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Only 5 Sears stores remain in the U.S.
- wkat4242 11mo agoWhat did they sell? A bit of everything?
- silisili 11mo agoLiterally almost everything, up to and including entire houses. I've lived in two Sears houses, great quality stuff if not a bit small by modern tastes. When I was a kid it was normal for parents to let their kids read the huge yearly Sears catalog to get ideas or pick gifts. By then they'd stopped selling items like firearms and houses but had pretty much everything else. If they had the foresight, they should have become a better version of what Amazon is now.
- cwyers 11mo agoIronically they had the foresight, they were just too early/didn't execute. They ran an online service (co-owner with IBM and CBS) called Prodigy that competed with AOL and CompuServ, and they tried to do online shopping there.
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo agoEveryone is talking like creating Amazon was some kind of low hanging citrus to be picked from the tree.
- 100721 11mo agoFor a company that had Sears’ positioning at the time? It wasn’t far off from that description.
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo agoBut a lot of stuff had to be invented and Bezos was the person to do it. Amazon sounded intense to work for to get to where it is.
- acdha 11mo agoThey invented almost all of that a century earlier. Amazon improved their warehouse management and, later, delivery times but that happened later. If Sears management had been earning their pay in the 90s that would have been much harder because Sears had a huge inventory and unmatched local presence for returns, support, etc. if they hadn’t been AWOL moving the catalog online. Amazon was shipping at regular postal speeds then, too, so Sears could even have beat them if they shipped from their warehouses. This wasn’t uncommon back then: we had several clients in the 90s who just couldn’t wrap their heads around how quickly many of their customers would switch to email or online forms when it saved them a few days on the transaction.
- lumost 11mo agoPeople are talking about putting a mail order catalog store online. Presumably, sears already had the catalog, shipping infrastructure - so it really should have been about digital payments, and an online storefront. How significant their shipping catalog was in the 1990s I do not know, scaling the online storefront would have required Amazon scale investments which a dividend maximizing company was unlikely to do.
- throwaway173738 11mo agopeople underestimate how slow picture loading was back then. Online storefronts seem to live and die by their product images. It wasn’t really feasible to sell anything other than books until DSL came along.
- acdha 11mo agoIt wasn’t perfect but we had plenty of successful sites where most users used dialup. You’re talking small, heavily compressed JPEGs but it was manageable and especially important to remember that people didn’t expect it to be super fast. For browsing, it was slower than paging through a full catalog but still days faster than mailing an order and less stressful for a surprising number of people than calling an order phone line, especially if they weren’t certain about what they wanted. Web pages had room for a lot more text than a printed catalog, too.
- toast0 11mo agoOnline ordering from the paper catalog would have worked well enough to bootstrap. For items in the catalog, you don't need a lot of pictures, and they don't need to be big. If you want to have a few more pictures on a details page, you would put them behind a more photos link and show one at a time so you don't trash the connection.
- dragonwriter 11mo ago> People are talking about putting a mail order catalog store online. Presumably, sears already had the catalog, shipping infrastructure - so it really should have been about digital payments, and an online storefront. [...] > How significant their shipping catalog was in the 1990s I do not know Sears discontinued its general mail order catalog (which had declined in relevance for years) in 1993, the same year NCSA Mosaic was released, while the web had about 0 public penetration and no commercial use. So, it wouldn't have been a matter of adapting the catalog business to the web, it would have been rebuilding it from scratch.
- tracker1 11mo agoAfter that, when the internet buzz was really picking up (around Win95 release cycle)... The prevailing opinion from their leadership was "the internet is a fad." and they just didn't try moving into that space at all until it was way too late.
- kstrauser 11mo agoOne thing that Amazon absolutely mastered was fast logistics. Sears thrived in a time where TV ads would sell things with an asterisk saying “allow 4-6 weeks for delivery”. They had 100+ years to bring their timelines down, yet Sears Prime with free rush delivery wasn’t a thing. I don’t know what it would have taken to revamp their supply lines to make that possible. And neither, I suspect, did they.
- DANmode 11mo agoA VP willing to risk their bonus.
- phil21 11mo agoYou mean a board willing to risk everything and operate at a loss for a decade or more. I doubt such a board would have lasted more than a few years at best. Not to mention trying to change 100 plus years of technical and organizational debt while in-flight. I don’t think Amazon could have come to be outside of the tech sector plus be a greenfield play. I could be wrong, but HN and techie folks in general seem to underestimate how hard it is to change existing organizations. It’s rarely a technical problem.
- ksec 11mo agoDo they sell it all under their own brand? i.e Costco Kirkland like or was it like old Amazon where every brand have their own exposure?
- tdeck 11mo agoIt's like Walmart. Some things under their own brand (for example, Craftsman tools and Kenmore appliances were their brands), many things were third party brands.
