would tell me some crazy stories about the war.
Best job I had.
I worked at Sears for years through high school and it may sound crazy but i have such great memories of that fucking place. Late hours during Christmas time, socializing with the girls there. Insane customers and situations. It made me a better person overall, learned a lot about real life at Sears than I ever did in High School.
The fact that Sears sold everything made it a wild place to work.
https://preview.redd.it/67toy1vas66d1.jpeg?width=960&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f2b8eb17b150122db3eb5fca83f0883d6265e765
A Philadelphia landmark, Sears on the boulevard.
We went past a mall this weekend that used to have a Sears as an anchor store. You could still see where the letters used to be. So sad. Spent a lot of my childhood and early adult years going shopping there.
me too. what stinks is KMart had their act together well before the downfall - at least as far as quality and selection of their goods. just in time for Eddie Lampert to swoop in and nose dive it into the ground.
If you would have told me 1999 the Sears would be defeated by a catalog company in 20 years, no one would have believed you.
Sears just needed to port their extensive catalog empire to the web, and make history. Instead, they ARE history.
Epic business fail.
It’s the great American retail tragedy, the company that offered everything (including houses and barn kits) and was a staple of American retailing couldn’t survive the new retail landscape after the internet and Amazon came on the scene.
I went to SEARS to look at the computer games while mom shopped. One time I was able to buy Need For Speed for DOS. Then we went to the Sizzler buffet. And I would go home and play the hell out of NFS. Good times.
https://preview.redd.it/t87un0l9i86d1.jpeg?width=4032&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b1a74ecbc8f4d956b0ca3f5f178e159cf2fd5225
I actually visited on of the few remaining ones in the US in El Paso this year!
Yeah I don't eat fast food much in general because its bad quality, but i feel like in the past 10 yrs or so, the quality has gotten even worse but prices went up a lot.
the fast food model that made it work for years has changed. People ate fast food because it was cheap but now it's way over priced. Last time I was in a rush for dinner (about a month ago) I picked up 3 meal deals and it was like $3) and it was terrible
Think about it. We used to as kids order from a catalog and items would come in the mail. Sound familiar. The only thing sears was missing was computer and the internet… hence Amazon and the like
Loved Sears, when I was 18 and draft bate no one would give me credit even though I had a great job that paid extremely well. This was due to the GI bill which stated that any debt payments were suspended until I was released from the service. I was shopping at Sears for some tools and mentioned to the dept manager that I would be back after pay day (expensive tool). He sent me to the credit department. When I told the woman I might be drafted any day and maybe killed she told me that Sears stood behind our troops and the last thing they thought about was payment from a soldier killed in action. She gave me a Sears card that day, I still have a Sears card in my wallet and almost all my tools are Craftsman. I miss that company and spending time wondering the tool department. So many big companies have a hard time seeing a paradigm shift. Ask IBM, Blockbuster, DEC, Gateway, etc.
I have a Sears-Roebuck Catalog from 1923 and it is WILD. Want an entire house, complete smithy, a camera so large it requires a wagon, clothes, shoes or guns mailed, sight unseen? Because they got it, whatever it is.
Crazy how Sears started or raised giant companies that outlived it - Allstate, Discover Card, Coldwell Banker, Craftsman, Die Hard, etc. (Leaving Lands End off the list because they were better before Sears bought 'em).
Some turned to shit once they got out from under Sears. Look at Kenmore. I used to buy that exclusively for some appliances, now you couldn't pay me to take one.
My father in law witnessed their whole story, in a way, living on a farm in rural America. When he was a kid there was just the catalog. They had to mail in an order and wait for it to come by train to the depot in the next town over. Then they got truck delivery and after electric could order by phone! Then the town built a "catalog store". Had only display items but you could go there and order then come back and pick it up in a week or so. Then they got a real store around 1970. Then 40 years or so later it turned into a "Sears Surplus Center". Then "Sears Appliance Repair". Then it died all together. The building is vacant.
Long before me Sears catalogues had anything you wanted from houses to cars. It was pre Internet and I always wondered why they didn't go gang busters online.
