My 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.
You 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.
From the perspective an enforcer that wants an easy meal without much risk to themselves they're a way tougher nut to crack. They're built by "big enough" business that getting their stuff engineered for all the various codes is an expense they can easily amortize over their production. And these businesses can afford lawyers and have every incentive to fight unreasonable stuff so the vultures in your local zoning board or building commissioner's office are unlikely to pick a fight with them. In contrast, some random guy is way easier prey.
But yes, on a fundamental level there's little difference between plopping a modular on a grid of piers vs plopping sheds on a grid of piers. The biggest difference is the level of finishing that's done at the factory.
Unfortunately yes. I wish it was that easy. That's why I said "jurisdiction with building code". Florida is free AF. They have pretty serious building code for anything people are expected to occupy because hurricanes. The mountain west is free, on paper, at a state level. But at a local level there's fucktons of jurisdictions that are basically run by carpetbaggers from California (if not in literal state of origin then spiritually) who make everything hard. The various offgrid cabin forums are absolutely chock full of horror stories about how those people run the place.
When 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.
It'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
I 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.
Think 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.
I'm even struggling to come up with counter examples where a major established company is able to successfully pivot when the business model that brought them success is no long as viable as it once was. Maybe IBM counts in that they still exist, although I'd argue they aren't nearly the omnipresent force they were back in the day. You could also count widely diversified companies, but I probably wouldn't because they never really have to try to pivot the entire business.
As you said, finding a balance is hard and maybe not truly possible.
Apple: suffered from Windows PC competition in the 1990s but came roaring back under Steve Jobs. They doubled down on high-quality design, user experience, and vertical integration, and even switched from PowerPC to x86 and ARM, and from classic macOS to BSD-based OS X.
HP(E): after stumbling with itanium, replaced its proprietary Unix server business with x86 and Linux.
Sony is perhaps a good example. Most of the product categories that they became known for, like radios, cassette players, analog TVs and VCRs, are gone, replaced by PCs, smartphones, Playstation and their media empire and industrial products like CMOS sensors that are everywhere. They've seen multiple times a major business segment sink beneath their feet, and survived.
Those 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.
Not just the internet for the Chinese portion. First the USA made this happen in living memory of many of us when they supported bringing China into world trade without trying to buffer the effects, nicely summarized here: https://www.npr.org/2025/12/29/nx-s1-5660865/why-economists-...
Consumer goods got cheaper at the cost a few million decently paying jobs and manufacturing capacity directly and due to second order effects.
Maybe in alternate history we could have saved some of this onshore manufacturing capacity but we’ll never know now.
> They were Amazon before Amazon, but just didn’t realize it.
They did realize it (well, they obviously didn’t have Amazon as a reference, but...). And they enjoyed it for a long time. But, as has happened many times to firms very successful in one set of conditions, they failed to adapt to changing conditions.
Perhaps Sears/Kmart could have filled the Target niche, and leveraged Sears' brand portfolio rather than selling them off to make crushing interest payments.
The 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.
Oh 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.
I will detail the evil anti machine from sears, combo washer dryer, drop the lid and it breaks the switch, the switch trigger is on the lid with a very long prong, dropped gently it works, fast it breaks, $150 plus service call, where it turns out the prong can be snapped off, leaving a stub that still triggers the switch, but wont break it.
Next, the waterpump sits on three bosses, with spring clips, if it ingests anything like a dress sock that WILL go through the machine, it stripps the drive shaft, but AGAIN, the bosses can be snapped off, there is a second place for the spring clipps, and the motor shaft now engages much further, and it will power it's way through whatever.
So the standard model was that, and the "heavy duty$$$" model was 3 min snapping of plastic booby traps.
pure evil, and very very likely illegal
but as someone who can fix/repair or make almost anything, I see this stuff all the time, but of course, today, it's done in the software.
Yeah they didn’t manufacture anything so they did get stuck with this crap especially after their influence waned on their suppliers.
Washing machines used to be better and much more reliable in my experience (if less efficient) for ex my parent have a high end Samsung and WOW is it SLOW! The drying is much worse(slow) too.
> 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.
i think its simpler than that. they got so big that they didnt pay any attention to all the waste, e.g. all the ad time that they spent on the old "I'll call today" A/C commercial.
That ad was worth every penny. I _still_ quote that ad, and everyone over the age of 30 always recognizes it, yet I can't remember ads I saw last month. If only sears was still around to capitalize on the ubiquitous headspace they purchased.
> That ad was worth every penny. I _still_ quote that ad, and everyone over the age of 30 always recognizes it, yet I can't remember ads I saw last month. If only sears was still around to capitalize on the ubiquitous headspace they purchased.
