zlacker

How'd that work out for the Sears Catalog?

>>DrillS+(OP)
Sears was destroyed by standard corporate raider tactics. I don't think that they serve as the example that you may think they do.

>>ssl-3+fa
I remember my last time walking into a Sears. I figured I'd give it a shot to see if they had anything different than HD/Lowes in the category I was looking at (shop vac attachments). A clerk pointed me to a computer saying "If we don't have it in the store you can order it from our catalog". The computer catalog was literally just searching Amazon listings. That basically confirmed to me that Sears was in a death spiral.

>>mindsl+pd
Yep. They were already dead by that point (again, due to standard corporate raider tactics) -- a zombie just awaiting its coup de grâce.

There was a time before that when they had a better web presence for selling regular hardgoods than Amazon (which was still mostly known as just an online book store), and the Sears Parts website was the very first place to look online for manuals, diagrams, parts, and standard accessories for any random household thing (including shop vac attachments).

They also co-founded the Prodigy network back in the 80s when home computers were still very novel and people weren't broadly sure if the concept would ever catch on.

>>ssl-3+fa
I used to work at Starbucks in their corporate office building in South Downtown Seattle. The building used to be a Sears warehouse ago [1]. The walls next to the elevator in the ground floor still had printed some sort of "Sears customer contract". It had clauses like "you can return the merchandise if you are not satisfied with no questions asked. We will refund you for any shipping charges when returning merchandise". Or "if you cannot find it in our warehouse you can have delivered from our catalog to your home". These slogans reminded me of Amazon and their customer obsession.

Sears could have been Amazon if they kept their customer obsession.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears,_Roebuck_%26_Company_Mai...

and

https://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/wm4RCM_Sears_Tower_Seatt...

>>DrillS+(OP)
I'm talking specifically about the catalog here - the rest of the recent (last 20 years or so) dysfunction of Sears is of a different kind.

The Sears Catalog was the Amazon of the early 20th century. So we must ask ourselves "Why did Sears discontinue its catalog service in 1993?" One of the answers to that question is the rise of retailers like Walmart where people could walk into a local (or at least closer to them than a Sears location) store and buy all sorts of things that they otherwise would have had to order. The catalog was inconvenient with other alternatives available.

The concern with Amazon is with its delivery ability - sure, for now, their unsustainable model that burns out drivers and pays them a pittance is working. Should that slip where they cannot deliver same-day/next day/day after reliably then that's an opportunity for other retailers to do to them what Walmart did to Sears.

You can even see it in this discussion - Walmart's online component directly competes and with many, many more local retails locations than Amazon and can often either have the items ready for pickup the same day or even deliver the same day.

So yes, there's a precedent for this, and if Amazon is focusing more on AWS and the buckets and buckets of money there but starts neglecting the retail part then that leaves a massive opening for competitors.