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Comment by ssharp | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if Sears selling higher quality stuff would really matter.

Departments stores seem almost entirely doomed to fail because of the combo of more specialty retail (buying clothes at a clothing store as opposed to department store), Amazon/ecommerce, discount retail (TJX family), and, of course, giants like Walmart being able to operate better.

Stores like Target and Meijer are able to fill the void of shopper wishing to avoid Walmart so I don't see a ton of space for anyone else.

Certainly Sears could have positioned itself better to evolve into something closer to Target but that ship sailed at least 20 years ago and Sears being mostly anchored to shopping malls didn't help its cause much.

The Sears attached to my hometown's mall was shut down 2 or 3 years ago. The space is currently being destroyed so they can develop an outdoor entertainment space.

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> Amazon/ecommerce,

Ironically, Sears shut down its century-old catalog just as ecommerce was becoming viable.

They had the infrastructure to be Amazon but they threw it away and Amazon had to build it all up from scratch.

>They had the infrastructure to be Amazon

Not really. A mail order catalog has very little in common with a modern eCommerce operation like Amazon's. It's a bit like saying that because Kodak was a photography giant they should have been able to win digital photography when, in fact, other than brand it's not clear what real assets and expertise they had to bring. (And brand can be a hindrance as well as a help if you're shifting businesses.)

Amazon's current operation had little in common with their modern operation.

Sears had the order fulfillment and distribution know how.

Did they really? My recollection is that they had a slow and inefficient pipeline that would never be able to handle the speed that Amazon fills order at.

History books claim Sears got slow and inefficient by focusing too much on retail and malls, and shutting down a lot of their classic logistics. In the 1990s they were absolutely slow as a catalog company. In the 1950s, for instance, they were considered fast and reliable. (For several decades the Chicago US Post Office was the largest branch in the country because of it serving Sears' warehouses.)

I mean, Kodak literally made the first digital camera as well.

I still have a Kodak digital camera from > 20 years ago. It's great because:

It uses AA batteries

The resolution is low enough you don't need to post-process stuff to put in on a web page.

You just plug in USB to transfer files. No nonsense like trying to get photos off an iPhone.

What nonsense? I grab the photos I want and airdrop them. It is probably 99% easy as I could imagine it to be without a brain to iPhone interface.

Does that work to windoze?

(Which works if you are transferring to an airdrop-compatible device.)

There is no fundamental difference between the workflow of a catalog based operation and a website based operation. In 1995 there were no "modern eCommerce operations" so any difference wouldn't have mattered anyone. Sears had as much experience doing direct to consumer sales as anyone could have possibly had at that time.

Then, LL Bean should have become Amazon. Sears was much more of a retail operation than a catalog operation at that point.

Right. Merchandise distribution, stockkeeping, delivery, returns, direct marketing...all these things needed to be invented from scratch by Jeff Bezos in the late '90s so that Amazon could be a success.

Likewise, I saw an actual, functioning prototype digital camera, which connected to a computer via serial...at the Kodak lab in Rochester where it was developed in the late 80s. It was never developed into a product, not because it was beyond them technically but because it didn't use film, which was what the company was all about selling.

Kodak was also early (probably too early) with photo digitization with PhotoCD. But, yeah, Kodak hadn't really sold cameras for years when digital came along. And it turned out that digital photography didn't really involve using services at photo dealers which was the part of distribution infrastructure where Kodak had some real assets.

Fujifilm had (somewhat) fewer issues with transitioning to digital mostly because they applied their technical expertise in emulsions to areas that had nothing to do with photography. (Though of course they stayed in the photo business as well.)

Also, Fuji had more recent experience in making film cameras and lenses. Mostly 35mm compacts and medium format cameras by 21st century.

Fuji did make pivot to mirrorless at the right time.

"all these things needed to be invented from scratch by Jeff Bezos in the late '90s so that Amazon could be a success."

That's like saying Elon Musk invented the electric car and rocket. More like he hired people to do it, probably from the companies Amazon is competing with.

Honestly, I think you underestimate how much of a distribution and fulfillment network Sears had at their peak. It is easy to imagine way for them to have transitioned to the internet, offer similar delivery speeds to Amazon.

But to do so would have required a lot of forethought and vision. They would have needed to recognize the significance of online retail, free shipping, trustworthy customer service, and their fulfillment way back in the early or mid 90s.

I remember startups back then that didn't really recognize that, and I'm certain that old retail didn't.

I think the turning point for Amazon and thus for Sears was when Amazon's logistics could deliver a product faster than Sears.

I'd really like a refresher on what the retail climate was like at that time that lead Sears into thinking getting rid of their catalog was a good idea.

