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Sears has been around for about a 100 years, and they have invented the catalog sales model - they were the Amazon of that era. I don't blame them for not doing things like A/B testing a 100 years ago, but 10 or 20? They were asleep at the wheel. That's when Walmart took off like a space rocket. Essentially the same offering to the same demographic. Yet Sears collapsed.

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There were other factors at play in the downfall of Sears than just failure to take advantage of their positions at the time. Sears, in a sense, became a victim of its own success. In the heyday of parasite capitalism, it became more profitable for a small group of bad actors to make Sears fail.

Xerox is a more apt example of the 'missed opportunity' narrative.

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