Only 5 Sears stores remain in the U.S.
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
1911: https://archive.org/details/sears-roebuck-catalog-122-spring...
1922: https://archive.org/details/SearsRoebuckAndCoCatalog1922_201...
When I was young, they were especially known for their tools:
1974/1975: https://archive.org/details/SearsCraftsmanPowerAndHandTools1...
More here:
https://archive.org/search?query=title%3A%28sears+catalog%29...
Same guy dug the original ditch by driving back and forth with his jeep for an hour during spring rain. This gives a perspective on his can do attitude.
But really, I'm living in the house still, so it can't be that bad.
wtf? how deep is the ditch?
I dug it out properly after buying. It was a perfectly good ditch though, but I wanted to drain more water at the back of the property, so I lowered it another 2 feet.
But yes, on a fundamental level there's little difference between plopping a modular on a grid of piers vs plopping sheds on a grid of piers. The biggest difference is the level of finishing that's done at the factory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craftsman_(tools)
My personal recollection from the 1970s is that Craftsman tools had a reputation for high quality and that people I knew bought them at Sears stores.
They were Amazon before Amazon, but just didn’t realize it.
And fair enough: When the ship is that big and there are that many people on board, you often don't want to "move fast and break things," because the downstream effects can be extreme. Now you've just broken a company that had been working for decades. You're incentivized to take small risks with high likelihoods of reward.
Of course, the problem is, at some point that becomes fatal. A balance can be struck, but it can be hard when the original driving force is long gone.
As you said, finding a balance is hard and maybe not truly possible.
HP(E): after stumbling with itanium, replaced its proprietary Unix server business with x86 and Linux.
They went from 300k employees to a small fraction. They went from designing graphics cards in-house to practically rebranding white box servers.
(Yes, they still make their own servers, too much of the design and manufacturing work being done by outside firms).
They’ve also thrown away a mind boggling amount of talent and institutional knowledge of storage and networking.
Amazon also wasn't like Sears, they depended heavily on 3rd party sellers to built their initial catalog. Sears didn't have 3rd party sellers until much later on. Amazon just leveraged those 3rd party sellers to figure out what they should carry and sell as Amazon down the line.
Consumer: I can check prices at different stores in 1 minute
Chinese: why do business with the Sears agent in Hong Kong when I can sell directly to the West?
Rule numbero uno: there is no customer loyalty in Ba Sing Se!
Consumer goods got cheaper at the cost a few million decently paying jobs and manufacturing capacity directly and due to second order effects.
Maybe in alternate history we could have saved some of this onshore manufacturing capacity but we’ll never know now.
Amazon took their largest cost center, IT infrastructure, and made it a profit center (AWS). That is the part that makes money.
They did realize it (well, they obviously didn’t have Amazon as a reference, but...). And they enjoyed it for a long time. But, as has happened many times to firms very successful in one set of conditions, they failed to adapt to changing conditions.
Sears had shifted so firmly into retail by the 80s. Then Wal-Mart ate their lunch on low price retail logistics.
Then Amazon came along, and solved last-mile delivery of catalog sales.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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!
This is empirically the default operational behavior. It should always be assumed as opposed to our current strategy of always being baffled and shocked that it happens.
We could be serious about this and restructure incentives away from naked kleptocracy to avoid it.
I mean we never will, but we could...
It's no small irony that Buffet's retirement aligns with the close out as an iconic holdout of long view valuation - even his more recent moves I think showed some retreat from his previous values. Perhaps not really his direct fault, but he had fewer and fewer good investment options as time went by.
Slavery kept going until we said that's illegal.
Child labor kept going until we said that's illegal
Putting heroin in baby food formula kept going until we said that's illegal.
We don't defer to the free market for everything.
Nobody is like, well child porn, I guess there's a market demand for it so it's right over there with the magazines
It is neither strange nor unusual to value things more than the freedom of the market. We do it all the time.
We should do that with societal harms and not just individual ones. Criminalizing obvious crime shouldn't be some kind of wild eyed fantasy. It should have been done 150 years ago.
How would that message be conveyed? Like, who would send it and who would receive it? Would it be more like an email or a phone call?
(I vaguely recall some realisation that he had made money but the public equity did not… It was a bit of an awakening for the young investor who had bought into fiduciary duty, shareholder interests, etc.)
> In 2008, Sears CEO Eddie Lampert decided to restructure the company according to [Ayn] Rand's principles.
> Lampert broke the company into more than 30 individual units, each with its own management and each measured separately for profit and loss. The idea was to promote competition among the units, which Lampert assumed would lead to higher profits. Instead, " ... the divisions turned against each other — and Sears and Kmart, the overarching brands, suffered."