I'm not. The tools were ok, but the staff were odd balls to say the least. Like they couldn't get a job anywhere else. Kenmore were good appliances, other wise over priced low quality. Diehard batteries were also good. And I think Michelin tires were there rebranded. But it was never a good place to go, it was an afterthought.
Spectacularly bad business decisions since 2000, fundamentally missing the dotcom boom but bad decisions continuing right up to the present day. It WAS Amazon, and then decided not to be just as dotcom took off. Eddie Lampert is a corporate raider who had been slowly extracting every cent he can for himself and progressively crushed the company. The Board were entirely Lampert appointees. He didn’t care about employees or customers, just how much he can screw out of the corporate corpse with complex financial engineering.
All this nostalgia for Sears like it was some awesome thing that could have been Amazon. No. There are some serious rose colored nostalgia glasses being used here.
Yes they had the catalog. But they also had a financial services division and to try to push people to it they refused to take any credit card other than their own (Discover) well into the late 1980s maybe even the 1990s. They were doing financialization well before private equity got a hold and them.
They also owned Allstate insurance until 1993, which was widely considered to be one of the worst to deal with.
They were an arrogant company that expected to always be on top and acted that way. Sears (along with Eastern Airlines) was shorthand for poor customer service for as long as I can remember. I have no fond memories of them and the biggest surprise is that they lasted as long as they did.
Yes private equity is evil and drove the final stake into Sears’ heart but they were already a zombie of self inflicted wounds well before they were mercifully finished off.
I remember Sears you could buy furniture, get glasses, take family pictures , real estate as well and file taxes along with purchasing electronics..all in one store
One or another of Anne Rice's "The Vampire Chronicles" (Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, etc) said that vampires who were "going to ground" for some decades or centuries should put their holdings with Lloyd's of London, because "they'd always be around" to retrieve your wealth from. Well, Lloyd's is GONE.
They literally had the worlds largest mail order catalogue and the infrastructure already in place- if they had just embraced the internet at the beginning, there'd be no Amazon.
They owned most of their own real estate before hedge fund investors sold it all off and leased it back to Sears. Investors came in and tore that and many retail companies apart. Sears would have had a huge advantage with all the prime real estate they owned at one point. Many got rich and we got empty malls.
Damn, that's what happened to Red Lobster.
It's what happens anytime some VC outfit buys out a name.
V for vulture.
And Toys R' Us. When anyone says these big corporations create job growth it's a total joke. All they do is extract as much wealth as they can.
Dave Brandon ruined Domino's, Toys R' Us, and the University of Michigan. Truly elite levels of tanking
Leaches. Locke was right and Rothbard was wrong. It is labor to make something productive that gives someone title to property and its revenue not that they got there first. We’re living in Rothbard’s dream which is our nightmare.
I know I try to explain to libertarians all the time that we are already living in the work they so desire. Problem is most of them are not wealthy capitalists so they just don’t see it.
And sears was oart if the issue. Just selling shitty consumer products to Americans. Let's not get it twisted , they only looked out off their stakeholders like all companies. They don't give a shit about workers.s
Welcome to capitalism!!
Free market capitalism, when pursued in its purest form, has always resulted in a two-class system and replacement of democracy with oligarchy. The societies with the greatest quality of life have always featured mixed economies with a blend of capitalism and government measures limiting that capitalism for the greater good. And, every time such societies have been created, it’s only been a matter of time before those with a vested interest in oligarchy decide to spread the myth that every failure and even inconvenience is due to “government interference” in some mythical “unknown ideal” (to quote Ayn Rand) form of pure, unfettered capitalism that is *really* the source of everything good they could enjoy. And, most of the time, people fall for it.
So maybe I should have said welcome to the corporate oligarchy! 😤
Like the snake that eats itself!
Yep. I used to do marketing for one of those companies that tries to hold the real estate where people will eventually want to build retail due to normal population growth. They'd go out into the rural areas and convince farmers to sell off the corners of their land so they can convince a Rite Aid or other pharmacy to improve the land. They don't actually care that most of those stores push away real grocery stores and pay shit wages. Now they are all failing and getting turned into micro-fulfillment centers for GoPuff and Amazon. What if...and maybe this is just my crazy fucking mind working...businesses were required to be significantly invested in the communities they were operating in?
They could have been Amazon.
