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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

It's too bad that Sears never really got into online. They were once the top catalog retailer, and known for consistent quality, good warranties, and boring products. Somehow they missed the Internet, retiring from catalog operations just as Internet shopping got going.

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Because Sears was a company in the process of being looted and trashed for at least the last couple of decades. I've had experiences in Sears of spending 15 minutes just looking for an employee. It had become a company so actively not interested in revenue that it actually became difficult to buy things there. At least they kept the stores clean; it seems like after they bought K-Mart, K-Mart literally stopped mopping the floors.

>I've had experiences in Sears of spending 15 minutes just looking for an employee Reminds me of an anecdote someone told me more than 15 years ago of him searching for a Sears employee and finding one literally hiding/crouching behind/underneath his register to avoid having to do his job. I would have thought it were an isolated thing.

I cannot for the life of me understand why Sears didn't become a major online retailer. They not only had a physical catalog system that could be fairly easily converted into an online catalog, they have physical stores that could be used as pickup points and warehouses for customers who don't want to wait until things are mailed.

In the UK there's a company called Argos that worked ENTIRELY as a catalog store. Their physical locations were basically a warehouse with a lobby that had the catalogs and computers where you could look items up and order them. THEY should be a major competitor to Amazon... but according to my UK friends, they're not.

Among other things, Sears was afraid of cannibalizing their in-store sales and didn't understand the potential of the internet. They had a very B&M-centered mindset.

For sure. Even when they went online the experience was _bad_. Ordering would almost never ship when it said it would and one time I ordered something for pick-up at a store and when I got to the store an employee their said another employee took the tags off of what I purchased and sold it to a customer.

They missed the internet and when they tried to get into it, they just failed at every turn.

That's insane, though. In reality, these things can coexist just fine, but even if they couldn't... why wouldn't you want to have a business model with lower overhead?

Because they didn't know how to run the new business.

It's the same story as when Sears rose to prominence: they saw a business model the other mail-order retailers didn't understand.

The irony is Sears started as a mail-order catalog but couldn't get back to the old model in time. But of course their large management structures couldn't move as fast as small company with somebody like Bezos at the helm who could just make calls on the spot.

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