My house, built in the 60s, is actually 4 Sears cabin kits. The guy bought them, and assembled them end to end, making a long house.
Same guy dug the original ditch by driving back and forth with his jeep for an hour during spring rain. This gives a perspective on his can do attitude.
But really, I'm living in the house still, so it can't be that bad.
When I bought, it was maybe 2 ft deep. 60s Jeeps weren't quite a wide as today, either.
I dug it out properly after buying. It was a perfectly good ditch though, but I wanted to drain more water at the back of the property, so I lowered it another 2 feet.
The fact that Amazon exists is a testament to the stunning mismanagement of Sears’ corporate leadership in the 90s and early 2000s. They had all the ingredients and instead simply set the company on fire.
Oh yeah they from what I recall they slowly dismantled it after what’s-his-face became ceo. Too big to fail before that.
By the end, in a lot of their stores they would have people with iPads walking around accepting payment right there in the aisles.
People also forget that what helps build sears’ reputation was their supply chain and curation, they mostly sold brands of good-quality stuff, a lot made in America too! They would rebrand good but basic quality items (like a wrench or sewing machine, or a shotgun or a guitar) and keep it running for years or decades.
My dad was given a shotgun in the 1950s, a Remington made sears-brand. It was, apparently, great! He used it a lot for like half a century.
I feel like a big part of the downfall was the huge lumbering corporate culture unable to cope with JIT supply lines and race to the bottom economies of consumer goods.
I will detail the evil anti machine from sears, combo washer dryer, drop the lid and it breaks the switch, the switch trigger is on the lid with a very long prong, dropped gently it works, fast it breaks, $150 plus service call, where it turns out the prong can be snapped off, leaving a stub that still triggers the switch, but wont break it.
Next, the waterpump sits on three bosses, with spring clips, if it ingests anything like a dress sock that WILL go through the machine, it stripps the drive shaft, but AGAIN, the bosses can be snapped off, there is a second place for the spring clipps, and the motor shaft now engages much further, and it will power it's way through whatever.
So the standard model was that, and the "heavy duty$$$" model was 3 min snapping of plastic booby traps.
pure evil, and very very likely illegal
but as someone who can fix/repair or make almost anything, I see this stuff all the time, but of course, today, it's done in the software.
> I feel like a big part of the downfall was the huge lumbering corporate culture unable to cope with JIT supply lines and race to the bottom economies of consumer goods.
i think its simpler than that. they got so big that they didnt pay any attention to all the waste, e.g. all the ad time that they spent on the old "I'll call today" A/C commercial.
Fun memory and a bit of an internal photo (and a rare shot of PalmOS software from the inside): https://ibb.co/nsVrW0h1
Sears' jewelry was... definitely marked up. This is from a SNC (SEARS Network Communicator, just a fancy term for their Symbol PDTs) showing true cost on a "$1299" necklace. $1299 down to $324? What a steal! It still only cost Sears a hundred bucks.
i think the infamous "I'll call now" air conditioner commercial in the '90s was a canary/sign of the mismanagement that was occurring. This commercial played during every commercial break on cartoon network, nickelodean, and the disney channel. Ive long wondered... how many kids bought AC units from sears?
The internet was a paradigm shift… full of unknowns. I think you are underestimating those challenges. We only speak about Amazon now because it was the one that survived.
pets.com also failed to make it through the "carcinization" of online retail, but wasnt nearly as notable a failure because it was attempting to start an online retail business from the ground up, versus Sears' failure to adopt online retail to their already-successful B&M model. I think the Sears mode of failure is much more spectacular because it had previously thrived on a business model that's almost analgous to Amazon's, threw it away, and failed to recognize it could be effective again.
It's even more ironic than that, since Sears was the Amazon of 1800s: they were America's largest mail order business and even IPO'd (1906) long before they opened their first brick and mortar storefront. You could buy anything and everything by mail from the famous Sears Catalog, up to and including entire homes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Modern_Homes
I think they did realize it and tried as hard as they could and still failed. I was a Sears salesperson in 2003 and 2004. The whole operation took itself very seriously and embraced the internet and technology. They just… failed. I’d love to know how they missed because everything was in their favor.