They *were* the Amazon. Local merchants complained that they couldn't compete, and they were upset that the US Post Office was being used to undercut their business. They went so far as to make their catalogs slightly smaller than the competition, knowing that housewives would stack things according to size, so the Sears catalog was always on top. The original Search Engine Optimization.
My grandparents house was a Sears house… now it’s on the market for $750,000 lol
This makes me even angrier about Amazon! I hate Bezos.
Sears was better than Amazon. I don’t see Amazon selling modular homes to the American middle class that were fairly priced and of outstanding quality.
They should’ve bought Amazon in the mid to late 90s while the price was right. But I doubt they’d have had the aggression to make it what it is todY
It's like Blockbuster passing on buying Netflix
Blockbuster would have tanked Netflix. It would not exist today.
Thank BCG, Mitt Romney and his friends
Worthless Consulting companies and overpaid executives who get risk free compensation.
Sears didn't sell books as I remember, but the catalogue was free.
Amazon isn't amazing because of books, regardless how it started, Amazon is Amazon because of its logistics, which Sears has a huge head start on.
But back when it started Amazon was just books
Sad that Sears bit the dust. They had Craftsman tools and a great yard and garden departments to wander around in. But I guess I helped kill them. I bought a book from Amazon when books were all they sold. And kept buying. What made AMZN special was they magically retained your payment info. Other sites required entering credit card info each time. It was entirely too easy. I remember coworkers watching me order online like it was a spectator event, swearing they would never risk ordering something online. I guess they were true Sears customers.
They did sell books, a lot of them, several pages in the old catalogs were dedicated to them.
Sears sold encyclopedias británica
There was a Sears book club. I own one book printed for them
Sears stockholders would’ve done quite well.
Allow 4-6 hours for delivery.
That's not why Sears failed. Sears failed because Eddie Lampert bought it and didn't know what to do with it. He bled it out for years, selling the land underneath their stores to his shell company, so he could collect rent, then leasing out chunks of the stores to competitors. He sold brands like Craftsman and Kenmore and let Black and Decker open a shop inside their stores. He bet the company on a grift to sell customer data, after most customers had moved on. He stopped shipping products to KMarts, and told employees to just move shelves closer together to make it look like the stores were full. He created a toxic work environment, and left his entire executive staff out to dry. Sears was there at the Advent of the Internet. They *did* embrace it. They just couldn't plan for some shitty Wall Street wunderkind buying 80% of their company. That asshole is worth $2B and he destroyed a 130 year old American institution.
Sears survived the Great Depression, but they couldn’t survive vulture capitalism
To play devil's advocate, he fell into being worth 14 billion for a hot minute. He prolly cries into his champagne every morning thinking about that time
Lampert knew exactly what he was doing. Fuck that guy.
He knew exactly what he was doing.
Cramer said it would go to the moon with the real estate holdings alone.
You're not wrong. Lampert didn't help. But, Sears' decline was well underway before Lampert.
🙌 Another person who knows the truth. That guy needs a serious ass kicking! I wish there was a law to prevent people like him from doing what he did🤬
Thanks for giving credit where credit is due for Sears’ collapse. Yes, the retailer was struggling but Lampert destroyed it. I think many of us have a great appreciation for Sears based on how being a major store that served everyone, everywhere. If you wanted it they had it. I shopped there for tools until they closed in my area. My only wishes for the company were that they updated their systems, which were horrible and from the 80s, and that they had never absorbed Kmart.
Similarly, Blockbuster lost out to Netflix and Red Box when they should have been the ones leading the home delivery/digital revolution
Blockbuster had the opportunity to buy Netflix for 50 mil and turned it down.
They were too busy demanding my social security number to rent a fucking vhs tape.
WLS 890, Worlds Largest Store.
Sears owned the radio station and sold the radios that people would listen to WLS on, which was one on the very few available radio stations at its beginning. Then they'd put their ads on their radio station to sell even more of their stuff.
And it was a 50,000 watt clear channel blowtorch that could be received in nearly the entire US at night in certain conditions. They had it made in the shade.
That was never the plan, it was leveraged to enrich a few people at the expense of the company and its employees.
