3 ms·

A guy says: > I don’t know how Sears failed so hard and proceeds to describe exactly why it failed so hard. BTW, despite all that corporate bullshit one thin

A guy says: > I don’t know how Sears failed so hard and proceeds to describe exactly why it failed so hard. BTW, despite all that corporate bullshit one thing should work reliably: inventory. When a customer is physically in the store you can "sorry, actually we don't have $thing in stock" all you want, they can't just teleport to your competitor. In the Internet - they can.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
I was going to comment the same, but I think the question was one layer up from that: Yes, they failed because of terrible tooling, tone-deaf management, and awful incentives. But why were those problems happening? The tooling problem should have been obvious to anyone even passingly involved with on-the-ground operations (and lower managers should have bubbled that up), management should have seen how they looked, the incentives should have been so obviously cancerous that they should never have been let out the door. So why did the company behave in ways that appear to have been dumb even at the time?
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  Sears was "too big to fail", an "American Institution", Sears catalogs were used as toilet paper in the old west (once you had bought your year's supply of ammunition, a new home to build, canning supplies and seeds). It may have felt like they could do no wrong so why focus on continuing to do right? Why push for excellence when you're already the best? And once one manager started thinking like that, then another did, and another did, and another... It's easy to see in the aftermath what factors caused them to fail, but the spirit of the event itself was plain to everyone not caught up in it. They thought they were invulnerable, and like a teenager wearing a t-shirt on a motorcycle they eventually found out the hard truth.

3 ms·

A guy says: > I don’t know how Sears failed so hard and proceeds to describe exactly why it failed so hard. BTW, despite all that corporate bullshit one thin

by justsomehnguy 5y ago

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
I was going to comment the same, but I think the question was one layer up from that: Yes, they failed because of terrible tooling, tone-deaf management, and awful incentives. But why were those problems happening? The tooling problem should have been obvious to anyone even passingly involved with on-the-ground operations (and lower managers should have bubbled that up), management should have seen how they looked, the incentives should have been so obviously cancerous that they should never have been let out the door. So why did the company behave in ways that appear to have been dumb even at the time?
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  Sears was "too big to fail", an "American Institution", Sears catalogs were used as toilet paper in the old west (once you had bought your year's supply of ammunition, a new home to build, canning supplies and seeds). It may have felt like they could do no wrong so why focus on continuing to do right? Why push for excellence when you're already the best? And once one manager started thinking like that, then another did, and another did, and another... It's easy to see in the aftermath what factors caused them to fail, but the spirit of the event itself was plain to everyone not caught up in it. They thought they were invulnerable, and like a teenager wearing a t-shirt on a motorcycle they eventually found out the hard truth.