26 ms·

The History of Sears Predicts Nearly Everything Amazon Is Doing (2017)

219 points by kimsk112 8y ago

justdroppedin 8y ago
Vastly superior to this article is this legendary MetaFilter comment on the same topic: https://www.metafilter.com/62394/The-Record-Industrys-Decline#1742245 https://www.metafilter.com/62394/The-Record-Industrys-Declin...
- th0ma5 8y ago
  I'm not convinced this would've worked. It would've been too early. 56k modems were cutting edge then and you still needed a desktop. Amazon sold only books mostly for quite some time around then. Also, there was a lot of hype around the net and "www" was pretty awkward to get people to wrap their heads around. It would've been a lot of money about 10 years too early.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - jacobush 8y ago
    Like boo.com
  - acdha 8y ago
    Amazon was still profitable after the first couple of years even with those limits, and people were racing to get online — decidedly not just geeks. It wouldn’t have converted the catalog business overnight but Sears was really well positioned, especially with local stores to handle returns and service. If they’d invested then, they’d have been prepared as broadband started to appear (for timing, I went from 56k dialup to 10Mb cable in 1998).
    - jhbadger 8y ago
      Although people forget that the conversion of Amazon to an "everything store" was later -- 1998/1999. For the first four years of its existence it was just a book store. The "everything store" phase was in the early cable modem era. https://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/05/business/amazoncom-is-expanding-beyond-books.html https://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/05/business/amazoncom-is-exp...
  - delecti 8y ago
    They already had the catalog though, and the related infrastructure, and the name recognition of both. "It's the catalog but on your computer" would have been easy enough for people to understand.
- colordrops 8y ago
  As the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20. Up until deep into the 21st century were people finally convinced that online retail made sense. Back in the 80s and 90s people barely understood the internet let alone the idea of selling things on it.
  - InclinedPlane 8y ago
    There were some good and bad reasons for this. Remember that when the web launched the idea of encryption, PCI compliance, input sanitization, etc. was all pretty foreign. Your typical web store was vulnerable to a remote execution vulnerability, probably stored all its data (including passwords and credit card numbers) in flat files (unencrypted plain-text) without even using a database (which at least meant it wasn't vulnerable to SQL injection), and didn't use ssl. It took a few years for things to improve to a basic level of security but even then the widespread public perception was that giving your credit card to "the internet" was about one million times worse than walking through a dark alley in the worst part of town while carrying a basket full of all your life savings in cash. Bit by bit things started to change, but it took years.
    - fjsolwmv 8y ago
      The general public had no conception of any of these things.
      - apatters 8y ago
        Maybe not, but there was certainly a trust issue. At the dawn of ecommerce many people were afraid of using their credit card online -- they didn't know the technical details but it just seemed new and scary.
        bluGill 8y ago
        Which should have given sears extra help: they were a known and trusted entity that you could give your credit card to unlike that tiny fly-by-night startup bookstore Amazon. They had everything needed to take advantage of the internet just a few years before: a trusted name, a large catalog, experience in online sales (progigy might have failed, but the experience would have been a big help), and a large distribution network.
- InclinedPlane 8y ago
  Still not the biggest such blunder, even in the late 20th century. That dubious honor must go to Xerox. They created a research org (Palo Alto Research Center or PARC) and tasked it with pushing the state of the art in the industry, which it did. Xerox PARC invented the GUI, ethernet, laser printing, WYSIWYG editors and desktop publishing, bitmapped graphics, the smalltalk language, the MVC design pattern, and more, all in the late 1970s. Xerox corporate leadership looked at this stuff (especially the ALTO computer which represented the culmination of most of these innovations) and couldn't see a future in it, so they shit-canned it. A few years later other companies (specifically Apple and Microsoft) toured Xerox PARC and learned a great deal about these things then repackaged it in their own forms (the Macintosh and Windows). Meanwhile, some PARC employees quit and spun out their own startups using the technology (3COM and Adobe). Billions upon billions of dollars and entire industries (graphic arts and digital design, ethernet based networking, the home desktop computer, etc.) were built up out of the technologies that Xerox simply left abandoned on the roadside because they were too myopic.
  - Stratoscope 8y ago
