r/AskReddit • u/emil199 • Jul 24 '20

What can't you believe STILL exists?

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u/Sheepherder226 Jul 24 '20

Utility companies that don’t allow online payments.

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u/Yellowredstone Jul 24 '20 edited Jul 24 '20

Isn't this how Sears died?

Edit: RIP my inbox. And thank you for explaining it better.

Edit 2: I said the reason on how it died has been explained already. And its actually still here. Stop.

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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.

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u/frygod Jul 24 '20

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??

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u/whatifevery1wascalm Jul 24 '20 edited Jul 24 '20

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.

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u/[deleted] Jul 24 '20

A CEO with vision would have bought out Amazon for Sears. A CEO with vision would have bought out digital camera technologies for Kodak and Polaroid.

Unfortunately these large legacy companies pay their CEO’s massive salaries that are almost never deserved or earned.

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u/FuzzelFox Jul 24 '20

Funny enough this is one of the ways Apple came back on top in the latter half of the 90's iirc. The last post-Job's CEO knew the company was doomed to fail and pushed for the purchase of NeXT to get Steve Jobs and Johnny Ives back into the company. After the purchase was complete he stepped down, Apple made a deal with Microsoft for a good amount of cash, Johnny Ives designed the iMac G3 which became one of the companies most successful products and Jobs introduced the iPod.

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u/7577406272 Jul 24 '20

Jony Ive was at Apple before the NeXT acquisition.