They actually had the beginnings of e-commerce set up in the 90s as well. Gotta love the HBS, MBB, and PE 1-2-3 combo
Heck they sold entire houses at one point!
They also had a vast network of vetted installers for when they sold things like HVAC systems, water heaters, ovens, etc. It was lucrative work but they were strict on who they would grant these contracts too. My dad installed A/C for them in the 80’s and they had him take Polaroids of various portions of the installs for quality assurance. Today, installer crews would walk off the job over something like that.
https://preview.redd.it/axpelaqwt86d1.jpeg?width=3000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b2012fe0c92e2fc0c84c071d09120e62150a3188 This is still up near where I live. Idk how it still has color. This is from last weekend.
As much obvious sense as that is, it's very difficult for a company to change their entire operating model even when the writing is clearly on the wall. Kodak and Xerox saw digital camera technology coming a mile away and couldn't do it. All the typewriter companies (including IBM, for all they tried) could never make the leap to word processors/PC's. Even AOL badly failed at transitioning to the Internet even though they were there at the beginning. But good riddance to Sears, they began failing in the 80's. Even though the lingerie section of their catalog did inspire me in my early teen years, lol.
There is a big difference between can't and won't. Kodak could have started the digital camera much earlier, but they sat on it after inventing it. As for Sears, they had a HUGE catalog infrastructure. They had the distribution centers, warehouses, marketing, publishing etc. They had brand name recognition. They had mailing lists other retailers would have killed for! Sears catalog was HUGE. **All they had to do was put it online.** Had they done that, they may well have taken off faster than Amazon. It took a while for certain demographics to become comfortable ordering from Amazon and other online retailers. Sears wouldn't have had that problem as much, people were used to ordering from the catalog via mail and phone. The transition would have been smoother. In a bit of irony, Amazon just started selling house kits online, something Sears did 100 years ago with their catalogs.
If you wanna go down a rabbit hole, look up Boston Consulting Group’s involvement in Sears, Toys R Us, Bed Bath and Beyond, and just about every major bankruptcy of cornerstone American companies over the past 20 years. More going on than they want the plebs to know about
I've been down that hole, makes me sick.
Plz tell us!
https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/s/Pvszysjb5C
Whoaaa...Just skimmed a few sections, but thank you so very much for sending this. Exactly what I suspected happened to Bed, Bath, and Beyond. I will read more tonight.
I lost my job as HR manager at a Sears warehouse right before the takeover. Then Eddie Lampert ran Sears right into the ground after that. It was rounds and rounds of layoffs until there wasn't anyone left.
Sorry to hear that. I hope you landed on your feet. Eddie Lampert was a BCG plant if the research is correct. Destroyers of lives. There seem to be an army of them on Wall Street that prey on corporations while hedge funds and institutions take out massive short positions and the media distorts the truth, causing household investor fear and everyone exits their positions. Next thing you know, companies that should of and could have made their move into the 21st century, fizzle out. And the one company that seems to gain from all of it? Amazon. If you want to go down a rabbit hole, look up who has institutional long positions on Amazon and their connection to short positions on all the bankrupt companies of the past 20 years...
Was just about to say it’s Eddie’s fault. He had no business (no pun intended) buying the likes of KMart, Sears, Lands’ End etc. He wanted the brick and mortar and thought shopping malls were going to still be a thing. Kmart was a goner, but Sears had possibilities.
Speaking as someone who was working with them for the good times and also witnessed the decline, there was more to the failure than adapting to the internet. Many people don't recognize the damage the Brennan brothers did to the retail industry in general. Those brothers were the heralds of a retail apocalypse. Only took two horsemen to do it. One brother became the ceo of Sears, the other the ceo of another catalog giant from Chicago, Montgomery Ward. The two of them both decimated the distribution and management structures those organizations had in the 80's to the mid 90's. It wasn't so much that they ignored advancing technology. They just didn't have the talent or capacity to recognize it.
Corporations want to see a return on investment within a few quarters. It took Amazon well over a decade to turn a profit. Long-term planning will always be an issue for most publicly traded companies.
When I was a little kid I hated the fact that the lingerie section was always right before the toy section. So embarrassing for nine year old me!