    This reminds me that I've been meaning to read Fumbling the Future: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B0791LWDG3/ https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B0791LWDG3/ $3.03 for the Kindle edition! How can I turn that down? (And yes, I do note the irony of this being an Amazon link.)
    - antaviana 8y ago
      10 minutes later, it's $5.77
      - Stratoscope 8y ago
        That's odd, it still shows $3.03 for me, even in an incognito window on mobile and desktop, and on a machine that has never been signed into my Amazon account.
        DoreenMichele 8y ago
- batbomb 8y ago
  McMaster-Carr is probably a little bit close to the embodiment of something like that
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- aportnoy 8y ago
  Are you here to see what condition your condition was in?
- excalibur 8y ago
  It's worth noting that Amazon's selection is orders of magnitude larger than Sears' ever was. This isn't solely or even primarily because there are more products available today, nor is it an accident. Sears (and pretty much every other retailer in the '90s) always offered a curated selection of products. If you went to them looking for a fedora, you'd have maybe four or five different options to choose from. A quick search on Amazon returns over 3,000 results (when limited to the "men's fashion" department). Instead of building a select portfolio of products, Amazon's model is to sell as many different items as they possibly can (with a few strategic omissions). There's an important paradigm shift here that needs to be considered. The idea of going to one place (what's a website again?) to find every variation ever made of every item you can possibly think of was completely foreign to people in 1993. In a nutshell, you can't GET to Amazon without going through Ebay. So what would have happened had Sears' tried-and-true curation model come to dominate online shopping early on? It's hard to say obviously, but it still would have been ripe for disruption, from people who saw the online marketplace a bit differently.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
    I actually prefer Sears model. At least there was some minimum of quality I could expect. In addition, I could be fairly certain that I would not get a counterfeit. This is one of the reasons I loce shopping at Costco, good quality, good prices, excellent service.
  - gutnor 8y ago
    Indeed you are right, that's what people kept talking about when Amazon started to rise in popularity: long tail sales strategy. They had everything that you simply couldn't get anywhere else, a strategy that only an online shop could manage. Borders and other big chain had a similar-ish strategy, however they were hampered by their physical shops: they are forced to curate to fit floor space and, for a customer, delivery is not a positive outcome of going to a physical shop, so it does not matter how fast you can get something if it takes longer than the customer is willing to stay in the shop. Amazon has continued to refine its online shop, but the key was to always offer as much as possible, even offering themselves as a platform to independent seller in order to vastly increase their catalogue. ( I have done business with amazon sellers that had sold only a handful of time per year, for a perishable product - that's ultra long tail )
- sct202 8y ago
  Prodigy (IBM-Sears JV) did have a storefront, but I don't think anyone actually used it. I think even with a good idea, most large companies aren't really the best place to launch new novel ideas--even when they're good ones. EDIT: I found an article from 1990 that says that you could buy things on Prodigy from Sears and JC Penny. You could also order groceries (it sounds really clunky though). It's under "Grocery shopping heads for home at Dominick's Jouzaitis, Carol Chicago Tribune (1963-Current file); Sep 7, 1990; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Chicago Tribune"
  - pgrote 8y ago
    We used the Prodigy grocery delivery service many times when it came out. It was clunky, but a great service. Within 6 months the delivery service stopped. It wasn't until 2017 our local grocery stores began offering delivery again. Amazing to think about that disconnect.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      A huge amount of money was lost in online grocery delivery in the dot-com crash which probably scared off most new entrants for a long time. I've had Peapod available for over 10 years but I think that's still the only option I have 40 miles outside of a major metro in the US.
- sytelus 8y ago
  Very good read! I often get amazed when CEOs shutdown products left and right to "improve the focus". This was in fact classic Jobs advice all the time that has gone bad in many instances. It's even more mind boggling when CEOs decide to sell their businesses. IBM selling entire PC lineup to Lenovo is classic example.
jroonc399jdj 8y ago
A few hundred years ago, some humans overthrew an aristocracy they felt ignored them, took a swing at updating their social contract. Traditionalists were mad. Modern thinkers won out more or less. Are we repeating that again? These loops are fascinating for their recurring appearance in human history.
