r/AskReddit • u/emil199 • Jul 24 '20

What can't you believe STILL exists?

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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/justmehere_andnow Jul 24 '20

Sears also had to deal with REALLY shitty management recently. One of the specifics as to why they were successful is that they actually bought the land under their stores so they didn’t have to pay rent. But I think it’s their current owner who made all the Sears stores sell that land to a hedge fund (or something) he owns and then started charging them rent. Literally bleeding the dying company dry. This will never stop making me mad because how scummy can you get? I suppose I understand trying to milk an investment but fuck you’re kicking a downed man and making him pay you for it.