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Comment by xigency | Hacker News Reader

I've read this point in a few places as well, but it doesn't really explain why they closed the catalog.

Here I found an article from 1993 describing the move: http://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/26/business/sears-eliminating...

This was the same time the company was leaving the Sears Tower. I think Sears faced a number of bad decisions over the decades leading to its early and later decline.

Edit: Here is another article of the decision to cut the catalog - http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1993-01-26/news/930317224...

It ends with the extremely ironic, "Sears on Monday wasn't interested in the past. It was positioning itself for the future."

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I wonder if the seemingly shortsighted decision was influenced by the desire to appease stock analysts (who are more interested in next quarter's results than next decade's) by shedding costs quickly. Analysts seemed to think the company was heading in the right direction... few companies (aside from Amazon) have the luxury of telling analysts "We're forgoing profits now so we can build up our business"

A quote from that 1993 article:

Still, most analysts hesitated to say that the revamping alone would put Sears back on its feet. "Put it this way: They're off their knees," said George A. Ashur, director of corporate bond research at Chase Securities Inc. "This is without a doubt good medicine for the company, but I have to see a few quarters of good returns before I'm ready to ditch the conservative show-me attitude."

At the time, mail order shopping was dying. Montgomery Ward and JC Penny were also bailing on mail order. The Sears model was for a pre-car America, where it was either Sears or some local overpriced retailers with no selection. By 1993, the US had malls everywhere there were people, Wal-Mart was taking on the job of servicing small towns, and the customer base of people reachable only by mail had shrunk.

Sears had the first good fulfillment system, but it was geared to the postal system and rail transport. It took about two weeks to get delivery on something from Sears, and you never knew what was out of stock until the package showed up. That allowed malls to beat them on convenience.

Really interesting nytimes article.

> The operation, which also published 50 small specialty catalogues, only recently began accepting Visa and Mastercard for purchases, and for many years, customers had to pick up their purchases at a Sears store even though other catalogues would mail items directly to homes.

Its easy to be nostalgic but it really sounds like sears had already fallen significantly behind by the time they shutdown their catalog.

> Its easy to be nostalgic but it really sounds like sears had already fallen significantly behind by the time they shutdown their catalog.

It's not unique to Sears either.

I know a few people who work at the Target HQ in Minneapolis and have heard stories in the past of executives being astounded by online shopping, especially the idea that people would do comparison shopping while in the store. Target has significantly increased their digital offerings since then but it's still far from the experience of Amazon.

I look at Barnes & Noble as another company that is screwing the pooch by not doing a better job with Internet sales, and a better job integrating internet and meatspace (aka "click and mortar"). I do a lot of business with B&N but I almost never buy books from their online store. Why? Partly because their site sucks, looks & feels dated and klunky, lacks the selection of Amazon's site, and doesn't offer good recommendations like Amazon does.

And if I go into a B&N store and want to special order a book, I can get free shipping, if it goes to my home. But if I want them to ship it to the store so I can pick it up there, it costs extra. WTF? And if memory serves correctly, you can't return items bought online to a physical B&N store.

There's just so many ways that they are missing the boat and nobody seems to care.

Don't get me started on B&N. As ridiculous as it sounds, I want to support B&N because at least they employ people who are somewhat local vs. an Amazon fulfillment center X miles away. Plus with that story of fake/reprinted books on Amazon, I'd rather buy directly from the retailer instead of a commingled pile.

My ideal B&N experience: go to their site, find the book I like, purchase it for the same price as Amazon (usually the prices are the same), then go pick it up at the store. But no, I can't do that. If I want to pick it up in store, I have to pay the "in store" price (which is often at 10-20% higher). No thanks.

I'm with ya. I kinda like supporting B&N and I do to a point. I live near a store and I go in the cafe for coffee all the time, and I do wind up buying books and magazines there. But I just find nothing at all appealing about shopping on bn.com, even with my member discount and whatever.

Whoever is running their e-commerce operation really ought to be fired. Or if the lack of awareness is coming from higher up, somebody (CEO?) ought to be fired.

But they are very different experiences. Amazon is the grand prize winner in the contest of looking up something you already know you want to buy, bundling it up with some shampoo you forgot to pick up at the grocery store earlier, and having all of that on your doorstep in two days.

Amazon's Achilles Heel is browsing. Their selection may feature 100,000 relevant items to my search but I seem to only find shitty versions of products, or at too high prices, regardless of how I mess with the search filter.

Target is great when you have an idea of what you might like to buy: you can try on shoes, sit on furniture, feel the bedsheets - you get the idea.

Sometimes the hassle of not getting the right size/feel of a product bought online, and having to repackage it and wait for another delivery simply isn't worth it compared to driving out to your local Suburban Mall Hell to just go and buy things like mom and dad used to do.

> Amazon's Achilles Heel is browsing. Their selection may feature 100,000 relevant items to my search but I seem to only find shitty versions of products

I would say their major problem is the lack of curation. The Amazon Marketplace brought all the garbage of eBay sellers to Amazon, and mixed it in with everything else.

As a result, you have to carefully watch out for things fulfilled by third parties (often subject to high shipping and strange return policies), and items with sketchy review histories. I can't find an article on it now, but I've come across items where it seems like the manufacturer pulled a bait-and-switch. The initial reviews are all very positive, and all the recent reviews are low and talk about poor product quality -- yet the item still has a reasonably high score. Did they seed reviews themselves? Did they actually change to a lower quality product? Who knows.

There's certain categories of products that I find to be an an utterly frustrating shopping experience on Amazon -- cell phone accessories is the one that immediately comes to mind.

Also now long-dead Borders; linking this post I'd come upon years ago because it has links to all the relevant posts in the first paragraph (even though one of them is more focused on the online shopping aspect): http://theferrett.livejournal.com/1641949.html

> only recently began accepting Visa and Mastercard for purchases

Looks like they got so used to having a monopoly that even after they lost it they couldn't let it go.

When I was a kid my mother had a dozen different department store charge cards, and you could only use them at that store. What a nightmare that must have been when it came time to pay bills.

It's really crazy when you look back and think about it.

They actually tried a diversification strategy by discontinuing the big-book and spinning up specialty books. The idea was that they could get a higher $/book by targeting specific interests. This helps in the world of prospecting (i.e. buying names from co-ops like Epsilon). It was also a strategy that would allow them to take advantage of bundling innovations at USPS like co-mailing. Obviously, none of it worked which was more of a function of merchandising than anything else.

Why was leaving the Sears Tower a bad decision? What ramifications did it have?

Building the Sears Tower was a bad idea. It ended up being a waste of money. Reading those articles it's clear that they were hemorrhaging money in 1990, compared to being profitable 20 years earlier.

They weren't hemorrhaging money at the time. Sears was profitable from 1980 to 1990, including fiscal 1990.

1990 is approximately the year when their earnings started to plunge toward losses. Earnings nearly got cut in half from 1989 vs 1990. At the time Walmart was still the #2 retailer, having just passed Kmart (for the curious, Walmart went from $32b in sales for 1990 to $485b by 2015; now Walmart is in a position where their earnings are falling and sales growth has been flat for years as Amazon starts to eat into them).

This NY Times article from January 1991, describes the atmosphere well:

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/28/business/big-change-is-exp...

The Sears Tower was built in 1970-1973 though? I'm still not seeing what it had to do with the profitability of the company in 1990. And you originally said that leaving it was a bad idea, not constructing it.

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