- dvtrn 8y ago
  It's odd to me to find this comment downvoted, nearly completely grayed out for applying the lessons of history of antiquity to the modernity of [e]commerce, after just reading quite a few others making the exact same statements only with more recent participants and industry juggernauts. I found it quite apt.
  - jpttsn 8y ago
    Vague is apt on easy mode.
    - dvtrn 8y ago
      How was that comment remotely vague? I'm sure it would seem so if one were lacking a few history lessons in high school but beyond that?
      - ectospheno 8y ago
        It is a transparent attempt to inject a political discussion into a topic where it is not appropriate. Your use of ad hominem in supporting this is just as transparent. There are other places where this discussion would be appropriate.
        dvtrn 8y ago
        I am TRULY sorry to put this burden out there but someone explain to me the "transparently political" here because it's either too early in the morning or I am just not seeing it in that comment for some other reason. Am I somehow out of line here for reading that comment as an allegory for what's happening with Amazon, as it happened with Sears, as it happened with many other institutional market players with enormous market power going back several hundreds of years? Is it wrong to ask if that loop is repeating itself now with Amazon and other giants of commerce in 2018? Because that's what I got from that commentary. It's an interesting thought experiment and I'm happy to oblige that. Playing a game of knee-jerk word association just to torpedo the commentary as ad-hoc political, yes, in my opinion signals some lack of appreciation for history. If you want to call that ad hominem that's fine, but I'm not taking it back.
okket 8y ago
Somewhat related tangent (sorry), but see also this thread about how radical the Sears catalog was in the era of Jim Crow: https://twitter.com/louishyman/status/1051872178415828993 https://twitter.com/louishyman/status/1051872178415828993
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  One mans cheap junk is another man's increased standard of living.
  - barrkel 8y ago
    Did you read the linked twitter thread? It's not about a mere "increased standard of living". Really tone deaf.
    - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      I read the thread in its entirety before commenting. Access to and ability to afford goods and services is what defines one's standard of living. Not having to deal with racist policies gave blacks access to a standard of living they otherwise couldn't attain. Instead of having to pay whatever some goods cost plus a lot of their time Sears let them buy those goods for the cost and a minimal amount of time allowing them to spend the time elsewhere. There's an obvious (or at least I thought so) modern parallel with poor people and cheap imported consumer goods. An increased standard of living encompasses a wider variety of improvements than just moving to a town with a Whole Foods and some breweries.
- Fricken 8y ago
  A little further down in that thread there's a link to an article about Sears mail order homes. I live in a century old neighbourhood and there's a couple dozen Sears homes within a 3 block radius of me. They're still standing, still lived in, still looking good. They were built to last.
  - torpfactory 8y ago
doe88 8y ago
Related, a recent episode of 99% invisible about all kind of houses (even schools) sold by Sears by Mail https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-house-that-came-in-the-mail/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-house-that-came-i...
- etrautmann 8y ago
  The house I grew up in was purchased from sears in 1919 or sometime right around then. Apparently the house shipped as a kit via rail.
  - tim333 8y ago
    So can we expect to be living in Amazon houses soon? Alibaba already have them, eg https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Strong-luxury-Modern-Prefab-Light-steel_60116320365.html?spm=a2700.galleryofferlist.normalList.277.141e629fMLEDBo https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Strong-luxury-Modern-... Hotels too https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Modern-Holiday-Inn-Luxury-Hotel-Design_60641156714.html?spm=a2700.galleryofferlist.normalList.156.141e629fMLEDBo https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Modern-Holiday-Inn-Lu... I quite like the look of the house
    - sbradford26 8y ago
      Amazon feels like a a regular store to me. I find things that I would expect. Alibaba always feels like Amazon with no rules, and it is awesome. If a vendor wants to sell a house they can, and if a consumer wants a kit house they can just contact them. I think the marketplace feel makes it a lot more interesting.
    - cucho 8y ago
      Soon: "Amazon has teamed up with Lennar to transform select Lennar homes into Amazon Experience Centers" http://theopendoor.lennar.com/real-estate-news/amazon-lennar-create-nationwide-alexa-smart-homes-partnership/ http://theopendoor.lennar.com/real-estate-news/amazon-lennar...
    - jlarocco 8y ago
bensonn 8y ago