Sounds like they would have been better off investing more in staying around in the conditions that actually existed rather than buying attention that they could never benefit from.
People flocked for this crap though, they were a consistent and reliable partner here. Times change though and everyone started just heading to Walmart, the modern version of sears in essence I guess, and Amazon who didn’t profit at all for like a decade and also never ever paid a dividend.
I wonder about comparing the total sales rev of Walmart or Amazon (lifetime revenue) to the lifetime revenue of Sears Roebuck and whatever, adjusted for inflation. This would probably paint an interesting picture of our consumer trends and corporate governance
> People flocked for this crap though, they were a consistent and reliable partner here.
By the 1990s, when the ad in question was around, Sears was long past its status as a retail juggernaut, and was trying (ultimately unsuccessfully) to regain it--this was roughly the last decade before they were bought by Kmart—and the loss was in large part because they had spent decades working harder on trying to do other things (which they largely abandoned during the 1990s, except for the consumer credit business that had displaced retail as the main revenue source, for their terminal effort to refocus on retail.)
> I wonder about comparing the total sales rev of Walmart or Amazon (lifetime revenue) to the lifetime revenue of Sears Roebuck and whatever, adjusted for inflation. This would probably paint an interesting picture of our consumer trends and corporate governance
Not really, without a lot of other data. Their dominance was for different lengths of times, and with difference size population bases. Simply comparing lifetime sales revenue adjusted for inflation isn't going to paint much of a picture at all.
Fun memory and a bit of an internal photo (and a rare shot of PalmOS software from the inside): https://ibb.co/nsVrW0h1
Sears' jewelry was... definitely marked up. This is from a SNC (SEARS Network Communicator, just a fancy term for their Symbol PDTs) showing true cost on a "$1299" necklace. $1299 down to $324? What a steal! It still only cost Sears a hundred bucks.
That had a lot to do with De Beers blacklisting any buyers of used diamonds, so used stones would end up their only supply. Meanwhile running "Diamonds are Forever" campaigns that would paint any such recycling as the actions of sleazy dishonest pawn brokers. You wouldn't sell Grandma's precious heirloom to one of those people now, would you? Nowadays I'm not sure the cartels have the power they used to, but whatever's left does still seem pretty disproportionate.
Amazon exists in large part because of a tax loophole in existence when web browsers became ubiquitous, where out of state purchases didn't need sales tax.
So, ordering anything not immediately needed and available on Amazon was very likely to have the lowest price. Talk about viral style growth of customer bases!
The 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.
pets.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.
> 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.
i think the infamous "I'll call now" air conditioner commercial in the '90s was a canary/sign of the mismanagement that was occurring. This commercial played during every commercial break on cartoon network, nickelodean, and the disney channel. Ive long wondered... how many kids bought AC units from sears?
I think it would have been hard to recover but yeah when Lampert got involved it was all about the financial engineering rather than the operations. I bought the shares around then but sold soon after, turned off by the conflicts and the lack of focus on ops.
(I vaguely recall some realisation that he had made money but the public equity did not… It was a bit of an awakening for the young investor who had bought into fiduciary duty, shareholder interests, etc.)
> In 2008, Sears CEO Eddie Lampert decided to restructure the company according to [Ayn] Rand's principles.
> Lampert broke the company into more than 30 individual units, each with its own management and each measured separately for profit and loss. The idea was to promote competition among the units, which Lampert assumed would lead to higher profits. Instead, " ... the divisions turned against each other — and Sears and Kmart, the overarching brands, suffered."
Our 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.
If 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.
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.
> If 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
How would that message be conveyed? Like, who would send it and who would receive it? Would it be more like an email or a phone call?
the 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
Even if vicious profiteering is actually the better long-term strategy (and it is, because outpacing your competitors leads to market dominance), if it is the more destructive strategy, it should come with consequences at the very least. Personally, I’d like to see a society structured in such a way that makes vicious profiteering a non-option in the first place, but that’s a bigger problem to solve.
Why would he be behind bars? He did what the shareholders voted for - increase profits temporarily. If the shareholders voted against their own long-term interest that's on them.
Since 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.
I 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.
Interesting 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.
Almost 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".
I 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.
When 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.
So 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.
Does 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.
Literally 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.
Ironically 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.
They 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.
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, scaling the online storefront would have required Amazon scale investments which a dividend maximizing company was unlikely to do.
people 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.
It 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.
Online 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.
One 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.
It'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.
I 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.
I 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.
The 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...
1922: https://archive.org/details/SearsRoebuckAndCoCatalog1922_201...