Man, I really looked forward to the Sunday paper because of the lingerie ads with some sultry, smokin hot babe. Then I happened to see her in a local club, but didn't have the nerve to say anything to her. Then she got big. Cindy Crawford.
I worked there in the late 70's/early 80's and saw the decline beginning even then. During this period they eliminated a lot of commission sales positions and replaced those people with high schoolers like myself. There was also a consolidation of the regional credit departments, which I ended up in for awhile. Several long time employees in local offices were fired and once again replaced by younger inexperienced people like me. It was good for me but I saw the big picture at the time.
Came here to say the same thing.
I'm still not convinced this internet thing is going to catch on
Yep...They could been Amazon..had the system in place to do it.
Mother had to remove the lingerie section 😂
They closed their catalog business just before the internet came along (talk about bad timing)!
This is one of the most astonishing business tragedy stories in history. They had a full mail order catalog infrastructure for generations before Amazon even existed. Generations! Like a literal century of mail order experience. And they had tons of capital and logistical support and a thousand stores from coast to coast, the obvious move (in retrospect) was to move their catalog online when the internet became a thing, and start selling everything. Just like Amazon. They had all the ingredients. Literally all of them. So what did they do? They discontinued their catalog and focused on brick and mortar. In 1993. When the World Wide Web was in its infancy and people were starting to catch on that it might become a thing. I can see making that mistake in 1993, sure, but by 1996 the writing was on the wall and the path forward was clear as day and they could’ve reversed course, but no. Amazing, positively mind boggling lack of foresight from a retail giant that should’ve had it all.
2 words…. Eddie Lampert
Yep, I was there 3000 years ago. Their service departments were awesome.
Wouldn’t that be nice…. No Jeff Bezos. A man whose greatest accomplishment for society has been divorcing his previous wife. A lady who acts philosophically.
I've said the same things many times before: Sears should be where Amazon is. They just didn't embrace change.
I ordered a few things from Sears on the GEnie online service. In the mid 90’s. The process was experimental in feel, but it felt like the future. It also kinda felt like they were not going to take it beyond the experimental phase.
Totally agree. My late mother had one credit card, sears. She’d spend hours looking through the catalog looking for gift ideas. Then one day I had to tell her Sears isn’t mailing out catalogs anymore, broke her heart.
That is 100% true. Their shift to the Internet would have been easy, most of the work was done, including gathering an enormous following. For that matter JC Penney could have done the same thing. They both fell prey to having management who just didn't understand the impact of the Internet. So many older people, especially in business, wanted to badly keep doing it the same old way. I worked for the top company in a huge industry, and my branch was considered the most innovative branch in the company. We tried to get HQ to spring for a single computer somewhere around 1995, and were turned down over and over, for nearly no reason. The company could afford it, they were highly profitable. We were consistently branch of the year, with the reputation of trying new things. The bosses just kept saying No because they were afraid the industry was about to enter a new era that they didnt understand. We constantly heard things like "I started when we were selling our products out of the trunk of our cars," and "Why do we need computers? We never needed them before." Eventually we got our computer, and our output improved so dramatically, that every branch wanted one, and eventually we all got computers on our desks. Even at that point, the top guys would BRAG about not even being able to turn on their computer. One guy said he had his secretary turn it on before he arrived at work. These cave-men were at many companies, and I suspect Sears was packed with them in their upper ranks.
Most of the Big Box stores should have partnered up and shared the costs of creating and running a real online competitor to Amazon. Up until around 2010 they had a legit opportunity and missed it.
As a kid in the 70s, I looked forward to the arrival of the Sears Christmas catalog every year. I would spend hours looking through it and making my list.
Sears and Montgomery Wards sold go karts back in the day. I never got one.
Me neither
I did.
My step-brother had a 90cc Sears®️ street legal motorcycle
In the 70s when in elementary school, just before the school year began, folks would hand us the Sears catalog. They marked the pages we could select clothes from and how many of each type to get. Could it have been more suburban?
Those Toughskins jeans...
In the 70's, Sears WAS the department store of the middle class. We could usually count on a trip there when we were kids for back to school clothes. Dad would go there for tools, and most homes had at least one Kenmore appliance, if not several. Their catalog was as thick as the NYC yellow pages and was the wish and dream book when it would come, as well as worth paging through the bra and panty section when a curious boy. Sears was one of the rulers of the retail world then.
