The point isn't that they were too early, it's that they gave up too quickly. Buying online and picking up from a store really isn't that advanced of a concept.
You're right. Service Merchandise build an empire around it, just by mail or phone instead of computer. Other stores did it, too. JCPenny comes to mind. Even some local and regional chains.
Amazon and others think they've invented something. But once again, it's just SV re-inventing something that worked last century.
Probably an impediment, instead of being an asset. A newcomer can see things differently: pick the right things and discard the wrong ones. Good luck with a 100 year old company.
But recall that Amazon started with books. The catalog for books is the size of the card catalog that used to be at your library. A row of cabinets, filled with rank and file of drawers, each filled with index cards. One could not ship out paper catalogs, listing every book, to every book-buying home. But delivering the catalog via the internet--and taking orders via web form rather than mail, fax, or phone--made that mail-order business viable. And starting from books, adding other items to the system was just scaling. If you can handle all the ISBN numbers in existence, adding every other consumer product isn't that much more.
Amazon made a system that allows customers to order every item from every product catalog, from the same interface accessible form every couch, and--most importantly--captured their market share early.
But now that omnibus e-commerce exists, competitors are going to chip away until their early-mover advantage is gone, and all they have left is their innovation since then. Aliexpress and Wal-Mart are going to hammer them from the price side, and individual stores that can actually keep the counterfeits, barely-suitable, and white-label garbage out of their catalog will hit them from the quality side.
Amazon's innovation was bigger catalogs, easier ordering. And their early patents are expiring now. They didn't build the other pieces they needed for a 120-year business while they had the protection--like searching and filtering; honest, scam-resistant ratings; and advertising and recommendations. So they have this huge catalog that presents as a giant wall of useless crap that might have the thing you actually want somewhere in it, and not necessarily at the best price. Unlike Sears, they still have enough money in the bank to turn it around before it's too late. Probably not the leadership, though.
> They didn't build the other pieces they needed for a 120-year business while they had the protection
I would argue they did with things like AWS.
Any new entrant is going to have to compete with Amazon on shipping cost/time. Yet Amazon can do it using their own distribution and sorting hubs, from which gig workers use their own cars to do the deliveries.
Those gig workers will dry up immediately the instant a better job opens up, and the delivery infrastructure Amazon thought it had will turn out to be owned by someone else. If the robots aren't ready in time, they will fall on their face.
It's really too bad the post office can't just setup something like this at the actual post-offices and be open for any carrier for a small fee. That'd solve a ton of last mile problems.
I don't know, I'd say Amazon's innovation was logistics. They don't need patents when they have a distribution network capable of delivering an order in most major population centers of the US in two days or less.
Once again, it's some 20th Century store re-inventing something which worked the previous century.