See also the 2013 Salon article "Ayn Rand-loving CEO destroys his empire" at https://www.salon.com/2013/12/10/ayn_rand_loving_ceo_destroy...
https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2bsxn8l0u5yr6z...
My 9 year old brain was convinced that it was somehow inferior to the Atari-branded version of the 2600 and I was sad when my parents got me the Sears version for Christmas (it was probably cheaper than the Atari, I can't remember).
It didn't take me long, however, to realize it was the same thing with a different logo.
Examples include: Family Dining (Red Lobster, Applebee's, etc) was a dying market segment. Millennials and younger tend to put less value on table service than their parents did, preferring food quality over table service when forced to choose. Fast-Casual took over the entire price segment, so the companies either pivoted (see Chili's takeout expansion), or sold out to PE to decompose.
Local Dentistry is getting bought out by PE because the economic conditions that traditionally granted junior dentists the capital to buy out their retiring seniors' practices have ceased. Now, in order to retire, dentists are forced to sell their practices to PE firms.
The company Danelectro made guitars and amplifiers in the 50's and 60's under the Silvertone brand name distributed through Sears.
Danelectro came up with the idea of packaging a guitar pickup in a chrome lipstick case. They used actual lipstick cases in the beginning.
We still have lipstick pickups today; they are a big part of the electric guitar world.
A company named GFS makes double coil lipstick humbuckers: https://www.guitarfetish.com/GFS-Pro-Tube-Lipstick-Humbucker...
- Coral Gables, Florida
- Orlando, Florida
- Braintree, Massachusetts
- Concord, California
- El Paso, Texas
According to another article I found (https://www.costar.com/article/1406528706/once-giant-sears-c...)
This hypothetical new Sears vision is to create an Ikea competitor, but an honest Ikea, where Sears squares off with their biggest showroom-based adversary.
Ikea is beautiful but hollow, as their showrooms are seductive dioramas, but the resulting money exchange of cash for particleboard is like buying sex instead of meeting you life partner.
Instead, Sears would be the interface between the customer and the American-made premise. Sears sells American made products and represents American makers. Fuck selling washers and dryers. The showroom is not there to stock imports in cardboard. It's there to show you a concept, what your life could be if you stop buying junk. It's there to demonstrate quality. It's not particleboard at the core; it's a chunk of USA.
It would shamelessly capitalize on nostalgia and quality. Instead of nordic spartan whites and blands, it would have dioramas of pine wood wall panelling, cast iron wood stoves, chrome magnificence, Tiffany glass. Want a new desk? $5k. Made of US oak. Want the pine walls? The boardfeet are in the back, milled 5 miles away, how much square feet you need?
Even better, each store is fucking exclusive. Find local makers and concentrate their products in the geographically local store. Make people rabid and giddy to travel to each store even if they need to go five states away. Visiting is a unforgettable experience, like a museum that you can buy stuff.
Stage 2 is to use the Sears branded products like Ycombinator for machine shops. Sears injects some startup capital and now Sears cabinet pulls are turned on a machine lathe in a startup machine shop in Ohio. Furniture ateliers are like franchise Chick-fil-as.
The OLD Radioshack, obviously.
When I was a kid it was normal for parents to let their kids read the huge yearly Sears catalog to get ideas or pick gifts. By then they'd stopped selling items like firearms and houses but had pretty much everything else.
If they had the foresight, they should have become a better version of what Amazon is now.
This wasn’t uncommon back then: we had several clients in the 90s who just couldn’t wrap their heads around how quickly many of their customers would switch to email or online forms when it saved them a few days on the transaction.
How significant their shipping catalog was in the 1990s I do not know, scaling the online storefront would have required Amazon scale investments which a dividend maximizing company was unlikely to do.
> How significant their shipping catalog was in the 1990s I do not know
Sears discontinued its general mail order catalog (which had declined in relevance for years) in 1993, the same year NCSA Mosaic was released, while the web had about 0 public penetration and no commercial use.
So, it wouldn't have been a matter of adapting the catalog business to the web, it would have been rebuilding it from scratch.
I doubt such a board would have lasted more than a few years at best.
Not to mention trying to change 100 plus years of technical and organizational debt while in-flight.
I don’t think Amazon could have come to be outside of the tech sector plus be a greenfield play. I could be wrong, but HN and techie folks in general seem to underestimate how hard it is to change existing organizations. It’s rarely a technical problem.
And now, decades later everything is full circle. I avoid Walmart and Amazon like the plague and try to only shop at smaller outlets, whether brick-and-mortar or online. It might be slightly more expensive but I assume that's just the tax you pay to avoid a corporate monopoly hellscape.