How did they screw this up?
How did they screw this up?
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Jeff Bezos could tell you.
I’m sure there are various factors. Such as, competition from Walmart in recent years, and consumers buying more and more items on the internet.
They screwed up in 1993, when they eliminated the catalog business instead of embracing the internet and moving it online. Amazon.com was founded about one year later.
Sears chose to become a brick and mortar retailer at the worst possible moment.
Sears was built on providing Americans whatever they needed, and shipping it directly to them where they lived. Abandoning that started the slow, painful death of the company. The ashes of the Sears catalog were the fertilizer for Amazon.
Because Sears isnt needed.
You might as well look for a Bloomingdale’s.
It would appear that their alliance with K-Mart was not all that successful. Wal-Mart and Target have delivered the most recent blows, expanding even as Sears and K-mart were shrinking.
In its heyday, Sears was what Amazon has become, as much of its business was by mail-order, much like one of its competitors, Montgomery Wards. J.C. Penney was late coming to the game, but it, too, was a rather major mail-order house.
But mail order became a thing of the past, as the growth in first telephone ordering, then later, Internet merchandising, became the means of reaching ever widening pools of potential buyers, which by now have threatened the traditional brick-and-mortar stores, to the point of coming extinction, with the exception of small boutique-like niche marketing.
Technology is clearly a two-edged sword.