If Amazon buys Sears it will be a mind-boggling Inception of Amazon's present history predicting its own past's future. What, OMG?! I can actually see this happening. Sears locations might make pretty decent mini-DCs/Echo sales centers. Ironically, I feel like they could turn Sears into Borders and do OK. A mini DC center in the back- this could allow for 2 hour deliveries to more suburnban/rural locations. In the front they could have shelves of Kindle files printed out on paper. I know, it sounds like Ye Olde Book Store, but here an Echo thingy would replace the Dewey Decimal or human employee. Alexa would manifest as a racially and gender ambiguous animatron who would not only answer your questions but also serve free Kombucha when you pick up your prescriptions or sign up for a checking account (cash converts to Amazon credits). I can see Amazon making them mini-malls within existing malls until the already struglling other stores can't exist anymore. Once Amazon has the entire mall- well that is when things get crazy!
- btrautsc 8y ago
  I have been inaccurately predicting this for a few years (with a variety of big box stores/ many location stores). I think what I was most wrong about is AMZN thinks a lot about the geographic overlap of their customers and where they will shop. That is why the Whole Foods purchase was so brilliant. Both the overlap of wallets shopping in at both AMZN (prime) and WF. I wonder how well Sear's store footprint fits with the AMZN customer base.
  - lotsofpulp 8y ago
    With wealth and income gap divide, there not much room to bet big on the non-rich part of town. Find the Whole Foods and and Apple Store and Nordstroms and that's the mall or shopping area that will support higher profit margins.
- codesternews 8y ago
  No one will touch Sears. The debt they have is huge and all those pension crap of employees. If Amazon have to do anything they will just open the stores. Buying Sears means opening own grave.
aiCeivi9 8y ago
Can Amazon as a company fail unless they spin-off AWS to separate entity?
- neaden 8y ago
  Sure, they could make some colossal mistakes and get in a huge amount of debt, or some new competitor could come into cloud computing in a way we can't predict and Amazon can't compete with. The future is weird and things that seem like they will last forever can quickly vanish, and afterwards it seems inevitable.
- noxToken 8y ago
  As a whole? Probably not. As an online merchant. It's unlikely but possible. The HN crowd and its ilk have been complaining about quality control for a while. Electronic components and labor for assembly are getting cheaper by the year. Grab a popular electronic item's circuit diagram (say Bluetooth earbuds), spend a few hundred reproducing the form factor of a popular major manufacturer, volume manufacture in China, and sell! Better yet, brand yours as a competitors (or however that works) and reap the profits as your cheap knockoff gets sold as the most popular item in that category. It's gotten so ridiculous that even my non-tech peers are starting to steer away from Amazon for certain purchases. I've even seen claims that there are fake/counterfeit diapers masquerading as ubiquitous brands. But it's not just limited to counterfeit goods. The quality in general of certain products (usually electronics) is abysmal. I don't fault Amazon for this - you can find cheap electronics in big box stores that will break just as quickly as an something on Amazon. Brick and mortar stores had shelf space on their side. If you go to a big box store for wireless earbuds, you'll likely see Beats, Samsung, Apple, Bose, etc. taking up most of the shelf space. If you do a search on Amazon for wireless earbuds, the first page (for me) has 15 organic results, and Apple is the only brand that I recognize. Again - not inherently bad, but I'm hard pressed to believe that even with hundreds to thousands of reviews per item, you're buying a quality product that will last for more than a year of regular use. I've bought a popular set of earbuds before based on Amazon's search. The first pair lasted 3 months. I got a second pair under warranty, and it died in the same manner after 3 months. Amazon is a titan in this space. It would take a lot of neglect for their retail side to outright fail. But if they don't fix their quality issues with their supply, they're going to start trending in the wrong direction.
yellowapple 8y ago
I'll believe it when Amazon starts selling kit houses.
- technotony 8y ago
  You mean like this? https://www.amazon.com/Allwood-Eagle-Point-1108-Cabin/dp/B00LYGIEU2/ref=sr_1_17?ie=UTF8&qid=1539708228&sr=8-17&keywords=container+house https://www.amazon.com/Allwood-Eagle-Point-1108-Cabin/dp/B00...
  - yellowapple 8y ago
    Well I'll be damned.
jdlyga 8y ago
What does Amazon need to do to avoid falling to the same fate as Sears?
- onetimemanytime 8y ago
  Maybe it's inevitable, but who cares...SEARS milked it for 130+ years. That's about 4-5 generations. But I tell you, no one is going to allow AMZN control 50++% of online sales for decades to come.
  - 8bitsrule 8y ago
    I've wondering why that's been true for 10 years and yet noone's even close. Cuz if they were waiting for AMZN to make a big mistake, they waited too long.

