In 1993, Sears exited the mail order business. In 1994, Amazon was founded.
It might have been different. Sears already owned Prodigy. The World Wide Web already existed in the early 1990s. PCs had been available for over 10 years. Modems had reached 28Kb/s. What if Sears had simply put their huge catalog on line and started taking orders? Sears already had the logistics infrastructure for deliveries.
Amazon might never have launched.
The POS system was archaic, even at that time. Nobody trusted inventory counts, it was never accurate. But the website was always worse. Plus we had no workable access to it. It took an eternity to load a page. And what you saw was worthless. Sears treated the website with contempt.
We had a mandatory company wide meeting on a Sunday night. They played a pre recorded message from the CEO telling us how important family was to the company. He was at home with his family. We weren’t. That never registered with Sears.
My job at the time was ostensibly to sell hand tools, or lawn tools, or consumer electronics. But that wasn’t the point at all. We got paid commission. The item was nothing. Maybe 3%, probably less. A few dollars. But a successful Sears card signup? That was a flat $20.00 payout. Add on a warranty? 30% commission on the warranty. Bonuses were paid to management based on the ratio of sales with addons. So for a sales rep like me we will take any sale. But my boss would prefer I not sell a TV at all if I don’t get the warranty.
Sears was a predatory business for decades. I don’t know when they lost their way but it was long before the turn of the century. Modern business would do well to study how Sears failed.
Amazon isn't anything different. You're bombarded with offers to sign up for the Amazon Visa, "Get $50 off with approval of the Amazon Rewards Visa". They try to sneak in the Asurion warranty. 'Customers who bought this item also bought...' is where they push the high-margin accessories.
They don't make any money on the big items. Nobody ever did. It's the service an accessories.
> I don’t know how Sears failed so hard
and proceeds to describe exactly why it failed so hard.
BTW, despite all that corporate bullshit one thing should work reliably: inventory. When a customer is physically in the store you can "sorry, actually we don't have $thing in stock" all you want, they can't just teleport to your competitor. In the Internet - they can.
It may have felt like they could do no wrong so why focus on continuing to do right? Why push for excellence when you're already the best?
And once one manager started thinking like that, then another did, and another did, and another...
It's easy to see in the aftermath what factors caused them to fail, but the spirit of the event itself was plain to everyone not caught up in it.
They thought they were invulnerable, and like a teenager wearing a t-shirt on a motorcycle they eventually found out the hard truth.
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Inventory counts: have to do 'inventory' (check what's really there), which costs workers and time to verify. Most frequently seen by consumers when a store thinks they have X of something but they really have N (likely zero).
POS: Infrastructure is a cost center... How do you measure the hypothetical losses?
Saturday... video message? WTF kind of cult is this BS?
Maligned incentives. I'm sure ages ago those metrics used to be useful for promotion or something, then they became the literal payment system. No wonder that place felt like a used car showroom for merchandise as they were going out of business.
Sunday. The store closed an hour or two early on Sundays. They had the whole staff come in at 7pm, even if it was our day off.
It was around the time of the Kmart merger so could have been about that. The only thing I recall now was the CEO telling us how important "family" time was, while my dinner got cold at home. Of course "Sears is a family" or somesuch. So yeah, a cult, at least in the c-suite.
Who knows what might have happened if they'd brought all of sears products online for purchase, in their existing standalone prodigy browser software...
In about 1985 Sears piloted a thing called "Electronistore." You could go into a Sears store and browse the catalog and place orders on a computer (a PC/XT) with a credit card.
The computer setup was very creative. At the time, a PC couldn't really display high quality photos, and there wasn't hard drive capacity for the photos of the Sears catalog anyhow. The solution was to make each product photo a frame on a Laserdisc. The computer was connected to a TV/Monitor that could be electronically commanded to switch inputs between the computer and the laserdisc player. The computer could command the laserdisc player to seek to a certain frame and freeze the frame.
You could browse and search the catalog, and then hit a button and it would show you the picture, then you'd hit another key and go back to the text interface for ordering.
Anyhow they ran the pilot and not too many people used it since you could just use the catalog instead which had all of the same products, so they shut it down and never really returned to e-commerce.
(article about it from the time: https://web.archive.org/web/20201112020112/https://www.chica...)
Here is the 1986 christmas catalog
https://archive.org/details/1986-sears-christmas-wishbook-ca...
This is all easy and achievable, should you pursue the path. Incremental improvements onto an existing, ancient, paper-oriented business process are easily possible.
- Print off online orders as facsimile mail-in orders for processing - Prices weren't fancy real-time updates back then, or didn't have to be if they were
You're looking at the state of today and assuming this is as it was on the nascent web.
It wasn't.