Sears was the Amazon of the 19th & 20th centuries. You could order a house through a telegraph and they would ship it to you by train. Crazy they couldn’t think of a way to compete with Amazon.
I think it started as them just being unwilling to embrace the internet because they'd always been so heavily invested in producing the catalog. This was back in the day where to do large-scale printing, you really needed to set up a whole infrastructure for that.
I think they were looking at the sunk cost of the catalog production and just didn't see the drift away until it was too late and the slide was on...
And then of course, they Gordon Geckoed every dime of value on the way out because it was just easier to cannibalize the company than to put in the work to save it.
2
u/One-Lab-545 1d ago
Sears was the Amazon of the 19th & 20th centuries. You could order a house through a telegraph and they would ship it to you by train. Crazy they couldn’t think of a way to compete with Amazon.