Before their downfall, Sears had a better website than Amazon for buying hard goods.
When Amazon was still focused on selling books, Sears had a huge array of non-book stuff that could be bought and shipped to their store for free, or delivered anywhere at a fairly low cost. I bought all kinds of stuff that way, at a time when buying anything online still seemed kind of novel.
For a very long time the Sears Parts website was the foremost place to find appliance parts and documentation online.
Sears was even one of the founders of Prodigy, years before Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the Word Wide Web.
FFS, they had a rich history of taking orders and delivering products that started over a century ago.
So, one might ask: If the old trope of "they didn't understand teh Intarwebs, herp herp" is false, then what was it that brought ruin to Sears a little bit quicker than some of their fellow mall anchor peers?
And that answer is simple: Standard corporate raider tactics.
I think the issue with Sears is they had a ton of large brick-mortar-stores (often the "anchors" at malls, which is another nearly dead industry with the last indoor mall built in the US in 2006). Remember the fear of Wal-Mart killing main street in the late 90s into the 2000s? Wal-Mart came in and killed the competition, which included Sears. Then Amazaon annihilated Sears further and took a huge dent in Wal-Mart. Sears had no choice but to implode. I imagine major horse and carriage companies suffered a similar fate with the invention of the automobile.
When Amazon was still focused on selling books, Sears had a huge array of non-book stuff that could be bought and shipped to their store for free, or delivered anywhere at a fairly low cost. I bought all kinds of stuff that way, at a time when buying anything online still seemed kind of novel.
For a very long time the Sears Parts website was the foremost place to find appliance parts and documentation online.
Sears was even one of the founders of Prodigy, years before Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the Word Wide Web.
FFS, they had a rich history of taking orders and delivering products that started over a century ago.
So, one might ask: If the old trope of "they didn't understand teh Intarwebs, herp herp" is false, then what was it that brought ruin to Sears a little bit quicker than some of their fellow mall anchor peers?
And that answer is simple: Standard corporate raider tactics.
https://janweirlaw.medium.com/how-hedge-funds-profit-from-ba...