When I was young, they were especially known for their tools:
1974/1975: https://archive.org/details/SearsCraftsmanPowerAndHandTools1...
More here:
https://archive.org/search?query=title%3A%28sears+catalog%29...
My 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.
You 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.
Are double-wide trailer homes and prefabricated housing all that different?
From the perspective an enforcer that wants an easy meal without much risk to themselves they're a way tougher nut to crack. They're built by "big enough" business that getting their stuff engineered for all the various codes is an expense they can easily amortize over their production. And these businesses can afford lawyers and have every incentive to fight unreasonable stuff so the vultures in your local zoning board or building commissioner's office are unlikely to pick a fight with them. In contrast, some random guy is way easier prey.
But yes, on a fundamental level there's little difference between plopping a modular on a grid of piers vs plopping sheds on a grid of piers. The biggest difference is the level of finishing that's done at the factory.
Have you tried living in a freer state?
Unfortunately yes. I wish it was that easy. That's why I said "jurisdiction with building code". Florida is free AF. They have pretty serious building code for anything people are expected to occupy because hurricanes. The mountain west is free, on paper, at a state level. But at a local level there's fucktons of jurisdictions that are basically run by carpetbaggers from California (if not in literal state of origin then spiritually) who make everything hard. The various offgrid cabin forums are absolutely chock full of horror stories about how those people run the place.
>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?
When 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.
Wait, were those tools all Sears branded? Hopefully they were private label and not actually manufactured by Sears!
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the Craftsman brand:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craftsman_(tools)
My personal recollection from the 1970s is that Craftsman tools had a reputation for high quality and that people I knew bought them at Sears stores.
I bought a set of Craftsman tools from Sears in the late 2000s. They’re solid.
At 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.
It'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
I 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.
Think 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.
I'm even struggling to come up with counter examples where a major established company is able to successfully pivot when the business model that brought them success is no long as viable as it once was. Maybe IBM counts in that they still exist, although I'd argue they aren't nearly the omnipresent force they were back in the day. You could also count widely diversified companies, but I probably wouldn't because they never really have to try to pivot the entire business.
As you said, finding a balance is hard and maybe not truly possible.
Apple: suffered from Windows PC competition in the 1990s but came roaring back under Steve Jobs. They doubled down on high-quality design, user experience, and vertical integration, and even switched from PowerPC to x86 and ARM, and from classic macOS to BSD-based OS X.
HP(E): after stumbling with itanium, replaced its proprietary Unix server business with x86 and Linux.
HP(E) managed to survive but I wouldn’t say they’re a roaring success.
They went from 300k employees to a small fraction. They went from designing graphics cards in-house to practically rebranding white box servers.
(Yes, they still make their own servers, too much of the design and manufacturing work being done by outside firms).
They’ve also thrown away a mind boggling amount of talent and institutional knowledge of storage and networking.
Sony is perhaps a good example. Most of the product categories that they became known for, like radios, cassette players, analog TVs and VCRs, are gone, replaced by PCs, smartphones, Playstation and their media empire and industrial products like CMOS sensors that are everywhere. They've seen multiple times a major business segment sink beneath their feet, and survived.
Intel famously pivoted from memory. Maybe it’ll still get to where Pat wanted it to go as a foundry in its most recent pivot attempt, unclear yet.
It helped that they pivoted into a brand new and rapidly growing market that they had a big hand in creating. That's not so much the case for retail.
Nintendo and Netflix are the only examples I’ve got.
Amazon does not make any money retailing either.
Amazon took their largest cost center, IT infrastructure, and made it a profit center (AWS). That is the part that makes money.
Those 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.
Simple, the internet shifted power to the consumer and the Chinese.
Consumer: I can check prices at different stores in 1 minute
Chinese: why do business with the Sears agent in Hong Kong when I can sell directly to the West?
Rule numbero uno: there is no customer loyalty in Ba Sing Se!
Not just the internet for the Chinese portion. First the USA made this happen in living memory of many of us when they supported bringing China into world trade without trying to buffer the effects, nicely summarized here: https://www.npr.org/2025/12/29/nx-s1-5660865/why-economists-...
Consumer goods got cheaper at the cost a few million decently paying jobs and manufacturing capacity directly and due to second order effects.
Maybe in alternate history we could have saved some of this onshore manufacturing capacity but we’ll never know now.
Thank you for the unexpected ATLA reference!
> They were Amazon before Amazon, but just didn’t realize it.
They did realize it (well, they obviously didn’t have Amazon as a reference, but...). And they enjoyed it for a long time. But, as has happened many times to firms very successful in one set of conditions, they failed to adapt to changing conditions.
except arguably they should have it in their DNA to adapt. How does the company built on mail order not adapt to the new mail order reality.
