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Sears started as a mail-order company in 1892, with a catalog that quickly grew to more than 500 pages. It came in the mail yearly, and rural America quickly ca

Sears started as a mail-order company in 1892, with a catalog that quickly grew to more than 500 pages. It came in the mail yearly, and rural America quickly came to depend on it. It’s hard to convey what a huge success Sears was; its 1906 IPO (the first one ever handled by Goldman Sachs) qualifies it retrospectively as way beyond a Unicorn, as they raised more than $1 billion in 2018 dollars. They didn’t open their first brick-and-mortar store until 1925, but the catalog operation was still going strong for decades after that. However, they mis-judged the future, and shut it down in 1993. Amazon was founded in 1994. Sears had all the logistical knowledge of how to sell and deliver billions of dollars of consumer products at scale; they should have been Amazon, but pivoted away at exactly the wrong moment.

avar 8y ago
Reading the NYT article about it written at the time[1] is painful with the benefit of hindsight. Some quotes: > "The mall is still an incredibly powerful draw," Mr. Martinez said. "Some of our better-performing stores are there." But the writing was already on the wall: > Traffic in malls has slowed somewhat in recent years, but analysts said the company had little choice but to focus on its mall stores, which are its most profitable. Arthur C. Martinez was head of Sears from 1992-2000[2] and known as "the person who saved Sears". Their stock price kept climbing until around 2007, and has been on a downwards trajectory ever since then. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/26/business/sears-eliminating-its-catalogues-and-50000-jobs.html https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/26/business/sears-eliminatin... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Martinez https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Martinez
samatman 8y ago
More than that, Sears had Prodigy, an early and very successful online service. They had all the pieces in place and still dropped the ball.
- tim333 8y ago
  I guess it's yet another example of it all being about execution. It was easy at the time to predict that sales would move online but Amazon was the one that executed best.
- commandar 8y ago
  They also launched and owned Discover up until 1993, so they even had in-house payment processing.

avar 8y ago

Reading the NYT article about it written at the time[1] is painful with the benefit of hindsight. Some quotes: > "The mall is still an incredibly powerful draw," Mr. Martinez said. "Some of our better-performing stores are there." But the writing was already on the wall: > Traffic in malls has slowed somewhat in recent years, but analysts said the company had little choice but to focus on its mall stores, which are its most profitable. Arthur C. Martinez was head of Sears from 1992-2000[2] and known as "the person who saved Sears". Their stock price kept climbing until around 2007, and has been on a downwards trajectory ever since then. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/26/business/sears-eliminating-its-catalogues-and-50000-jobs.html https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/26/business/sears-eliminatin... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Martinez https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Martinez

samatman 8y ago

More than that, Sears had Prodigy, an early and very successful online service. They had all the pieces in place and still dropped the ball.

tim333 8y ago
I guess it's yet another example of it all being about execution. It was easy at the time to predict that sales would move online but Amazon was the one that executed best.
commandar 8y ago
They also launched and owned Discover up until 1993, so they even had in-house payment processing.