219 points by kimsk112 8y ago

Vastly superior to this article is this legendary MetaFilter comment on the same topic: https://www.metafilter.com/62394/The-Record-Industrys-Decline#1742245 https://www.metafilter.com/62394/The-Record-Industrys-Declin...

th0ma5 8y ago
I'm not convinced this would've worked. It would've been too early. 56k modems were cutting edge then and you still needed a desktop. Amazon sold only books mostly for quite some time around then. Also, there was a lot of hype around the net and "www" was pretty awkward to get people to wrap their heads around. It would've been a lot of money about 10 years too early.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jacobush 8y ago
  Like boo.com
- acdha 8y ago
  Amazon was still profitable after the first couple of years even with those limits, and people were racing to get online — decidedly not just geeks. It wouldn’t have converted the catalog business overnight but Sears was really well positioned, especially with local stores to handle returns and service. If they’d invested then, they’d have been prepared as broadband started to appear (for timing, I went from 56k dialup to 10Mb cable in 1998).
  - jhbadger 8y ago
    Although people forget that the conversion of Amazon to an "everything store" was later -- 1998/1999. For the first four years of its existence it was just a book store. The "everything store" phase was in the early cable modem era. https://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/05/business/amazoncom-is-expanding-beyond-books.html https://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/05/business/amazoncom-is-exp...
- delecti 8y ago
  They already had the catalog though, and the related infrastructure, and the name recognition of both. "It's the catalog but on your computer" would have been easy enough for people to understand.
colordrops 8y ago
As the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20. Up until deep into the 21st century were people finally convinced that online retail made sense. Back in the 80s and 90s people barely understood the internet let alone the idea of selling things on it.
- InclinedPlane 8y ago
  There were some good and bad reasons for this. Remember that when the web launched the idea of encryption, PCI compliance, input sanitization, etc. was all pretty foreign. Your typical web store was vulnerable to a remote execution vulnerability, probably stored all its data (including passwords and credit card numbers) in flat files (unencrypted plain-text) without even using a database (which at least meant it wasn't vulnerable to SQL injection), and didn't use ssl. It took a few years for things to improve to a basic level of security but even then the widespread public perception was that giving your credit card to "the internet" was about one million times worse than walking through a dark alley in the worst part of town while carrying a basket full of all your life savings in cash. Bit by bit things started to change, but it took years.
  - fjsolwmv 8y ago
    The general public had no conception of any of these things.
    - apatters 8y ago
      Maybe not, but there was certainly a trust issue. At the dawn of ecommerce many people were afraid of using their credit card online -- they didn't know the technical details but it just seemed new and scary.
      - bluGill 8y ago
        Which should have given sears extra help: they were a known and trusted entity that you could give your credit card to unlike that tiny fly-by-night startup bookstore Amazon. They had everything needed to take advantage of the internet just a few years before: a trusted name, a large catalog, experience in online sales (progigy might have failed, but the experience would have been a big help), and a large distribution network.
InclinedPlane 8y ago
Still not the biggest such blunder, even in the late 20th century. That dubious honor must go to Xerox. They created a research org (Palo Alto Research Center or PARC) and tasked it with pushing the state of the art in the industry, which it did. Xerox PARC invented the GUI, ethernet, laser printing, WYSIWYG editors and desktop publishing, bitmapped graphics, the smalltalk language, the MVC design pattern, and more, all in the late 1970s. Xerox corporate leadership looked at this stuff (especially the ALTO computer which represented the culmination of most of these innovations) and couldn't see a future in it, so they shit-canned it. A few years later other companies (specifically Apple and Microsoft) toured Xerox PARC and learned a great deal about these things then repackaged it in their own forms (the Macintosh and Windows). Meanwhile, some PARC employees quit and spun out their own startups using the technology (3COM and Adobe). Billions upon billions of dollars and entire industries (graphic arts and digital design, ethernet based networking, the home desktop computer, etc.) were built up out of the technologies that Xerox simply left abandoned on the roadside because they were too myopic.
