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Comment by shimon | Hacker News Reader

This does sound ironic, but the scope of what Sears Roebuck offered was staggeringly greater than what you could get at any brick and mortar store. For a time you could even order a house: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Catalog_Home

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Well of course they did. We live in an industrialized society and they had an industrial offering of products. Actually, we live in a digitized society now and that's where Amazon stepped in. General stores existed in an era before branding, before supermarkets, before everything was made in a factories halfway across the planet.

You should read the history of retail, general stores used to be places you ordered goods from or where you had the counter person pick out your goods from the shelves behind them. Piggly Wiggly revolutionized this model by letting customers pick out goods and bring them to the front of the store, and Sears changed the whole economy by giving rural Americans (most people at the time) access beyond the monopoly of their local general store.

Piggly wiggly retail story always surprises me as much as the first Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise was in Utah!

https://www.deseretnews.com/article/700217162/Story-of-first...

>Well of course they did.

Somebody has to do initially remarkable things first. You act like it's no big deal!

Yeah - it's hard to imagine a world where rail shipment, parcel delivery, industrial warehousing, and efficient processing of mail orders are recent technological developments. But they were! And bringing tech into the domain of consumer retail has been profitable throughout history.

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