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Comment by massysett | Hacker News Reader

20/20 hindsight and all. Amazon still has practically no retail footprint. Sears' big business was bricks-and-mortar retailing, not catalog retailing. The catalog was shrinking and dying. Under the circumstances it was perfectly reasonable for Sears to shut down the catalog and focus on stores.

Also, Amazon did not start out being anything like what it is today. For years it was just books. I remember as they added departments, they would tack an extra tab onto the homepage--"CDs", "Video", etc. So what was Sears going to do? Instantly transport the entirety of a dying catalog business to a non-existing consumer Internet? That wouldn't parallel Amazon at all. Not to mention that Sears did not have access to a bunch of giddy investors who were willing to pump in money despite no sign of profitability.

Only under a superficial analysis could Sears have been what Amazon is today.

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Many other large brick-and-mortar retailers have spun up relatively successful eComm businesses (Target, Walmart, Macy's). While those aren't to the scale of Amazon, I really don't think this is an excuse.

> While those aren't to the scale of Amazon

Since OP's point was

> Sears could have been what Amazon is today

it's quite relevant that Target, Walmart, Macy's are not nearly to the scale of Amazon.

Similarly (and probably off topic), Amazon is not nearly to the scale of Walmart when you look at overall sales. Walmart's overall revenue is about 5x.

It may seem like Walmart is following the footsteps of Sears, but they are not out of the game yet. They need to face the innovator's dilemma head on and do it quickly because the broader issue is their e-commerce growth rate is declining instead of accelerating and the way people shop is fundamentally changing. They need to be dominant in e-commerce to be a dominant retailer in the future.

Walmart is better positioned than anyone to take on Amazon online. Their massive distribution footprint is a huge asset they are not leveraging. They need to morph into a logistics company and announce an all-encompassing same-day delivery service. They also need to completely re-haul their web/mobile UX.

I would gladly buy from Walmart. Amazon is just a lot easier right now. In the end, Amazon is not all that differentiated and if Walmart had some strong technological leadership, they could certainly close the e-commerce gap.

walmart has a 2 day delivery program similar to prime for 40 dollars a year. they need to advertise better..no one knows (you didnt did you?)

Quiet ironically to this thread, Target for years was run by Amazon.com. Wasn't until 2011 IIRC that they went on their own. Similarly ToyRUs, marks and Spencer's also were at one point or another run by Amazon.

That explains why the search/filtering for products on Target's site was so terrible when I recently had to buy an item from there.

I don't think any transformation like that happens overnight, but you have to have a point of view on what the future will look like and then turn the ship towards it. A good example is Netflix. They did DVDs, won that battle but then turned a multi-billion dollar public company towards streaming. It wasn't easy, but the leadership was clear about what the future was and it reflected in the investments they made. Some other company or a combination of other companies would have been Netflix today if Netflix had failed to turn towards streaming.

> Sears' big business was bricks-and-mortar retailing, not catalog retailing.

Hardly - it was the logistics they had in place to power both of those.

> The catalog was shrinking and dying.

So was brick-and-mortar. Just not quite as fast. Jumping ship from the Titanic to the Exxon Valdez is not a long term strategy.

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