- Stratoscope 8y ago
  This reminds me that I've been meaning to read Fumbling the Future: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B0791LWDG3/ https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B0791LWDG3/ $3.03 for the Kindle edition! How can I turn that down? (And yes, I do note the irony of this being an Amazon link.)
  - antaviana 8y ago
    10 minutes later, it's $5.77
    - Stratoscope 8y ago
      That's odd, it still shows $3.03 for me, even in an incognito window on mobile and desktop, and on a machine that has never been signed into my Amazon account.
      - DoreenMichele 8y ago
batbomb 8y ago
McMaster-Carr is probably a little bit close to the embodiment of something like that
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
aportnoy 8y ago
Are you here to see what condition your condition was in?
excalibur 8y ago
It's worth noting that Amazon's selection is orders of magnitude larger than Sears' ever was. This isn't solely or even primarily because there are more products available today, nor is it an accident. Sears (and pretty much every other retailer in the '90s) always offered a curated selection of products. If you went to them looking for a fedora, you'd have maybe four or five different options to choose from. A quick search on Amazon returns over 3,000 results (when limited to the "men's fashion" department). Instead of building a select portfolio of products, Amazon's model is to sell as many different items as they possibly can (with a few strategic omissions). There's an important paradigm shift here that needs to be considered. The idea of going to one place (what's a website again?) to find every variation ever made of every item you can possibly think of was completely foreign to people in 1993. In a nutshell, you can't GET to Amazon without going through Ebay. So what would have happened had Sears' tried-and-true curation model come to dominate online shopping early on? It's hard to say obviously, but it still would have been ripe for disruption, from people who saw the online marketplace a bit differently.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
  I actually prefer Sears model. At least there was some minimum of quality I could expect. In addition, I could be fairly certain that I would not get a counterfeit. This is one of the reasons I loce shopping at Costco, good quality, good prices, excellent service.
- gutnor 8y ago
  Indeed you are right, that's what people kept talking about when Amazon started to rise in popularity: long tail sales strategy. They had everything that you simply couldn't get anywhere else, a strategy that only an online shop could manage. Borders and other big chain had a similar-ish strategy, however they were hampered by their physical shops: they are forced to curate to fit floor space and, for a customer, delivery is not a positive outcome of going to a physical shop, so it does not matter how fast you can get something if it takes longer than the customer is willing to stay in the shop. Amazon has continued to refine its online shop, but the key was to always offer as much as possible, even offering themselves as a platform to independent seller in order to vastly increase their catalogue. ( I have done business with amazon sellers that had sold only a handful of time per year, for a perishable product - that's ultra long tail )
sct202 8y ago
Prodigy (IBM-Sears JV) did have a storefront, but I don't think anyone actually used it. I think even with a good idea, most large companies aren't really the best place to launch new novel ideas--even when they're good ones. EDIT: I found an article from 1990 that says that you could buy things on Prodigy from Sears and JC Penny. You could also order groceries (it sounds really clunky though). It's under "Grocery shopping heads for home at Dominick's Jouzaitis, Carol Chicago Tribune (1963-Current file); Sep 7, 1990; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Chicago Tribune"
- pgrote 8y ago
  We used the Prodigy grocery delivery service many times when it came out. It was clunky, but a great service. Within 6 months the delivery service stopped. It wasn't until 2017 our local grocery stores began offering delivery again. Amazing to think about that disconnect.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    A huge amount of money was lost in online grocery delivery in the dot-com crash which probably scared off most new entrants for a long time. I've had Peapod available for over 10 years but I think that's still the only option I have 40 miles outside of a major metro in the US.
sytelus 8y ago
Very good read! I often get amazed when CEOs shutdown products left and right to "improve the focus". This was in fact classic Jobs advice all the time that has gone bad in many instances. It's even more mind boggling when CEOs decide to sell their businesses. IBM selling entire PC lineup to Lenovo is classic example.

