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Comment by doomlaser | Hacker News Reader

Love the original catalog index of homes. http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm

You can click on the pictures to see the original home ads in the Sears catalog, with prices (e.g. http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/images/1908-1914/1911_011...) $1062 for the parts to a beautiful American Craftsman style bungalow ($34,394.38 adjusted for inflation)! Some assembly required :)

On a tangential note: Sears killed the mail order catalog in 1993, just as the Internet was starting to take off. They could have been Amazon. Now, even their landmark highrise, the Sears Tower, has been unceremoniously renamed Willis Tower.

I still like the idea of mail order house parts & plans though. Someone should start a startup to make and build them.

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When folks say things like "Sears could have been Amazon," I feel like they don't quite see the whole picture.

They adopted digital tech earlier than most other companies.

Sears co-founded the Prodigy dialup service eons before "The Internet" was a household name, and they were selling hardgoods on the web (for delivery or free in-store pickup) when Amazon was still mostly a cheeky book store.

Sears died mostly because of corporate raider tactics that made it impossible for them to survive.

The Red Dead Redemption 2 video game which takes place in 1899 has a story arc about buying a house from a catalog, receiving the parts and assembling it.

You can still buy house plans and bundles of parts similar to what Sears used to offer, Menards sells them.

Home Depot also has some prefab units but they're all very small.

Saying "Willis Tower" in Chicago is akin to saying "Voldemort" in Harry Potter, it's not done without gasps and dirty stares.

>> Sears killed the mail order catalog in 1993, just as the Internet was starting to take off. They could have been Amazon.

That's like saying Ford could have been Tesla, they just needed to make an electric car in 2012.

Sears did have an internet store on Prodigy (an AOL competitor) in the early 90s it went nowhere... a lot of these megacompanies weren't going to turn it around even if they were first movers.

I mean, GM came kinda close with the EV1. It was essentially as good as a Nissan Leaf was, in the 90s! It was more of an organizational failure than a technical one that killed it.

[Company A] killed the [business], just as the [trend] was starting to take off. They could have been [Startup B].

Here are my values:

Google ... online news Reader ... social media ... Global Media Inc.

I don't know how to stress Google's dominance and ability in literally crushing the entire media world. Google News, Google Reader, Blogger, Read-it-Later, Google Books, Google Podcast, YouTube ... were all part of a big conglomerate of information extraction + information production.

Of course, the curse of antimonopolistic eyes, M+FAANG competition, and media envy would have followed.

Agreed but worth it to note that since then building standards have gone up by a lot. It was much easier to offer cheap homes based on old-growth planks and lead paint.

To buy an equivalent house like the ones in Sears catalog in a desirable neighborhood can easily set you back half a million.

> in a desirable neighborhood

land value =/=house price

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