- chuckadams 11mo agoOne of Sears' house brands was Acme, and one of the items sold under that brand was anvils.
- peapicker 11mo agoSo _that's_ how the coyote sourced them.... ;)
- glimshe 11mo agoThe original Sears was the Amazon of the 20th century.
- nubinetwork 11mo agoI would argue that they were a lot like Walmart (when Walmart was starting out)... clothes, electronics, sporting/seasonal goods... then they ventured out into additional services like family photography, optometry, pharmacy... really, the only difference was the mail order catalog.
- anon_cow1111 11mo agoI was there, 3000 years ago when Walmart didn't even sell groceries, I still remember mom commenting "It feels weird buying food at Walmart now and not even going to [regional grocery chain]". And now, decades later everything is full circle. I avoid Walmart and Amazon like the plague and try to only shop at smaller outlets, whether brick-and-mortar or online. It might be slightly more expensive but I assume that's just the tax you pay to avoid a corporate monopoly hellscape.
- heavyset_go 11mo agoIt was a mix of Walmart, except with higher quality brands and without groceries, and Kohl's, with some Lowe's and Best Buy mixed in.
- bookofjoe 11mo agohttps://archive.ph/AVfou https://archive.ph/AVfou
- ericpp 11mo agoMeanwhile Sears is still thriving in Mexico under different ownership.
- marbro 11mo ago[dead]
- tdeck 11mo agoInteresting fact. It reminds me of how K-Mart is apparently big in Australia despite having died a slow and pathetic death in the US. Or how Yahoo is still a thing in Japan.
- musicale 11mo agoAlmost tells you that there is something wrong with the business incentives in the US; or perhaps sequences of activities like starting with a leveraged buyout, saddling the new company with debt, and subsequently gutting the company to make the huge interest payments, usually to the principals of the deal, are considered gross mismanagement, conflicts of interest, and breaches of fiduciary duty rather than good ways to "unlock value".
- tdeck 11mo agoI think in the case of the two companies I mentioned, they were managed very differently in the other countries. K-Mart, for example, had fallen out of favor with shoppers well before it was bought by private equity.
- OkayPhysicist 11mo agoIMO, saying something is was killed by private equity is almost always misattribution. Thriving companies rarely sell out to corporate vultures (the particular brand of PE that people tend to mean when they say "killed by private equity"). Instead, the company has something fundamentally wrong (sometimes it's the company's fault, sometimes the market has shifted, sometimes there are deeper issues in the economics), and it sells out to someone willing to make a buck driving the business into the ground. Examples include: Family Dining (Red Lobster, Applebee's, etc) was a dying market segment. Millennials and younger tend to put less value on table service than their parents did, preferring food quality over table service when forced to choose. Fast-Casual took over the entire price segment, so the companies either pivoted (see Chili's takeout expansion), or sold out to PE to decompose. Local Dentistry is getting bought out by PE because the economic conditions that traditionally granted junior dentists the capital to buy out their retiring seniors' practices have ceased. Now, in order to retire, dentists are forced to sell their practices to PE firms.
- tkgally 11mo agoThe Internet Archive has scans of Sears catalogs from when it was a major mail-order retailer. For example: 1911: https://archive.org/details/sears-roebuck-catalog-122-spring-1911 https://archive.org/details/sears-roebuck-catalog-122-spring... 1922: https://archive.org/details/SearsRoebuckAndCoCatalog1922_201812 https://archive.org/details/SearsRoebuckAndCoCatalog1922_201... When I was young, they were especially known for their tools: 1974/1975: https://archive.org/details/SearsCraftsmanPowerAndHandTools197475 https://archive.org/details/SearsCraftsmanPowerAndHandTools1... More here: https://archive.org/search?query=title%3A%28sears+catalog%29+AND+mediatype%3A%28texts%29&sort=date https://archive.org/search?query=title%3A%28sears+catalog%29...
- b112 11mo agoMy house, built in the 60s, is actually 4 Sears cabin kits. The guy bought them, and assembled them end to end, making a long house. Same guy dug the original ditch by driving back and forth with his jeep for an hour during spring rain. This gives a perspective on his can do attitude. But really, I'm living in the house still, so it can't be that bad.
- ycombinatrix 11mo ago>Same guy dug the original ditch by driving back and forth with his jeep for an hour during spring rain. wtf? how deep is the ditch?
- b112 11mo agoWhen I bought, it was maybe 2 ft deep. 60s Jeeps weren't quite a wide as today, either. I dug it out properly after buying. It was a perfectly good ditch though, but I wanted to drain more water at the back of the property, so I lowered it another 2 feet.