jroonc399jdj 8y ago

A few hundred years ago, some humans overthrew an aristocracy they felt ignored them, took a swing at updating their social contract. Traditionalists were mad. Modern thinkers won out more or less. Are we repeating that again? These loops are fascinating for their recurring appearance in human history.

dvtrn 8y ago
It's odd to me to find this comment downvoted, nearly completely grayed out for applying the lessons of history of antiquity to the modernity of [e]commerce, after just reading quite a few others making the exact same statements only with more recent participants and industry juggernauts. I found it quite apt.
- jpttsn 8y ago
  Vague is apt on easy mode.
  - dvtrn 8y ago
    How was that comment remotely vague? I'm sure it would seem so if one were lacking a few history lessons in high school but beyond that?
    - ectospheno 8y ago
      It is a transparent attempt to inject a political discussion into a topic where it is not appropriate. Your use of ad hominem in supporting this is just as transparent. There are other places where this discussion would be appropriate.
      - dvtrn 8y ago
        I am TRULY sorry to put this burden out there but someone explain to me the "transparently political" here because it's either too early in the morning or I am just not seeing it in that comment for some other reason. Am I somehow out of line here for reading that comment as an allegory for what's happening with Amazon, as it happened with Sears, as it happened with many other institutional market players with enormous market power going back several hundreds of years? Is it wrong to ask if that loop is repeating itself now with Amazon and other giants of commerce in 2018? Because that's what I got from that commentary. It's an interesting thought experiment and I'm happy to oblige that. Playing a game of knee-jerk word association just to torpedo the commentary as ad-hoc political, yes, in my opinion signals some lack of appreciation for history. If you want to call that ad hominem that's fine, but I'm not taking it back.

okket 8y ago

Somewhat related tangent (sorry), but see also this thread about how radical the Sears catalog was in the era of Jim Crow: https://twitter.com/louishyman/status/1051872178415828993 https://twitter.com/louishyman/status/1051872178415828993

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
One mans cheap junk is another man's increased standard of living.
- barrkel 8y ago
  Did you read the linked twitter thread? It's not about a mere "increased standard of living". Really tone deaf.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    I read the thread in its entirety before commenting. Access to and ability to afford goods and services is what defines one's standard of living. Not having to deal with racist policies gave blacks access to a standard of living they otherwise couldn't attain. Instead of having to pay whatever some goods cost plus a lot of their time Sears let them buy those goods for the cost and a minimal amount of time allowing them to spend the time elsewhere. There's an obvious (or at least I thought so) modern parallel with poor people and cheap imported consumer goods. An increased standard of living encompasses a wider variety of improvements than just moving to a town with a Whole Foods and some breweries.
Fricken 8y ago
A little further down in that thread there's a link to an article about Sears mail order homes. I live in a century old neighbourhood and there's a couple dozen Sears homes within a 3 block radius of me. They're still standing, still lived in, still looking good. They were built to last.
- torpfactory 8y ago

doe88 8y ago

Related, a recent episode of 99% invisible about all kind of houses (even schools) sold by Sears by Mail https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-house-that-came-in-the-mail/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-house-that-came-i...

etrautmann 8y ago
The house I grew up in was purchased from sears in 1919 or sometime right around then. Apparently the house shipped as a kit via rail.
- tim333 8y ago
  So can we expect to be living in Amazon houses soon? Alibaba already have them, eg https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Strong-luxury-Modern-Prefab-Light-steel_60116320365.html?spm=a2700.galleryofferlist.normalList.277.141e629fMLEDBo https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Strong-luxury-Modern-... Hotels too https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Modern-Holiday-Inn-Luxury-Hotel-Design_60641156714.html?spm=a2700.galleryofferlist.normalList.156.141e629fMLEDBo https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Modern-Holiday-Inn-Lu... I quite like the look of the house
  - sbradford26 8y ago
    Amazon feels like a a regular store to me. I find things that I would expect. Alibaba always feels like Amazon with no rules, and it is awesome. If a vendor wants to sell a house they can, and if a consumer wants a kit house they can just contact them. I think the marketplace feel makes it a lot more interesting.
  - cucho 8y ago
    Soon: "Amazon has teamed up with Lennar to transform select Lennar homes into Amazon Experience Centers" http://theopendoor.lennar.com/real-estate-news/amazon-lennar-create-nationwide-alexa-smart-homes-partnership/ http://theopendoor.lennar.com/real-estate-news/amazon-lennar...
  - jlarocco 8y ago

bensonn 8y ago

If Amazon buys Sears it will be a mind-boggling Inception of Amazon's present history predicting its own past's future. What, OMG?! I can actually see this happening. Sears locations might make pretty decent mini-DCs/Echo sales centers. Ironically, I feel like they could turn Sears into Borders and do OK. A mini DC center in the back- this could allow for 2 hour deliveries to more suburnban/rural locations. In the front they could have shelves of Kindle files printed out on paper. I know, it sounds like Ye Olde Book Store, but here an Echo thingy would replace the Dewey Decimal or human employee. Alexa would manifest as a racially and gender ambiguous animatron who would not only answer your questions but also serve free Kombucha when you pick up your prescriptions or sign up for a checking account (cash converts to Amazon credits). I can see Amazon making them mini-malls within existing malls until the already struglling other stores can't exist anymore. Once Amazon has the entire mall- well that is when things get crazy!

