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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

It is interesting how many fronts they failed on.

Sears Credit could have spawned something like Paypal. They were successful with their Discover card, and the Sears card was often young people's first credit card.

They were kings of catalog shopping, and had the logistics and product data to have had a decent online business.

And, they had brand strength in several areas like Kenmore, Craftsman, Land's End and DieHard Batteries. I know they licensed all that out, but way after the brand had peaked.

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This is the canonical eulogy for Sears, courtesy of Pastabagel@Metafilter:

https://www.metafilter.com/62394/The-Record-Industrys-Declin...

"By my estimates, Sears could have spent about $200 million in 1994-1996 to develop and promote retailing and financial services online, and they'd be reaping billions.

Sears could still be a huge American company today, instead of a historical footnote."

But then again, where are all the early search engine companies now? Alta Vista, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Inktomi, Lycos... Just because you are early in a market doesn't mean you will succeed.

Yeah, but if you are early and you have capital, you've got a major market advantage. You'd have to seriously stumble somewhere in your execution, and having capital makes that easier to fix more quickly while being early means you're better able to drive and read the market. For a company like Sears whose name was largely built on their mail order catalog business, the fact that they'd die to competition from online retailers is pretty ironic.

They gave away this market by killing the mail order business in the late 90s. That's the entire thesis of the link I posted.

Sure, Sears would have lost some ground to online retail at the start, but with a massive warehouse and distribution network already in place they could have made up the lost ground very very quickly.

I feel the real missing ingredient here was the foresight required to anticipate a lot of these changes looking forward.

It's something I've been trying to develop myself. Any idiot can look back and say, gee, they could've done this, that, and the other thing, with benefit of hindsight.

How do you become the sort of person who sees where things are going, years/decades in advance?

The Innovator’s Dilemma is a good read for more information on this topic. In fact one of the examples/case studies focuses on Sears and how the were nearly taken down by discount retailing.

The book can be found on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Innovators-Dilemma-Technologies-Man...

again? Sears was already mayor investor in Prodigy since 1984, finally getting rid of it in 1996. Cant find it right now, but there is a clip on YT from some breakfast/morning TV show where presenters shop around dialed into Prodigy system presenting variety of Sears catalog items.

And don’t forget their joint venture with IBM — Prodigy. Given their logistics and catalog, they could have owned online shopping.

I can find references to Prodigy having an online shopping portal, but I have had trouble finding any anecdotes of people actually buying things thru it. It was probably too early for it's time (early 90s graphics, internet speed and all) and it's failure probably soured Sears from future attempts by the time Amazon showed up.

The graphics were ahead of its time. RIP was a major step up from ascii.

Well, they spun IN Land's End before they spun it out. It was not created at Sears.

Bought by Sears in 2002 for $2B cash. Current market cap is ~$468M. Ouch.

bad way to do market math. What if they already made $10 Billion from Land's End since 2002?

With zero knowledge, I'd bet that they got their $2b and then some. Acquisitions are /were probably their only asset, since real estate was mortgaged by their hedge fund owner.

Forbes seems to think they overpaid, then ruined it. The market cap was also ~3x higher a few years ago, so it sounds like post spinoff didn't go well either.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/markcohen/2016/09/27/landsend-a...

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