And why didn't Penny's jump into that vacuum?

Although I expect I already know that answer. I was warned by the oldest worker at my first tech job never to work as a software developer for a manufacturer. They don't understand where the uncertainty and the QA effort lives in the dev process and they keep trying to force it to look like what they know. Probably working for a retailer, even one with supply chain chops, would have been awful in that era.

I wonder how much of it was learning the wrong lessons from the relatively quick decline of Service Merchandise [1]. While a more "regional" competitor to Sears, Service Merchandise remained in the catalog game longer than Sears, was possibly the most successful catalog merchant of the 80s and 90s (depending on who you ask, and again some regional biases), and was also relatively active on the early internet (making millions apparently in internet sales in the early 1990s, ahead of Amazon).

Every article I see about Service Merchandise's decline blames the catalog business (despite doing well in internet sales) as being "too old fashioned" and the root cause, and certainly that's what people seemed to be thinking in the 90s (again, wow how they ignored those internet sales looking at the quoted figures). I'd love to see a better retrospective on the company's 1990's management given we saw Amazon succeed.

Maybe more so than Sears, the fact that Service Merchandise didn't compete better with Amazon is fascinating. Service Merchandise and Sears thought they were competing with Circuit City (dead), Wal-Mart, K-Mart (bought by Sears, dead), Target, rather than each other in the 1990s, and Amazon was left almost entirely uncontested to eat Sears and Service Merchandise's original core competencies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Merchandise

> It's a bit like saying that because Kodak was a photography giant they should have been able to win digital photography when, in fact, other than brand it's not clear what real assets and expertise they had to bring.

This isn't exactly the best example seeing as how Kodak is the poster child for ignoring technology shifts and going bankrupt as a result. Their executives largely ignored digital for the longest time and put minimal resources into R&D even after it was clear digital was taking over. It's sad really, because Kodak was positioned to be a pioneer in digital but they failed to embrace change and that costed them immensely in the end.

To add to that: It was a Kodak engineer that effectively invented the self-contained digital camera. Kodak would have been unanimous with digital photography had they recognized what they had. Unfortunately, their leadership was in charge of a chemical company, and as such, they failed miserably to capitalize.

The first image sensor was created at Bell-Labs, so just creating a camera using one didn't really give them any advantage.

I think a lot of people get caught up in the idea that a company is a living breathing organism that should fight for its life to the very end. In reality, its a collection of investors and employees all with their own interest, and sometimes it's best for everyone to part their separate ways. It's not like the same people were at Kodak when the digital sensor was invented, as there was when they finally gave up on film.

The change to digital was a very slow one, and film remained a very profitable business for Kodak for a long time. IMHO, it would have been insane for Kodak to invest in semiconductor fabrication facilities from the start. Meanwhile existing semiconductor companies could leverage existing tools, employees, and facilities to produce image sensors with relatively low cost and low risk. By the time it made sense to invest in semiconductor tech, they were already too far behind, and it just made more sense for the company to milk the Kodak brand for all they could.

I see it as more like Edison promoting DC over AC. He certainly knew AC was the way to go, but he could only gain financially from DC, so that's what he promoted.

> I see it as more like Edison promoting DC over AC. He certainly knew AC was the way to go, but he could only gain financially from DC, so that's what he promoted.

I don't think Edison knew AC was better. Don't forget Tesla worked for Edison and showed him AC current, and Edison told him not to waste his time on it which is why Tesla went off to do his own thing. And anybody that knew Tesla (based on what I've read, I've obviously never met him) knew he didn't care about making money at all, so he would've happily let Edison have all the profits. Most people don't know Tesla voluntarily tore up his contract with Westinghouse that would have made him the richest man in history. I think it would have been very easy for Edison to profit from AC had he not been so stubborn.

> I think it would have been very easy for Edison to profit from AC had he not been so stubborn.

I've often wondered what could have happened had they became partners or even friends. What Tesla would have made of, say, the Edison Effect - perhaps the vacuum tube (diode, triode, etc) would have been invented much earlier? How that would have affected history (good and bad)? Would electronic digital computers have been developed earlier? Who knows...

First to market in hardware, especially 30+ years ago wasn't a minor advantage it was an enormous advantage.

And I'm not suggesting Kodak should have just went for digital in 1975, as that wasn't cost effective, or practical. But they should have, arguably, understood it was the future and at least pretended that it was a possible revenue stream. Instead they actively avoided it, and doubled-down on the "we're a chemical company" for decades. Then they went bankrupt.

Kodak had a number of key patents on CCD imagers. They had a fab (that still exists) turning out high resolution linear and area array sensors for special applications and DSLRs. Much of the commercial satellite imagery seen on Google maps comes via Kodak sensors.

