Interesting.
They should have been what Amazon is today.
Before internet ordering, there was mail ordering.
Yes, it is all catalog shopping/ordering.
That’s all “on-line” is. Trying to dress it up as new-age doesn’t change the fact it’s still an old-fashioned kind of shopping, in the old days meant for those who were remote and couldn’t shop in person.
Interesting.
They should have been what Amazon is today.
Before internet ordering, there was mail ordering.
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It is interesting. They invented mail order. In a way, they were Amazon in the pre-internet era. They published a catalog that was available to everyone in every town. You could order anything and everything from that catalog and have it delivered. It all moved at the speed of mail, but it was much the same concept as Amazon.
“There was mail ordering.”
Yes, Sears was the equivalent of Amazon or eBay. They built a massive building / distribution center just east of downtown LA which was in operation from 1926 to 1992. Considering how large it is, was built in 1926 and serviced a sparsely populated west and Rocky Mountain region only, demonstrates their dominance over the mail order business for almost 70 years.
The building has been vacant since 1992 which is about the same time they started into a tailspin. The internet didn’t exist and eBay or Amazon didn’t either.
In the late 80’s I used to live one block from a Sears regional distribution center. The building was massive with four or five stories covering several acres of ground and additional acres of parking for the constant streams of trailer trucks coming and going.
Years from now they’ll be an example in business textbooks about failure to adapt to changing technology.