They were caught flatfooted between being Wal-Mart and Amazon.
Sears had shifted so firmly into retail by the 80s. Then Wal-Mart ate their lunch on low price retail logistics.
Then Amazon came along, and solved last-mile delivery of catalog sales.
Perhaps Sears/Kmart could have filled the Target niche, and leveraged Sears' brand portfolio rather than selling them off to make crushing interest payments.
You forgot Allstate insurance!
The 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.
Oh 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!
I bought a riding lawnmower used, 17 years ago. The mower was very well maintained, engine was good, and already 25 to 30 years old when I bought it.
I wanted the manual.
Sears parts still existed, and they shipped me a complete copy of the manual(photocopied) for 10 bucks.
Manual listed all parts, breakdown, etc. I was able to confidently order parts, keep it running for a decade.
That was one reason Sears was so liked.
(for reference, my new mower manual has as much detail, I checked before I bought)
I will detail the evil anti machine from sears, combo washer dryer, drop the lid and it breaks the switch, the switch trigger is on the lid with a very long prong, dropped gently it works, fast it breaks, $150 plus service call, where it turns out the prong can be snapped off, leaving a stub that still triggers the switch, but wont break it. Next, the waterpump sits on three bosses, with spring clips, if it ingests anything like a dress sock that WILL go through the machine, it stripps the drive shaft, but AGAIN, the bosses can be snapped off, there is a second place for the spring clipps, and the motor shaft now engages much further, and it will power it's way through whatever. So the standard model was that, and the "heavy duty$$$" model was 3 min snapping of plastic booby traps. pure evil, and very very likely illegal but as someone who can fix/repair or make almost anything, I see this stuff all the time, but of course, today, it's done in the software.
Yeah they didn’t manufacture anything so they did get stuck with this crap especially after their influence waned on their suppliers.
Washing machines used to be better and much more reliable in my experience (if less efficient) for ex my parent have a high end Samsung and WOW is it SLOW! The drying is much worse(slow) too.
Probably much more efficient though.
Holy run-on sentences, Batman!
> 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.
i think its simpler than that. they got so big that they didnt pay any attention to all the waste, e.g. all the ad time that they spent on the old "I'll call today" A/C commercial.
That ad was worth every penny. I _still_ quote that ad, and everyone over the age of 30 always recognizes it, yet I can't remember ads I saw last month. If only sears was still around to capitalize on the ubiquitous headspace they purchased.
> That ad was worth every penny. I _still_ quote that ad, and everyone over the age of 30 always recognizes it, yet I can't remember ads I saw last month. If only sears was still around to capitalize on the ubiquitous headspace they purchased.
Sounds like they would have been better off investing more in staying around in the conditions that actually existed rather than buying attention that they could never benefit from.
People flocked for this crap though, they were a consistent and reliable partner here. Times change though and everyone started just heading to Walmart, the modern version of sears in essence I guess, and Amazon who didn’t profit at all for like a decade and also never ever paid a dividend.
I wonder about comparing the total sales rev of Walmart or Amazon (lifetime revenue) to the lifetime revenue of Sears Roebuck and whatever, adjusted for inflation. This would probably paint an interesting picture of our consumer trends and corporate governance
> People flocked for this crap though, they were a consistent and reliable partner here.
By the 1990s, when the ad in question was around, Sears was long past its status as a retail juggernaut, and was trying (ultimately unsuccessfully) to regain it--this was roughly the last decade before they were bought by Kmart—and the loss was in large part because they had spent decades working harder on trying to do other things (which they largely abandoned during the 1990s, except for the consumer credit business that had displaced retail as the main revenue source, for their terminal effort to refocus on retail.)
> I wonder about comparing the total sales rev of Walmart or Amazon (lifetime revenue) to the lifetime revenue of Sears Roebuck and whatever, adjusted for inflation. This would probably paint an interesting picture of our consumer trends and corporate governance
Not really, without a lot of other data. Their dominance was for different lengths of times, and with difference size population bases. Simply comparing lifetime sales revenue adjusted for inflation isn't going to paint much of a picture at all.
I wonder if those networks had a hard time filling ad orders, so Sears ended up with a massive discount?
If those ads were pennies compared to other spots, it could be deemed worth it. Parents often are nearby when kids are watching TV.
Hell no! TV ads were Goliath! Radio still stays relevant, too. Late night is where it dried up. (nowadays it’s podcast spot and insta bullshit? Eh.)