- potato3732842 11mo agoYou literally can't do that today in any jurisdiction with building code. It wouldn't be illegal, but the hoops you'd need to jump through (and they way they'd likely try and screw you at every turn) to string together a bunch of kit buildings and call it a "house" would make it so expensive that you'd be better off hiring professionals to build a house the normal way.
- klipklop 11mo agoIntentionally destroyed to get access to its real estate. I dunno how the CEO is not behind bars for what he did.
- kristopolous 11mo agoOur obligation is to personal profit at the expense of everything else. This is empirically the default operational behavior. It should always be assumed as opposed to our current strategy of always being baffled and shocked that it happens. We could be serious about this and restructure incentives away from naked kleptocracy to avoid it. I mean we never will, but we could...
- dv_dt 11mo agoIf the passive investor class wanted more and better options to collect profits with low long-term risk they would actually support that kind of restructure - but alas it's all very short=sighted profit taking now that actually hurts long term growth. It's no small irony that Buffet's retirement aligns with the close out as an iconic holdout of long view valuation - even his more recent moves I think showed some retreat from his previous values. Perhaps not really his direct fault, but he had fewer and fewer good investment options as time went by.
- b00ty4breakfast 11mo agothe problem is that every time the shortsightedness crashes the economy, the rest of us have to bail them out and the thing keeps on chooglin. They have no incentives to behave otherwise
- kristopolous 11mo agoThese things continue until we criminalize it. Slavery kept going until we said that's illegal. Child labor kept going until we said that's illegal Putting heroin in baby food formula kept going until we said that's illegal. We don't defer to the free market for everything. Nobody is like, well child porn, I guess there's a market demand for it so it's right over there with the magazines It is neither strange nor unusual to value things more than the freedom of the market. We do it all the time. We should do that with societal harms and not just individual ones. Criminalizing obvious crime shouldn't be some kind of wild eyed fantasy. It should have been done 150 years ago.
- mullingitover 11mo agoThe fact that Amazon exists is a testament to the stunning mismanagement of Sears’ corporate leadership in the 90s and early 2000s. They had all the ingredients and instead simply set the company on fire.
- jbs789 11mo agoThe internet was a paradigm shift… full of unknowns. I think you are underestimating those challenges. We only speak about Amazon now because it was the one that survived.
- shit_game 11mo agopets.com also failed to make it through the "carcinization" of online retail, but wasnt nearly as notable a failure because it was attempting to start an online retail business from the ground up, versus Sears' failure to adopt online retail to their already-successful B&M model. I think the Sears mode of failure is much more spectacular because it had previously thrived on a business model that's almost analgous to Amazon's, threw it away, and failed to recognize it could be effective again.
- dragonwriter 11mo ago> Sears' failure to adopt online retail to their already-successful B&M model. By the time of the height of the dotcom boom, Sears main income was from its consumer credit business, not its B&M retail business, where its dominance had been fading for a couple of decades.
- jonway 11mo agoOh yeah they from what I recall they slowly dismantled it after what’s-his-face became ceo. Too big to fail before that. By the end, in a lot of their stores they would have people with iPads walking around accepting payment right there in the aisles. People also forget that what helps build sears’ reputation was their supply chain and curation, they mostly sold brands of good-quality stuff, a lot made in America too! They would rebrand good but basic quality items (like a wrench or sewing machine, or a shotgun or a guitar) and keep it running for years or decades. My dad was given a shotgun in the 1950s, a Remington made sears-brand. It was, apparently, great! He used it a lot for like half a century. I feel like a big part of the downfall was the huge lumbering corporate culture unable to cope with JIT supply lines and race to the bottom economies of consumer goods. Oh well!
- LeoPanthera 11mo agoAt one point Sears owned an ISP, a bank, and a nationwide stock tracking and distribution system. They were Amazon before Amazon, but just didn’t realize it.
- decimalenough 11mo agoIt's even more ironic than that, since Sears was the Amazon of 1800s: they were America's largest mail order business and even IPO'd (1906) long before they opened their first brick and mortar storefront. You could buy anything and everything by mail from the famous Sears Catalog, up to and including entire homes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Modern_Homes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Modern_Homes
- mulmen 11mo agoI think they did realize it and tried as hard as they could and still failed. I was a Sears salesperson in 2003 and 2004. The whole operation took itself very seriously and embraced the internet and technology. They just… failed. I’d love to know how they missed because everything was in their favor.
- theturtletalks 11mo agoThose who tell stories, rule society. Amazon's story of starting in a garage selling books to selling millions of things was just more interesting than Sears, which had been around for so much longer. Amazon also wasn't like Sears, they depended heavily on 3rd party sellers to built their initial catalog. Sears didn't have 3rd party sellers until much later on. Amazon just leveraged those 3rd party sellers to figure out what they should carry and sell as Amazon down the line.