btrautsc 8y ago
I have been inaccurately predicting this for a few years (with a variety of big box stores/ many location stores). I think what I was most wrong about is AMZN thinks a lot about the geographic overlap of their customers and where they will shop. That is why the Whole Foods purchase was so brilliant. Both the overlap of wallets shopping in at both AMZN (prime) and WF. I wonder how well Sear's store footprint fits with the AMZN customer base.
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  With wealth and income gap divide, there not much room to bet big on the non-rich part of town. Find the Whole Foods and and Apple Store and Nordstroms and that's the mall or shopping area that will support higher profit margins.
codesternews 8y ago
No one will touch Sears. The debt they have is huge and all those pension crap of employees. If Amazon have to do anything they will just open the stores. Buying Sears means opening own grave.

aiCeivi9 8y ago

Can Amazon as a company fail unless they spin-off AWS to separate entity?

neaden 8y ago
Sure, they could make some colossal mistakes and get in a huge amount of debt, or some new competitor could come into cloud computing in a way we can't predict and Amazon can't compete with. The future is weird and things that seem like they will last forever can quickly vanish, and afterwards it seems inevitable.
noxToken 8y ago
As a whole? Probably not. As an online merchant. It's unlikely but possible. The HN crowd and its ilk have been complaining about quality control for a while. Electronic components and labor for assembly are getting cheaper by the year. Grab a popular electronic item's circuit diagram (say Bluetooth earbuds), spend a few hundred reproducing the form factor of a popular major manufacturer, volume manufacture in China, and sell! Better yet, brand yours as a competitors (or however that works) and reap the profits as your cheap knockoff gets sold as the most popular item in that category. It's gotten so ridiculous that even my non-tech peers are starting to steer away from Amazon for certain purchases. I've even seen claims that there are fake/counterfeit diapers masquerading as ubiquitous brands. But it's not just limited to counterfeit goods. The quality in general of certain products (usually electronics) is abysmal. I don't fault Amazon for this - you can find cheap electronics in big box stores that will break just as quickly as an something on Amazon. Brick and mortar stores had shelf space on their side. If you go to a big box store for wireless earbuds, you'll likely see Beats, Samsung, Apple, Bose, etc. taking up most of the shelf space. If you do a search on Amazon for wireless earbuds, the first page (for me) has 15 organic results, and Apple is the only brand that I recognize. Again - not inherently bad, but I'm hard pressed to believe that even with hundreds to thousands of reviews per item, you're buying a quality product that will last for more than a year of regular use. I've bought a popular set of earbuds before based on Amazon's search. The first pair lasted 3 months. I got a second pair under warranty, and it died in the same manner after 3 months. Amazon is a titan in this space. It would take a lot of neglect for their retail side to outright fail. But if they don't fix their quality issues with their supply, they're going to start trending in the wrong direction.

yellowapple 8y ago

I'll believe it when Amazon starts selling kit houses.

technotony 8y ago
You mean like this? https://www.amazon.com/Allwood-Eagle-Point-1108-Cabin/dp/B00LYGIEU2/ref=sr_1_17?ie=UTF8&qid=1539708228&sr=8-17&keywords=container+house https://www.amazon.com/Allwood-Eagle-Point-1108-Cabin/dp/B00...
- yellowapple 8y ago
  Well I'll be damned.

jdlyga 8y ago

What does Amazon need to do to avoid falling to the same fate as Sears?

onetimemanytime 8y ago
Maybe it's inevitable, but who cares...SEARS milked it for 130+ years. That's about 4-5 generations. But I tell you, no one is going to allow AMZN control 50++% of online sales for decades to come.
- 8bitsrule 8y ago
  I've wondering why that's been true for 10 years and yet noone's even close. Cuz if they were waiting for AMZN to make a big mistake, they waited too long.