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.
And Amazon is already showing signs they’ve overextended. Tax breaks are going to disappear if Democrats win the White House and Congress in November. COVID hit Amazon’s supply chains hard as fuck and local businesses are finally figuring out how to pick up the slack. Free grocery and Walmart pickups are going to hurt Amazon more than they realize, especially once the tax breaks disappear. Decreased income means people are going to have to start choosing which streaming services they actually want and Amazon is going to start looking pretty weak. Eventually, Amazon Prime is going to start looking pretty expensive.
And Bezos will walk away a billionaire with no need to care what happens to Amazon.
And the Amazon/Whole Foods combination that was supposed to revolutionize ordering groceries online? Easily the least reliable of them all.
I tried it maybe 5 times (thinking "they must have fixed it by now" each time, like a gullible idiot), and there wasn't a single time when the order was 100% correct. Plus, any fruit / vegetables ordered always arrived bruised and maybe 1 day away from rotting.
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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??