The fact that Amazon exists is a testament to the stunning mismanagement of Sears’ corporate leadership in the 90s and early 2000s. They had all the ingredients and instead simply set the company on fire.
By the end, in a lot of their stores they would have people with iPads walking around accepting payment right there in the aisles.
People also forget that what helps build sears’ reputation was their supply chain and curation, they mostly sold brands of good-quality stuff, a lot made in America too! They would rebrand good but basic quality items (like a wrench or sewing machine, or a shotgun or a guitar) and keep it running for years or decades.
My dad was given a shotgun in the 1950s, a Remington made sears-brand. It was, apparently, great! He used it a lot for like half a century.
I feel like a big part of the downfall was the huge lumbering corporate culture unable to cope with JIT supply lines and race to the bottom economies of consumer goods.
Oh well!
i think its simpler than that. they got so big that they didnt pay any attention to all the waste, e.g. all the ad time that they spent on the old "I'll call today" A/C commercial.
If those ads were pennies compared to other spots, it could be deemed worth it. Parents often are nearby when kids are watching TV.
There was a mass explosion of cable channels, and ad rates plunged. Some networks had a hard time filling all ad space.
Sounds like they would have been better off investing more in staying around in the conditions that actually existed rather than buying attention that they could never benefit from.
I wonder about comparing the total sales rev of Walmart or Amazon (lifetime revenue) to the lifetime revenue of Sears Roebuck and whatever, adjusted for inflation. This would probably paint an interesting picture of our consumer trends and corporate governance
By the 1990s, when the ad in question was around, Sears was long past its status as a retail juggernaut, and was trying (ultimately unsuccessfully) to regain it--this was roughly the last decade before they were bought by Kmart—and the loss was in large part because they had spent decades working harder on trying to do other things (which they largely abandoned during the 1990s, except for the consumer credit business that had displaced retail as the main revenue source, for their terminal effort to refocus on retail.)
> I wonder about comparing the total sales rev of Walmart or Amazon (lifetime revenue) to the lifetime revenue of Sears Roebuck and whatever, adjusted for inflation. This would probably paint an interesting picture of our consumer trends and corporate governance
Not really, without a lot of other data. Their dominance was for different lengths of times, and with difference size population bases. Simply comparing lifetime sales revenue adjusted for inflation isn't going to paint much of a picture at all.
I wanted the manual.
Sears parts still existed, and they shipped me a complete copy of the manual(photocopied) for 10 bucks.
Manual listed all parts, breakdown, etc. I was able to confidently order parts, keep it running for a decade.
That was one reason Sears was so liked.
(for reference, my new mower manual has as much detail, I checked before I bought)
Washing machines used to be better and much more reliable in my experience (if less efficient) for ex my parent have a high end Samsung and WOW is it SLOW! The drying is much worse(slow) too.
Probably much more efficient though.
Sears' jewelry was... definitely marked up. This is from a SNC (SEARS Network Communicator, just a fancy term for their Symbol PDTs) showing true cost on a "$1299" necklace. $1299 down to $324? What a steal! It still only cost Sears a hundred bucks.
So, ordering anything not immediately needed and available on Amazon was very likely to have the lowest price. Talk about viral style growth of customer bases!
By the time of the height of the dotcom boom, Sears main income was from its consumer credit business, not its B&M retail business, where its dominance had been fading for a couple of decades.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4rqZZgVxnCk&pp=ygUMaWxsIGNhbGw...
The weird market of things-on-kids-channels-for-adults was always to try to turn the kid on the parent to use them to close the sale ;)