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I honestly felt that this is where Sears dropped the ball. If any company should have had the "DNA" to compete with Amazon, it should have been Sears. Which b

I honestly felt that this is where Sears dropped the ball. If any company should have had the "DNA" to compete with Amazon, it should have been Sears. Which basically owned the catalog/mail order space before the internet. They could have leveraged their large stores to be showrooms / distribution hubs (that they mostly already owned, which is why the private equity people were so interested in them, due to their real estate holdings). You visit a sears, you see what you want, you order it and in a couple of days you come back to pick it up. Their logistics pricing should be cheaper than what amazon could have done (as they are skipping last mile), and for many consumers it wouldn't have made much of a difference (the sears that was local to me growing up was in the same general shopping center as the groccery store we generally went to, so we were regularly there). Of course they did try to do "in store pickup", but this was when they were dying already and the experience was pretty terrible (i still used it a bunch back in the day as at one point they were basically paying us to shop at sears via the amount of free shop your way points they were giving out).

sokoloff 4y ago
> You visit a sears, you see what you want, you order it and in a couple of days you come back to pick it up. Why would anyone want that? If I’m going to go so much as 15 minutes out of my way, I expect to leave with the item in my hand that day. That’s the killer advantage for brick and mortar retail. I don’t even want to go to the store the first time, but I sure as hell don’t want to go twice if Amazon offers the same overall latency with zero trips to the store.
bluGill 4y ago
Sears made several attempts at online shopping over the years, none worked out. They finally gave up and it and catalog orders the year before the web took off. Hindsight is 20/20, but at the time it looked like one more attempt at online ordering would just be throwing good money after bad.
WorldMaker 4y ago
Sears had the DNA and definitely were the Amazon of the previous century, but they didn't have the fight left in them. By the time Amazon showed up they were already being chewed apart by vultures for being fat, old, and complacent. There was already an LBO or three from private equity firms on their books and then the bad merger with K-Mart all with the intent of breaking Sears apart for pieces/scraps/brands anyway. Sears was already a walking corpse when Amazon came to fight. I feel like the wilder "DNA fight" that wasn't was "80's Sears/Amazon wannabe": Service Merchandise. They tried to recreate the Sears formula for the late 1980s/early 1990s and basically convergently evolved the Ikea model before Ikea grew any US presence as just big warehouses with smaller showrooms up front. They made a bunch of silly mistakes in the 90s trying to grow beyond their roots in primarily the US South region to more national regard/footprint, but if they hadn't made those mistakes they probably could have been a real interesting contender against Amazon.

sokoloff 4y ago

> You visit a sears, you see what you want, you order it and in a couple of days you come back to pick it up. Why would anyone want that? If I’m going to go so much as 15 minutes out of my way, I expect to leave with the item in my hand that day. That’s the killer advantage for brick and mortar retail. I don’t even want to go to the store the first time, but I sure as hell don’t want to go twice if Amazon offers the same overall latency with zero trips to the store.

bluGill 4y ago

Sears made several attempts at online shopping over the years, none worked out. They finally gave up and it and catalog orders the year before the web took off. Hindsight is 20/20, but at the time it looked like one more attempt at online ordering would just be throwing good money after bad.

WorldMaker 4y ago

Sears had the DNA and definitely were the Amazon of the previous century, but they didn't have the fight left in them. By the time Amazon showed up they were already being chewed apart by vultures for being fat, old, and complacent. There was already an LBO or three from private equity firms on their books and then the bad merger with K-Mart all with the intent of breaking Sears apart for pieces/scraps/brands anyway. Sears was already a walking corpse when Amazon came to fight. I feel like the wilder "DNA fight" that wasn't was "80's Sears/Amazon wannabe": Service Merchandise. They tried to recreate the Sears formula for the late 1980s/early 1990s and basically convergently evolved the Ikea model before Ikea grew any US presence as just big warehouses with smaller showrooms up front. They made a bunch of silly mistakes in the 90s trying to grow beyond their roots in primarily the US South region to more national regard/footprint, but if they hadn't made those mistakes they probably could have been a real interesting contender against Amazon.