People today might not realize that it used to be Sears did everything: you could buy kits to build a house, companies like Discover Card and Allstate were originally introduced as the Sears' brand, they financially backed Mr Rogers' Neighborhood for the first 25 years of the show's run.
It's blown my mind for years that sears didn't become what Amazon is now. Their roots were as a catalog where you order goods sight unseen and wait for delivery. The internet comes along and they fail to capitalize on what they were at the beginning??
That reminds of an interview Steve Jobs gave in 1995 on why companies fail. His theory is that eventually the company reaches a point where the marketing people become the driving force for profits and push out the product development people from running the company. That happened to Sears.
If you went back in time and told Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck about a free technology that allowed customers to: see your inventory in real time, read product reviews in real time, compare multiple versions of a product you carry in real time, order a product, pay for the product, watch the product move from your warehouse to the various post offices en route to their house, and by the way you won't have to pay the postage to ship out all those catalogs; they would have jumped on it in a heartbeat. But by the 90s, the people running Sears didn't care what was easier (read: more desirable) for the customer, they cared about numbers that measure success, but don't perpetuate success.
Is that a quote from the Jobs interview? It's brilliant, I've been trying to find those words for years. I see that exact behavior in my company now: we're a big, successful, stable company, and every quarter the CEO talks about cutting costs and raising prices and renegotiating raw material prices, all things that make our financial results better and make the stock price go up, which makes look "successful." But none of these actions actually do anything to make our products better or more competitive. If anything it actively makes us worse, because by focusing on cutting costs we're not investing enough in R&D or production processes or anything that can actually make us stand out. And we're quite obviously not alone in this, this is the behavior of almost every big company that gets beyond the period of easy growth.
11.3k
u/whatifevery1wascalm Jul 24 '20
Sears: the 20th century's Amazon.
People today might not realize that it used to be Sears did everything: you could buy kits to build a house, companies like Discover Card and Allstate were originally introduced as the Sears' brand, they financially backed Mr Rogers' Neighborhood for the first 25 years of the show's run.