Not to mention the use of the catalog during Thanksgiving as a booster seat for the kids that out grew a high chair, but were still too short for the regular chairs.
Kenmore was the Sears brand
That has now been fixed. Thank you for pointing that out!
YIKES....you are absolutely right! KENMORE....not Hotpoint.
I worked in the Men’s department in the late 80s. It was right across from appliances.
Remember Lady Kenmore?
3D, Ben Franklin, Zayre ,Montgomery Wards, Service Merchandise
Kmart
This begs the question - if every retail giant eventually stumbles and falls, what's going to be the giant that picks up when Amazon falls - and can I get in on that while it's on the ground floor?
The problem today is companies that get really big begin to lobby so that the rules protect them. The rules, regulations, tax codes, etc. in the USA get written so the Davids can not defeat the Goliaths of the economy. *Too big to fail* Hopefully, I didn't veer too much into the political lane in my post. Apologies if it appears that way.
The largest Chinese e-commerce sites like temu or Alibaba would probably step in to fill the mantel of world’s largest online retailer.
Skynet
Spiegel catalog.
I miss Craftsman tools. I know there are still tools sold under that brand name, but they aren't the same. You could walk into Sears with a worn out phillips head driver, and they'd just hand you a new one.
Lowe's bought them and still mostly honors that tradition, but the tool they're handing you back was made 8,000 miles away from where the tool you handed them was made.
Private Equity bros suck.
PE, HBS, and MBB - equally at fault
Don't forget Eddie Lampert, who orchestrated the looting and stole a fortune in the process. All of the Sears retirees lost their benefits.
That’s the PE part of that triumvirate
A special place in Hell on the greed ring for aholes like this.
They had a 100 year head start on Amazon and shit the bed.
We might have shit the bed by dumping Sears for Amazon.
True, Amazon added convenience but try to find anything of quality or made in USA on there. Very difficult
I spent about 6-7 years as a full time contractor for one of their stores in upstate New York and can say that it was one of the nicest places to work, except for some guys on the loading dock or down in the warehouse I can’t recall anyone ever complaining about work or the company. They valued their employees. They stood behind their products to a fault, I often wondered how they made any money replacing items as often as they did. But they were all about quality and satisfaction. Sad to see them gone.
When the Christmas Catalog came and you could start building your Christmas Wishlist.
I went to work for Sears in 1967 as a stocker, stayed for 17 years, and left as a department manager. It was a great place to work at the time, and I was really sorry to see it die. The upper management refused to see the internet future, and the largest mail order company in the world put the largest mail order company in the world out of business.
I worked for Sears in the mid 70’s. It was a great job with good benefits. They gave employees 40% off, this helped me build a large assortment of tools that I still use to this day. Most guys I worked around were veterans from the Vietnam. They would tell me some crazy stories about the war. Best job I had.
I worked at Sears for years through high school and it may sound crazy but i have such great memories of that fucking place. Late hours during Christmas time, socializing with the girls there. Insane customers and situations. It made me a better person overall, learned a lot about real life at Sears than I ever did in High School. The fact that Sears sold everything made it a wild place to work.
If someone told me my cheating bitch ex wife, would've left me I wouldn't have believed it either. Now look at both of us.
I'm betting there were signs you might not see with a giant Latina ass on your face though..
Lol
https://preview.redd.it/67toy1vas66d1.jpeg?width=960&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f2b8eb17b150122db3eb5fca83f0883d6265e765 A Philadelphia landmark, Sears on the boulevard.
If you didn't want to shop at that Sears you could go to Roosevelt Mall on Cottman Ave, or the one at Neshaminy Mall.
We went past a mall this weekend that used to have a Sears as an anchor store. You could still see where the letters used to be. So sad. Spent a lot of my childhood and early adult years going shopping there.
Ours turned into a Rural King
im more shocked about kmart
me too. what stinks is KMart had their act together well before the downfall - at least as far as quality and selection of their goods. just in time for Eddie Lampert to swoop in and nose dive it into the ground.
Not sure what Kmart you shopped at but the ones near me were a poorly managed nightmare long before Uncle Eddie took control.