Kodak's problem is that they always bottom fed the market with their film cameras and retained the same position in digicams. The former strategy is great when you want to drive demand for consumables. It doesn't work when there is nothing to consume in the picture taking process.

Ultimately the top tier camera makers had enough cash reserves and brand recognition to sort their shit out and build digital cameras that were actually good. Then they could differentiate again on bodies and lenses.

There was a long time there where everyone thought the startups and the consumer electronics companies were going to win. Wasn't there a time when Sony had the best digital cameras? Digital cameras were one of the big 'disruptions' in the early information age.

We'll see what happens in the long run. With advances in smartphones and computational photography, interchangeable lens cameras increasingly look like a niche. And the big camera makers have been really slow to do anything other than incrementally tweak their bodies.

Clearly, they'll still be the go tos for pros and advanced amateurs for a long time but that's barely a mass market.

Sony did successfully use digital to become a respected camera maker--and they still have some of the best cameras in their category today. But, by and large, the traditional consumer electronics companies focused on point and shoots, which have been almost totally erased by phones.

You're not wrong. The upstarts may not have weathered the first rounds of the battle but I know people are pretty annoyed at the lock-in.

There was supposed to be a format standard for lenses to solve this problem, but one of my camera-snob friends pointed out that while you can physically thread the lens on another body, things like autofocus probably won't work. So in the end it got people to buy new lenses but still not be able to pick best of breed from each generation.

The top camera makers, Nikon and Canon, were top camera makers before digital. Smartphones killed the compact cameras market that had the most companies and the survivors are the ones that had successful interchangable lens systems or were able to pivot to mirrorless.

Sony is the other currently successful camera maker. They bought Konica-Minolta, and made the switch to mirrorless early. Most importantly, they manufacture the best sensors that everyone else except for Canon uses.

Most of the current digital camera brands were analog camera makers. Panasonic is the exception and they partnered with Leica.

Also Fujifilm in mirrorless but they're probably a smaller player than Sony.

This seems like an argument, but we're in agreement.

Kodak was a pioneer in digital cameras. They made plenty of them. But they focused on compact cameras, with the EasyShare brand, and smartphones absolutely devastated sales of those.

It's a little bit more complicated than that.

Kodak was not a camera company as much as they were a chemical company. They made film, they made developing agents, glass, etc. Eastman Chemical was formerly a subsidary of Kodak, and they had even broader chemical expertise -- fibers, explosives, involved in the Manhattan Project, etc.

So transitioning to digital photography would have meant giving up almost all of their expertise and present business interests. It would have meant slashing their revenue and completely reinventing the company.

Of course, all of that happened anyway. But one can imagine how difficult it would be to pull that trigger yourself. Doing the long-term responsible thing might have even led to shareholder lawsuits...

Shareholders in public companies can easily sell their stock and invest in something else if it seems to be the future. And employees can (not so easily) find another job. A company doesn't need to be eternal. Once upon a time, wasn't a company required to have a fixed purpose and maybe a time limit?

>Shareholders in public companies can easily sell their stock and invest in something else if it seems to be the future.

That doesn't preclude lawsuits. American business law is fucking stupid.

Huh? Under what scenario would the shareholders get sued for selling their stock?

Also, people complain too much about lawsuits versus corporations. Wells Fargo just took a $1.6 billion charge for legal expenses. That's something like 700 person-years at $400/hr, 16 hrs/day. The stupidity isn't the system that allows the lawsuits, it's the corporate mindlessness that wastes the equivalent of 1,000 people's lifetimes on arguing that they didn't do anything wrong instead of just saying "welp you got us".

There's a popular perspective that companies are better off always taking drastic action even if it will probably lead to going down in flames rather than milking a business through an inevitable decline. And that's not always the case.

It's of course natural and sensible for companies to pursue strategies for new products and product lines as existing ones mature and decline. But if doing so means investing in new businesses where you have no particular expertise or advantage, it's unclear if you're benefiting your owners (i.e. shareholders) by doing so.

There's plenty to criticize Kodak about. But it was going to be in a very tough position no matter what. And we can name plenty of other businesses that have been completely replaced by new unrelated technologies. Keuffel and Esser wasn't going to become a calculator company.

I worked at NCSA back in the mid 90's. Some of my coworkers had taken money from Kodak to work on software for a 4 megapixel camera they were doing R&D on. In like '95.

Back then there wasn't enough infrastructure to deal with 4M pictures, and they thought that you would send them a memory card and they'd send you a CDROM full of images and optionally 'develop' the pictures for you.

