Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

Once, I believe it was in the late 90's, my wife showed me the cover of a business mag. It showed the CEO of Sears, and also a young guy with a messenger bag and a Misfits pin. "Sears", with an arrow pointing to the CEO. "Sears.com" with an arrow pointing to the youngster.

The thing is, she knew that youngster, and he really did work at Sears, for their webstore. He wasn't the only guy, but it was apparently pretty close. Other than getting on the cover of that magazine, my understanding is he got rather little access to top management, and he certainly didn't get to set strategy on things like pricing and shipping. Sears, like a lot of other incumbents, could neither understand the New Thing, nor turn over enough control to the people who did (in part because the people they hired were too young and inexperienced in retail to trust with t hat), and that is why they failed, when as a catalog company they should have been well positioned for the comeback of ordering things delivered to your home.

> Once, I believe it was in the late 90's, my wife showed me the cover of a business mag. It showed the CEO of Sears, and also a young guy with a messenger bag and a Misfits pin. "Sears", with an arrow pointing to the CEO. "Sears.com" with an arrow pointing to the youngster.

It was from Fortune in November 1999. Here's an image of the cover:

https://twitter.com/opinion_joe/status/998689983757209607

Better quality: https://backissues.com/cgi-bin/backissues.cgi?full/FU1999110...

Thanks! Your google-fu is better than mine, I admit it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYqZJrGV_tc

To be fair, in '98 there weren't many people with big corporate web store experience who were also experienced enough in retail to trust with a big corporate retail operation.

Truth. I think that might be a reason why none of the retail incumbents, not even the ones with a by-mail background, did well. If you were an upstart, by-mail-only internet company, you didn't need to know how to run a bricks-and-mortar retail chain (of large size).

It is probably relevant to consider Amazon's (limited) forays into bricks-and-mortar establishments. They have had about as much impact as the online versions of the legacy retailers.

I think amazon got to play by different rules though, it would be a very different thing for an established company like Sears to reinvest all of its profits into growing its digital platform in the 90s, 00s, or even now. There is no way investors would have stayed on for that ride.

Exactly this, the CEO of a publicly traded company would have to answer to the board of directors and investors. That would add resistance to spending lots of money on something unproven. Publicly traded tech companies get much more freedom in this regard. Plus just the amount of institutional cruft (technology, policy, procedure, personnel) in a large/old company like Sears.

You're correct, although it should be said in view of recent events, that the path they took didn't play all that well with investors either. But you're right, most investors aren't interested in the 20-year timeframe.

I remember that what became NewEgg opened a brick and mortar store for (mostly) software and such (some hardware) in the suburb of Seattle that I lived in at the time, then a year or two later shifted entirely to online. They pivoted //hard// and made it work.

I don't think Sears could have done quite that, but keeping the catalog and 'order to the store for free (long time) shipping' / 'delivery to home with paid shipping' would have been a much better move and SHOULD have been within their grasp to understand and execute on. All the more so if a customer could look at clothing styles and options and order slight variants or harder to get sizes from the catalog.

Tiger Direct did the same. They had a brick & mortar in the Western Chicago Suburbs - Naperville or Aurora, I think. Never stepped foot in there, despite being a easy weekend drive from them. Everything I ever bought from them was online.

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