The Larkin Soap Company
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Any company can fold rather quickly. Just some strife, some headwinds, etc...
How stable is Boeing right now?
"Internal struggles among the next generation of Larkin executives and the loss of key executives, precipitated the demise of the company. Sales fell from a high of $28.6 million in 1920 to $2 million by 1939.[2] The company was sold in 1941, liquidated in 1942,[6] and the new owners continued a mail-order business until 1962.[3]"
Nearly 100 years later, the department store has demised because of the rise of a slightly faster form of mail order business.
I strongly disagree with this speculation.
Amazon’s benefit wasn’t just being there first. It was being there first and being Amazon.
Sears was fucked because they were 100+ years old and hadn’t innovated in decades and were entering a period that would be defined by innovation. They just didn’t have it in them.
Sure maybe they stave off failure by a few more years and then maybe they get a series of increasingly lucky breaks afterwards and then they do keep Amazon from becoming Amazon. But it’s far far far far from a sure thing that would result from simply pivoting back to mail order.
I think they'd be further ahead if not for their branding and lack of advertising. Walmart, at least in my life experience, is equated with low class, cheap, junky. IMO they should've kept the Jet brand as their web/delivery presence.
Amazon's being attacked by Walmart on one side (same day in-store pickup and/or delivery of things you know) and Temu/Alibaba on the other.
There's a reason they're sitting on AWS as a profit center.
Target, Best Buy, Home Depot are also champing at the bit, each in their own way.
Apple was near bankruptcy, was on the way out.
But, Jobs did come back, and now it looks pre-destined. Like some story book of inevitability. But was really not a sure thing at all.
If the right leader had taken over Sears, who knows. Sears had the history and background to do what Amazon did. The Sears Catalog is still known as an Icon. If that had been parlayed into the Internet Sears Catalog, things could have been very different.
Imagine a retro styled hip Sears Catalog online.
This sounds awful.
> If the right leader had taken over Sears, who knows
This my whole point. That yes if Sears gets the absolute best break imaginable (like Apple did), then yes they have a chance. The comment I was replying to said that all they did was not act which I think is wrong.
Who knows what will become cool again. Hipsters pick some odd things.
That thought process is exactly what Sears was infected with and why they were 100% cooked.
yes. the old Sears Catalog is exactly the things that would be popular again. to be hip.
but since it went through many decades. to be more specific. I am imagining something like 1920's-30's Dust Bowl era Sears Catalog. Kind of like how hipsters made Pabst Blue Ribbon, your 1950's dad, cool again.
Check this out. An ASMR video no less, about 1920's Sears Catalog, tell me someone wouldn't have been able to make this hip.
I was searching for examples.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzlYcU8hDTY
Generally, I am conflating 1920's-30's Style, with Sears Catalog that I think a lot of people associate with that era. And so Sears could have tied in the hipster nostalgia for that 20's-30's era with their catalog.
Guess every generation has their own call-backs. Things that cycle back around to be hip. So what if in this fictional web site to compete with Amazon, you could choose different era's, and the entire site theme would change. So shop in the 80's again, shop in the 70's again.
Congrats lol.
> tell me someone wouldn't have been able to make this hip
That is what I am telling you.
> So what if in this fictional web site to compete with Amazon, you could choose different era's, and the entire site theme would change. So shop in the 80's again, shop in the 70's again.
Again, sounds like what a boomer thinks young people would think is cool.
My whole point is not that old things are never fashionable again in the present. It's that this phenomenon is not something that is easy to manufacture and that Sears was in no position to manufacture it.
The idea that if Sears had simply decided to be online they would have Amazon's business is malarkey IMO. They could've made it happen but it would've taken lucky break after lucky break after lucky break.
If you are a new user, I suggest reading the guidelines [1].
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
I think there should be a higher standard than just posting random links without context. How about a single line of text explaining why it is interesting to them?