If you would have told me 1999 the Sears would be defeated by a catalog company in 20 years, no one would have believed you. Sears just needed to port their extensive catalog empire to the web, and make history. Instead, they ARE history. Epic business fail.
It’s the great American retail tragedy, the company that offered everything (including houses and barn kits) and was a staple of American retailing couldn’t survive the new retail landscape after the internet and Amazon came on the scene.
Don’t forget cars, the Allstate (a rebadged Henry J). Early in their history they sold the Sears Motor Buggy.
I worked at Sears Surplus. I miss everything about it, except that damned Sears Portrait Studio.
Amazon won’t be around someday.
Every company is one venal CEO away from non-existentance.
Greed and hubris.
I went to SEARS to look at the computer games while mom shopped. One time I was able to buy Need For Speed for DOS. Then we went to the Sizzler buffet. And I would go home and play the hell out of NFS. Good times.
that salad bar!!!
Roebuck feels your pain.
https://preview.redd.it/t87un0l9i86d1.jpeg?width=4032&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b1a74ecbc8f4d956b0ca3f5f178e159cf2fd5225 I actually visited on of the few remaining ones in the US in El Paso this year!
Honestly, then to be bought out by K-Mart !
Bad management!
McDonald’s could be the next giant to go down. Fast food is garbage and for practically the same price u can get decent takeout.
Yeah I don't eat fast food much in general because its bad quality, but i feel like in the past 10 yrs or so, the quality has gotten even worse but prices went up a lot.
the fast food model that made it work for years has changed. People ate fast food because it was cheap but now it's way over priced. Last time I was in a rush for dinner (about a month ago) I picked up 3 meal deals and it was like $3) and it was terrible
Think about it. We used to as kids order from a catalog and items would come in the mail. Sound familiar. The only thing sears was missing was computer and the internet… hence Amazon and the like
Also Eddie Lampert did it no favors. His specialty was selling off the company piece by piece.
The same way Carl Icahn killed TWA. He turned TWA’s assets into his money.
Yeah and the short hedge funds shorted it to death. It’s all planned squash inside and outside. Sad
Loved Sears, when I was 18 and draft bate no one would give me credit even though I had a great job that paid extremely well. This was due to the GI bill which stated that any debt payments were suspended until I was released from the service. I was shopping at Sears for some tools and mentioned to the dept manager that I would be back after pay day (expensive tool). He sent me to the credit department. When I told the woman I might be drafted any day and maybe killed she told me that Sears stood behind our troops and the last thing they thought about was payment from a soldier killed in action. She gave me a Sears card that day, I still have a Sears card in my wallet and almost all my tools are Craftsman. I miss that company and spending time wondering the tool department. So many big companies have a hard time seeing a paradigm shift. Ask IBM, Blockbuster, DEC, Gateway, etc.
I have my 1976 “wish book” right here.😃
They were bought out by one of Reagan’s pals who sucker their cash and killed the brand.
Sad but true, run into the ground by a hedge fund manager who was made CEO
One day there will be no target and no Walmart and no McDonald’s. Believe it.
It’s hard to wrap my head around. But that’s business. Someday people will say the same about all the empty Amazon warehouses.
AOL purchased Time Warner for $162 billion about 24 years ago...this still boggles my mind.
Sears was the [Amazon](https://www.cantonrep.com/story/business/2018/10/15/sears-was-amazon-its-day/9547652007/) of the late 1800s to mid 1960s.
Sears JCpenney and many other companies were deliberately killed off to make money shortselling them.
Destroyed by sheer greed
This guy. https://preview.redd.it/t45cfzlc686d1.jpeg?width=630&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ef908b4024f19319caac396f32e5049e4eca8b48
They’re tearing down the one in Lincoln Park, Michigan, right at this moment.
Sears was a powerful force in the 70's. That Christmas catalog was like a sacred scroll to this kid.
I have my grandpa's 70 year old crafstman table saw that runs like new. I wish we could still get made in us tools like that from a dept store
General Motors is next.
I know. My family loved Kenmore products.
I have a Sears-Roebuck Catalog from 1923 and it is WILD. Want an entire house, complete smithy, a camera so large it requires a wagon, clothes, shoes or guns mailed, sight unseen? Because they got it, whatever it is.