Fun memory and a bit of an internal photo (and a rare shot of PalmOS software from the inside): https://ibb.co/nsVrW0h1
Sears' jewelry was... definitely marked up. This is from a SNC (SEARS Network Communicator, just a fancy term for their Symbol PDTs) showing true cost on a "$1299" necklace. $1299 down to $324? What a steal! It still only cost Sears a hundred bucks.
All jewelry is ridiculously marked up. You see Cash for Gold places, but have you ever seen Cash for Diamonds?
That had a lot to do with De Beers blacklisting any buyers of used diamonds, so used stones would end up their only supply. Meanwhile running "Diamonds are Forever" campaigns that would paint any such recycling as the actions of sleazy dishonest pawn brokers. You wouldn't sell Grandma's precious heirloom to one of those people now, would you? Nowadays I'm not sure the cartels have the power they used to, but whatever's left does still seem pretty disproportionate.
Amazon exists in large part because of a tax loophole in existence when web browsers became ubiquitous, where out of state purchases didn't need sales tax.
So, ordering anything not immediately needed and available on Amazon was very likely to have the lowest price. Talk about viral style growth of customer bases!
The 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.
pets.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.
> 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.
i think the infamous "I'll call now" air conditioner commercial in the '90s was a canary/sign of the mismanagement that was occurring. This commercial played during every commercial break on cartoon network, nickelodean, and the disney channel. Ive long wondered... how many kids bought AC units from sears?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4rqZZgVxnCk&pp=ygUMaWxsIGNhbGw...
Figure though: how many kids would then run around the house screaming 'another scorcher!' and 'call now!' on a hot summer's day?
The weird market of things-on-kids-channels-for-adults was always to try to turn the kid on the parent to use them to close the sale ;)
Implying that you would've done any better. Hindsight is always 20/20.
Intentionally destroyed to get access to its real estate. I dunno how the CEO is not behind bars for what he did.
I think it would have been hard to recover but yeah when Lampert got involved it was all about the financial engineering rather than the operations. I bought the shares around then but sold soon after, turned off by the conflicts and the lack of focus on ops.
(I vaguely recall some realisation that he had made money but the public equity did not… It was a bit of an awakening for the young investor who had bought into fiduciary duty, shareholder interests, etc.)
Also, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/column-this-is-what-hap...
> In 2008, Sears CEO Eddie Lampert decided to restructure the company according to [Ayn] Rand's principles.
> Lampert broke the company into more than 30 individual units, each with its own management and each measured separately for profit and loss. The idea was to promote competition among the units, which Lampert assumed would lead to higher profits. Instead, " ... the divisions turned against each other — and Sears and Kmart, the overarching brands, suffered."
See also the 2013 Salon article "Ayn Rand-loving CEO destroys his empire" at https://www.salon.com/2013/12/10/ayn_rand_loving_ceo_destroy...
By Ayn Rand standards, Lampert did an excellent job with Sears. He personally made over a billion in profit from his original investment.
https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2bsxn8l0u5yr6z...
Our 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...
If 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.
These 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.
> If 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
How would that message be conveyed? Like, who would send it and who would receive it? Would it be more like an email or a phone call?
the 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
Even if vicious profiteering is actually the better long-term strategy (and it is, because outpacing your competitors leads to market dominance), if it is the more destructive strategy, it should come with consequences at the very least. Personally, I’d like to see a society structured in such a way that makes vicious profiteering a non-option in the first place, but that’s a bigger problem to solve.
Why would he be behind bars? He did what the shareholders voted for - increase profits temporarily. If the shareholders voted against their own long-term interest that's on them.
Since 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.
Ah, the Sears Tele-Games.
Here 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...
I 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.
Meanwhile Sears is still thriving in Mexico under different ownership.
Interesting 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.
Almost 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".
I 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.
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https://archive.ph/AVfou
When 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.
So 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.
I always love to remember the description of Sears in "The people's republic of Walmart".
Does 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.
Mildly related, but I think this is a good time for our yearly moment of silence for Radioshack.
The OLD Radioshack, obviously.
What did they sell? A bit of everything?
Literally 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.
Ironically 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.
Everyone is talking like creating Amazon was some kind of low hanging citrus to be picked from the tree.
For a company that had Sears’ positioning at the time? It wasn’t far off from that description.
But 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.
They 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.
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, scaling the online storefront would have required Amazon scale investments which a dividend maximizing company was unlikely to do.
people 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.
It 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.
Online 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.
One 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.
A VP willing to risk their bonus.
One of Sears' house brands was Acme, and one of the items sold under that brand was anvils.
So _that's_ how the coyote sourced them.... ;)
Do 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?
It'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.
It 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.
The original Sears was the Amazon of the 20th century.
I 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.
I 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.
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