If anything, Kodak was too early, which is a phenomenon I experienced first hand at several startups.

Wikipedia says they started in that space in '91:

> In 1991, Kodak brought to market the Kodak DCS (Kodak Digital Camera System), the beginning of a long line of professional Kodak DCS SLR cameras that were based in part on film bodies, often Nikons. It used a 1.3 megapixel sensor, had a bulky external digital storage system and was priced at $13,000 (equivalent to $24,000 in 2018[6]). At the arrival of the Kodak DCS-200, the Kodak DCS was dubbed Kodak DCS-100.

Exactly - Kodak was the first with high resolution digital SLRs with the DCS series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_DCS_400_series

I was there in 1995 - installing computers and supporting a organization with a group of photographers that had 5 of those cameras. We had 100mb PCMCIA micro hard drives - made by IBM - by the dozens (over $1500 a pop if I remember right). It took a minute and a half per picture to import the raw images into Photoshop on the highest end Mac Quadra. Somehow I stumbled on a company that made a DSP accelerator card ($5-$6K if I remember right) that cut that import time to 20-30 seconds, but it would still take a day for a photographer to import all their photos from shooting a day or two in the field.

The early days of digital photography were not pretty. I can do 10 times on my phone what we could do after spending literally 10's of thousands of dollars - and 1/4 the resolution we have today.

And yet with the right people it still managed to look really good :) One of the best things I learned was the strength of mastering the fundamental basics of any craft. I was working with experienced film photographers where developing film had a high cost in both time and materials so they were very deliberate in thinking about and composing shots before they shot. With digital I pointed out you could take a lot more pictures more quickly, and correct things in photoshop - but an old crusty photographer responded he'd rather spend his time on the front end of the process in the physical world with the camera then spending hours behind the desk in front of photoshop - and even as a computer geek that really resonated with me.

The old every hour of planning saves 8 of execution and all that.

Kodak isn’t the best example since they made a digital camera back in the 70’s and sat on the tech!

Kodak had a huge interest in selling photo paper and products related to film development.

I've been paying attention lately to https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/ and https://www.red.com/ They make video cameras which take interchangeable lenses, produce video and stills good enough to be used in feature films, and are relatively cheap (comparable to Leica and Hasselblad cameras from the film era.) They are positioning themselves to be successful where Nikon, Canon, et al are becoming increasingly irrelevant.

My Nikon DSLR is four or five years old now, but instead of replacing it with another Nikon I'm thinking about a Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera. (https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagicpocketci...)

Video is the new still photography.

My wife knew a guy who was essentially the Sears.com developer, back then. There was a magazine showing the Sears CEO, and him (he had a Misfits pin on his messenger bag).

He wasn't literally the only developer, but it was close. Sears did not take ecommerce seriously enough, for quite a long time (like, maybe, ever).

When was that? Everyone's got to start somewhere. I was the only web developer for a really big moving company back when you were just called webmaster. Ran it off Mac OS X Server 1.2 on an original iMac for a while.

Sears used to be quite literally the everything store. They even sold houses.

I thought amazon wasn’t quite there yet, and then I found this: https://www.amazon.com/ECOHOUSEMART-Laminated-friendly-Build...

Amazon still isn't quite there - that "house kit" is offered by a third party, and I am not sure anyone rational would just drop that kind of money on a credit card for a third party on Amazon...

Now, if it said "fulfilled by Amazon" - or it went to a different section of the site ("Amazon Dwellings" - I dunno) that was clearly an Amazon branded product, manufacturing and fulfillment system for houses, that'd be a different thing.

I'm not sure how Sears did it way, way back when. But it was probably closer to something like a dealership, where you went inside a store and sat down and worked out the paperwork, etc - then paid the down payment or in full or whatever, then had to go "back home" to arrange shipment from the (likely train) dock or such out to your land...

What I could see Amazon getting into would be shipping container houses/pods/etc - or something like small houses (in conjunction with Ikea maybe?). I know Amazon has at least one offering of a container house, but again, it's third party. What I'm envisioning would be something you just go thru a designer app to come up with the interior layout for the "pods" in the standard container sizes, then tell them where you want it to be delivered, and it arrives on your property ready to be offloaded, with a large Amazon logo on the side (looking like a standard shipping container until it is "unwrapped" or "assembled" more or less. With everything included to make it stupid simple. Heck, if the land sale could be included in it, so that all bylaws and such were taken care of (water, electrical, sewage, etc), plus all the contracts and such for cement foundations or whatnot - it would be one heck of a housing solution.

