Sears closed down catalog sales in the mid-1990s just as every other retailer was moving to the newfangled internet.
Okay. But they are on the Internet now, just like everybody else, and have been there for a while. The catalogue sales division was losing millions of dollars a year when they closed it.
Maybe they could have retooled the wishbook catalog and adapted it to the growing Internet or maybe not, but I'm not sure getting rid of the catalog was an obviously stupid idea, given what's happened to all printed paper media lately and given the success of companies like Amazon.com which don't have paper catalog.
Anyway, Sears catalogs are back, though on a much reduced scale.
I remember when Sears shut down their catalog sales and their catalog stores. But again their business model was outdated. The competitors were rushing out catalog for every submarket or niche AND had toll free 1-800 numbers.
As I recall from a marketing case, Sears for years refused to put toll free numbers into their catalogs-the competition had been doing it for five to ten years.
The only thing that saved Sears was that they hired General William Pagonis as Executive VP of Logistics. Remember, General Pagonis was in charge of logistics during Gulf War I, in 1991.
Indoor plumbing did away with their catalog business.