- brushfoot 11mo agoThink of the kinds of people who vie for leadership roles at established companies like Sears was at the time. Those people aren't innovators and creators. They're management types, MBAs, bureaucrats. And fair enough: When the ship is that big and there are that many people on board, you often don't want to "move fast and break things," because the downstream effects can be extreme. Now you've just broken a company that had been working for decades. You're incentivized to take small risks with high likelihoods of reward. Of course, the problem is, at some point that becomes fatal. A balance can be struck, but it can be hard when the original driving force is long gone.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- anon_cow1111 11mo agoMildly related, but I think this is a good time for our yearly moment of silence for Radioshack. The OLD Radioshack, obviously.
- awaymazdacx5 11mo ago[dead]
- black_puppydog 11mo agoI always love to remember the description of Sears in "The people's republic of Walmart".
- busyant 11mo agoSince we're reminiscing, I remember Sears sold a "Sears-version" of the Atari 2600. I forget what it was called, but it was identical to the 2600. My 9 year old brain was convinced that it was somehow inferior to the Atari-branded version of the 2600 and I was sad when my parents got me the Sears version for Christmas (it was probably cheaper than the Atari, I can't remember). It didn't take me long, however, to realize it was the same thing with a different logo.
- kstrauser 11mo agoAh, the Sears Tele-Games.
- saghm 11mo agoWhen visiting my parents a couple weeks ago who live closer to where I grew up, my dad mentioned he recently visited one of the Sears stores that we used to go to sometimes when I was at kid. He said the store seemed to be only half full of inventory, with entire display shelves empty, and he couldn't understand why it was even being keep open at all.
- gravypod 11mo agoDoes anyone have any ideas for if some of the original seats home assembly manuals exist? I'd love to take a look at those plans and can't find any records.
- kazinator 11mo agoHere is a piece of history. The company Danelectro made guitars and amplifiers in the 50's and 60's under the Silvertone brand name distributed through Sears. Danelectro came up with the idea of packaging a guitar pickup in a chrome lipstick case. They used actual lipstick cases in the beginning. We still have lipstick pickups today; they are a big part of the electric guitar world. A company named GFS makes double coil lipstick humbuckers: https://www.guitarfetish.com/GFS-Pro-Tube-Lipstick-Humbucker-Pickup-Cool-Chimey-Tone-Chrome_p_21831.html https://www.guitarfetish.com/GFS-Pro-Tube-Lipstick-Humbucker...
- kirykl 11mo agoI tried to buy a vacuum from a Sears store once. The cashier couldn't price match against Sears' own website, which had a lower price. So while inside the store, I purchased the vacuum on my phone, and selected in store pickup, and showed it to the cashier. But they had a separate building for in store pickup I had to drive around to.
- CrimsonCape 11mo agoSo how can I get control of one Sears store and through that one store, singlehandedly resurrect the brand? Surely they must be ready to field Skunkworks-like ideas from young talent willing to risk and win... This hypothetical new Sears vision is to create an Ikea competitor, but an honest Ikea, where Sears squares off with their biggest showroom-based adversary. Ikea is beautiful but hollow, as their showrooms are seductive dioramas, but the resulting money exchange of cash for particleboard is like buying sex instead of meeting you life partner. Instead, Sears would be the interface between the customer and the American-made premise. Sears sells American made products and represents American makers. Fuck selling washers and dryers. The showroom is not there to stock imports in cardboard. It's there to show you a concept, what your life could be if you stop buying junk. It's there to demonstrate quality. It's not particleboard at the core; it's a chunk of USA. It would shamelessly capitalize on nostalgia and quality. Instead of nordic spartan whites and blands, it would have dioramas of pine wood wall panelling, cast iron wood stoves, chrome magnificence, Tiffany glass. Want a new desk? $5k. Made of US oak. Want the pine walls? The boardfeet are in the back, milled 5 miles away, how much square feet you need? Even better, each store is fucking exclusive. Find local makers and concentrate their products in the geographically local store. Make people rabid and giddy to travel to each store even if they need to go five states away. Visiting is a unforgettable experience, like a museum that you can buy stuff. Stage 2 is to use the Sears branded products like Ycombinator for machine shops. Sears injects some startup capital and now Sears cabinet pulls are turned on a machine lathe in a startup machine shop in Ohio. Furniture ateliers are like franchise Chick-fil-as.
- magneticnorth 10mo agoIf you're like me and wanted to know where the last 5 stores actually are: - Coral Gables, Florida - Orlando, Florida - Braintree, Massachusetts - Concord, California - El Paso, Texas According to another article I found (https://www.costar.com/article/1406528706/once-giant-sears-could-soon-be-down-to-just-five-locations https://www.costar.com/article/1406528706/once-giant-sears-c...)
- carolynmichael 10mo ago[dead]