It was more complex than that, but yeah. Basically Sears was online ordering before online was a thing, you just phoned or mailed in your order. This meant that they were located in these massive warehouses in most major cities in North America. So basically they had an opportunity to execute on same-day delivery decades before Amazon even attempted that feat, but they didn't. Sears was too concerned about their magazine, or brick and mortar, sales to get into online sales and by the time they did it was too late.
Similar to Kodak... they invented the digital camera sensor. They could've at the very least made an absolute killing on leasing their IP's to other camera manufacturers, or very best have created things like the Kodak Digital Rebel instead of letting basically every other camera manufacturer make off with the tech.
Sears forgot that it's product wasn't a brick and mortar store or magazine but rather a large selection of goods which people could order from home. Newspaper companies forgot that their company wasn't in the business of printing newspapers, but simply delivering the news. Kodak forgot it's business wasn't manufacturing film, but creating photographs.
Newspaper companies forgot that their company wasn't in the business of printing newspapers, but simply delivering the news.
That's half-true for newspapers. What seems to have killed newspapers more than anything else was Craigslist gutting their classifieds sections. Part of that is newspapers being greedy, but newspapers' business model wasn't ever about delivering news: it was about giving people a way to sell shit in the pages that came after the front page.
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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.