My maternal great-grandfather bought a house from sears- apparently the process was actually pretty cool. He sent in the cashiers check (or equivalent, I do know he bought it outright) along with instructions on which train station to ship it to. Apparently it was exactly what it said on the tin- my grandmother's older brother said that they included all the fasteners. They saved the plans/instructions, and they were remarkably detailed. I'll have to see if I can track down who has them and put some scans up, it'd make an interesting blog post.

About the only modification they made was adding electric- this was on a farm in the upper Midwest in the 20s,rural electrification wasn't a thing yet. Apparently they ran the lights off a generator that charged a bank of Edison Ni-Fe batteries.

I do know that they didn't go into a store--the nearest Sears was 400 miles away. He did telegraph to request more details, but AFAIK the process to order the house wasn't much different than ordering anything else. I don't know what details went into authorizing payment, but I don't think there was phone service in that town at the time.

Although 150k for that Amazon house seems like a ripoff, most large lumber yards will spec out a 'kit' for far less than that. I do know that that is still a thing, my brother was a manager at a Menards (Home Depot, but cheaper) and they had a selection of houses that were pre-specced and they would sell them as a kit. Although they aren't delivered as an entire kit, you go back to the store in stages to get the components.

> Now, if it said "fulfilled by Amazon" - or it went to a different section of the site ("Amazon Dwellings" - I dunno) that was clearly an Amazon branded product, manufacturing and fulfillment system for houses, that'd be a different thing.

Except you run the chance of getting a counterfeit product if it's fulfilled by Amazon - and even if it's sold by Amazon, because of the whole co-mingling thing. Can you imagine getting a counterfeit house?

Oh, man, imagine the shipping on that. If only is was prime. Actually, it would amuse me to no end to know someone abused the Amazon Prime warehoused by showing up with a few house's worth of these in many trucks, and Amazon ended up storing them all for free and them shipping them out for free. Who needs a warehouse when Amazon has plenty of perfectly fine ones just waiting for you? :)

Doesn't Amazon charge for warehouse space? I would imagine that the warehousing fees for that would be insane.

Although I did buy a granite 12"x18" surface plate that was FBA- I'm sure they lost on shipping that 2 day, it weights ~90lbs. I noticed that shortly after I bought that the item was no longer fulfilled by Amazon.

> Doesn't Amazon charge for warehouse space? I would imagine that the warehousing fees for that would be insane.

I guess they do.[1] Oh well.

1: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/200612770?...

TBF, It's often (and in this case, I would imagine much) easier to build it up from scratch.

Imagine transforming the massive department that was the catalog service, and it's not even about the physical difficulty of transforming the department, the political resistance at the time will be crazy. Multiple billions are wasted for political games every year in large companies, and it's not clear and cut as 'what if we just do this' because hindsight is 20/20. People and especially management carry a heavy inertia.

Sears had it the easiest. They already had all the logistics and delivery operations in place. All they had to update was one thing: their ordering process. They've could have started by placing the catalog online and having you call to order (maybe they did this?), then you move to online ordering, then you went full e-tailer and removed the catalog. The only thing that changed from traditional retail giant to e-tailer was the ordering process.

Sears was uniquely positioned for the future and they squandered their opportunity.

I know almost no one does this, but I find it so strange given what we know about domain knowledge that it wasn't the natural solution to teach a bunch of the catalog staff PHP and make them the foundation of the ecommerce staff.

You had people in there with 3-30+ years experience of knowing the ins and outs of Sears logistics, the product lines, the sales techniques, and the brand. They couldn't learn how to work a Wordpress site? Make a theme? Is it really always faster to take web devs and teach the entire rest of the domain to them?

I wonder what it would do to the inertia and political gamesmanship issues (not to mention retention!) if a company gained the reputation for continuously training employees and executives to keep up with the latest and greatest, that if you were innovative and took initiative you would be ahead of outside hires for new, desirable roles.

It’s hard to underestimate the inertia in these places. I’ve had a couple of employers that became victims of a changing market. Everybody knew we had to change but nothing happened. The funny thing is after the businesses failed many of us ended up doing what we should have done before.

It does seem to me like specialty retailers out in the middle of the mall have really upped their game over the last twenty years. I think the guests are getting sucked out into the middle of the mall for the boutique shops.

Except you can't find a book in most malls.

I've seen at least one mall expand, adding no additional department store space at the corners. Another tacked a Barnes and Noble onto the corner but not really attached (the exception to the 'no books in malls' situation). Two, including the former, added an 'outdoor' area, which was a walkway with shops and restaurants on both sides.

The weird thing about the B&N was they stuck it on the end of the mall that had high turnover in tenants. I never understood why they didn't knock out one storefront and put a hallway through. Maybe access space behind the stores was an issue?

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