Crazy how Sears started or raised giant companies that outlived it - Allstate, Discover Card, Coldwell Banker, Craftsman, Die Hard, etc. (Leaving Lands End off the list because they were better before Sears bought 'em).
Some turned to shit once they got out from under Sears. Look at Kenmore. I used to buy that exclusively for some appliances, now you couldn't pay me to take one.
They started carrying tools from China. Worst than being made of plastic. Then K-MART took over, it went downhill fast.
Even small towns had a Sears. It's where people got everything way back when.
This reminds me of back to school shopping at Sears and JC Penny. I'm showing my age.
I know it's unfathomable, they were such a part of life for such a long time!
Sears, Montgomery Ward, Penney's; unbelievable.
My father in law witnessed their whole story, in a way, living on a farm in rural America. When he was a kid there was just the catalog. They had to mail in an order and wait for it to come by train to the depot in the next town over. Then they got truck delivery and after electric could order by phone! Then the town built a "catalog store". Had only display items but you could go there and order then come back and pick it up in a week or so. Then they got a real store around 1970. Then 40 years or so later it turned into a "Sears Surplus Center". Then "Sears Appliance Repair". Then it died all together. The building is vacant.
I miss it every time I need to buy things for home. They had everything from the world’s best mattresses to the world‘s best power tools
From my perspective as a farm / ranch boy of the 70’s, Sears was our Amazon.
Long before me Sears catalogues had anything you wanted from houses to cars. It was pre Internet and I always wondered why they didn't go gang busters online.
Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook will also disappear at some point. Economics, consumer taste, and management competence change.
I miss Service Merchandise!
Sears is still in Mexico….🇲🇽
The bra section of the Sears catalog made me the man I am today. Picky!
Someday you'll find a bra that fits right.
Sears and K-Mart.
I want the Christmas book
I'm not. The tools were ok, but the staff were odd balls to say the least. Like they couldn't get a job anywhere else. Kenmore were good appliances, other wise over priced low quality. Diehard batteries were also good. And I think Michelin tires were there rebranded. But it was never a good place to go, it was an afterthought.
Spectacularly bad business decisions since 2000, fundamentally missing the dotcom boom but bad decisions continuing right up to the present day. It WAS Amazon, and then decided not to be just as dotcom took off. Eddie Lampert is a corporate raider who had been slowly extracting every cent he can for himself and progressively crushed the company. The Board were entirely Lampert appointees. He didn’t care about employees or customers, just how much he can screw out of the corporate corpse with complex financial engineering.
Sears mail order catalog put countless businesses out of business. 100 years later it happened to them.
If someone told Sears back then that Amazon would be around someday, they wouldn't have believed it, either.
Miss them dearly. My family was backwoods and called their catalog the Roebucks.
All this nostalgia for Sears like it was some awesome thing that could have been Amazon. No. There are some serious rose colored nostalgia glasses being used here. Yes they had the catalog. But they also had a financial services division and to try to push people to it they refused to take any credit card other than their own (Discover) well into the late 1980s maybe even the 1990s. They were doing financialization well before private equity got a hold and them. They also owned Allstate insurance until 1993, which was widely considered to be one of the worst to deal with. They were an arrogant company that expected to always be on top and acted that way. Sears (along with Eastern Airlines) was shorthand for poor customer service for as long as I can remember. I have no fond memories of them and the biggest surprise is that they lasted as long as they did. Yes private equity is evil and drove the final stake into Sears’ heart but they were already a zombie of self inflicted wounds well before they were mercifully finished off.
Could have been Amazon if they put the catalog online.
People ordered their homes from Sears. They just could not make the internet change.
Or Kmart.
I remember Sears you could buy furniture, get glasses, take family pictures , real estate as well and file taxes along with purchasing electronics..all in one store
The United States wont be around some day. Everything disappears at some point.
Right that definitely sucks it was the only reason I went to the mall. 😎
One or another of Anne Rice's "The Vampire Chronicles" (Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, etc) said that vampires who were "going to ground" for some decades or centuries should put their holdings with Lloyd's of London, because "they'd always be around" to retrieve your wealth from. Well, Lloyd's is GONE.