Sears had a chance to do something like that, but it’s now called Amazon and eBay. There is still a way they could enter that market in a big sort of way.
Imagine if Sears would set up an online store in a deal with one of the big shippers like UPS, but designed to also integrate “sub-stores” by a bunch of other catalogs out there. There are hundreds of them, that still send out paper catalogs before the holiday season.
The idea being that all together, it would function like a virtual Wal-Mart. Not just the entire Sears and K-Mart inventory, but that of all the other catalogs, from Edmund Scientifics to the Cheese of the Month Club.
I've often thought of writing a sci-fi short story based on that catalog.
/johnny