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The beginning of the end for both companies began as they kept getting sold and resold and sold again to venture capital groups, the operators of which never once ate at a HoJo’s or bought Sears auto parts to fix their car or had their children circle what they wanted for Christmas in the Wish Book. When you share little in common with your customers, how do you innovate to keep them and their children?

Take out the "human" element and the manager who is ad knows his customers and you get failure. Anything can fail when the "management" is out of touch. This is what scares me about our republic and out of touch politicians.

This is what scares me about our republic and out of touch politicians.

We will have pinheads for politicians until we start reminding them that they are our servants and our hired help - and we start treating them as such. They are, in reality, the least elite of the population. The fact that a public parasite like Biden calls people 'pal' is emblematic of how much the laughably pathetic narcissists in public office have inflated their own egos.

Excellent comment under the original article at its source. The bold item is mine:

It's more the rule than the exception that after the original management passes on a business declines and folds. Part of that is individual genius, a little is luck, and some is just time. You mention that HoJo's may have invented franchising, well OK, and maybe they invented the "coffee shop" especially the chain version, but there's no moat on that and soon there were franchise coffee shops regionally and nationally. And 31 Flavors overwhelmed their main attraction, and indeed every supermarket today offers a couple of dozen packaged flavors. Sears is another matter, a bit more complicated, but all of retail has changed dramatically, a couple of times, since the 1950s. I remember the catalogs, too, but the shopping center invented in the 1950s obsoleted Sears as a one-stop shopper, leaving Sears in old locations, they never made sense as shopping center anchors for that very reason. So really on those two examples, they "retired" 30+ years ago and now pass away down the corridors of time.