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Comment by bigbuppo | Hacker News Reader

Remember how Sears was a thing but they kept making dumb decisions and were also unable to adapt to new realities? Facebook/Meta is like that. Doomed company walking.

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Sometimes I have thoughts like this, but then I get on the subway and watch everyone around me endlessly scroll Instagram while their brains melt out their ears, and then I decide that I was the one who was out of touch.

History tells us that a large portion of the population can be out of touch. Sometimes almost everybody in a given society.

Yeah, Sears is wierd, they were well positioned to be where Amazon is today. But what feels like a small change 30 years later, Transition from mail order to web order, was too much for them?

Hadn't they been phasing out the catalog business in favor of brick-and-mortar stores?

One can hope.

Agreed, they are eating the seed corn with this one

I just wish they'd stop buying promising stuff like Rivos that they're almost certain to ruin on their way down.

I’d agree except most over the age of 45-50 will never leave FB for other platforms. They’ve got decades of milking money out of that cow before it dies completely

Just like people shopped at Sears up until the day the stores finally closed.

It wasn't that Sears was unable to adapt to new realities, they merely had a incompetent hedge fund manager CEO who was unable to separate his fantasy world of Objectivist delusions from reality. He tried to implement a management structure based on Ayn Rand novels, with predictable results. Sears didn't die a natural death, it was the victim of yet another Objectivist murder.

https://www.inc.com/erik-sherman/sears-ceo-eddie-lampert-sho...

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/4385-failing-to-plan-h...

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