Think of the kinds of people who vie for leadership roles at established companies like Sears was at the time. Those people aren't innovators and creators. They're management types, MBAs, bureaucrats.
And fair enough: When the ship is that big and there are that many people on board, you often don't want to "move fast and break things," because the downstream effects can be extreme. Now you've just broken a company that had been working for decades. You're incentivized to take small risks with high likelihoods of reward.
Of course, the problem is, at some point that becomes fatal. A balance can be struck, but it can be hard when the original driving force is long gone.
Those who tell stories, rule society. Amazon's story of starting in a garage selling books to selling millions of things was just more interesting than Sears, which had been around for so much longer.
Amazon also wasn't like Sears, they depended heavily on 3rd party sellers to built their initial catalog. Sears didn't have 3rd party sellers until much later on. Amazon just leveraged those 3rd party sellers to figure out what they should carry and sell as Amazon down the line.
I think it would have been hard to recover but yeah when Lampert got involved it was all about the financial engineering rather than the operations. I bought the shares around then but sold soon after, turned off by the conflicts and the lack of focus on ops.
(I vaguely recall some realisation that he had made money but the public equity did not… It was a bit of an awakening for the young investor who had bought into fiduciary duty, shareholder interests, etc.)
Our obligation is to personal profit at the expense of everything else.
This is empirically the default operational behavior. It should always be assumed as opposed to our current strategy of always being baffled and shocked that it happens.
We could be serious about this and restructure incentives away from naked kleptocracy to avoid it.
If the passive investor class wanted more and better options to collect profits with low long-term risk they would actually support that kind of restructure - but alas it's all very short=sighted profit taking now that actually hurts long term growth.
It's no small irony that Buffet's retirement aligns with the close out as an iconic holdout of long view valuation - even his more recent moves I think showed some retreat from his previous values. Perhaps not really his direct fault, but he had fewer and fewer good investment options as time went by.
Child labor kept going until we said that's illegal
Putting heroin in baby food formula kept going until we said that's illegal.
We don't defer to the free market for everything.
Nobody is like, well child porn, I guess there's a market demand for it so it's right over there with the magazines
It is neither strange nor unusual to value things more than the freedom of the market. We do it all the time.
We should do that with societal harms and not just individual ones. Criminalizing obvious crime shouldn't be some kind of wild eyed fantasy. It should have been done 150 years ago.
the problem is that every time the shortsightedness crashes the economy, the rest of us have to bail them out and the thing keeps on chooglin. They have no incentives to behave otherwise
Since we're reminiscing, I remember Sears sold a "Sears-version" of the Atari 2600. I forget what it was called, but it was identical to the 2600.
My 9 year old brain was convinced that it was somehow inferior to the Atari-branded version of the 2600 and I was sad when my parents got me the Sears version for Christmas (it was probably cheaper than the Atari, I can't remember).
It didn't take me long, however, to realize it was the same thing with a different logo.
Literally almost everything, up to and including entire houses. I've lived in two Sears houses, great quality stuff if not a bit small by modern tastes.
When I was a kid it was normal for parents to let their kids read the huge yearly Sears catalog to get ideas or pick gifts. By then they'd stopped selling items like firearms and houses but had pretty much everything else.
If they had the foresight, they should have become a better version of what Amazon is now.
One thing that Amazon absolutely mastered was fast logistics. Sears thrived in a time where TV ads would sell things with an asterisk saying “allow 4-6 weeks for delivery”. They had 100+ years to bring their timelines down, yet Sears Prime with free rush delivery wasn’t a thing. I don’t know what it would have taken to revamp their supply lines to make that possible. And neither, I suspect, did they.
Ironically they had the foresight, they were just too early/didn't execute. They ran an online service (co-owner with IBM and CBS) called Prodigy that competed with AOL and CompuServ, and they tried to do online shopping there.
People are talking about putting a mail order catalog store online. Presumably, sears already had the catalog, shipping infrastructure - so it really should have been about digital payments, and an online storefront.
How significant their shipping catalog was in the 1990s I do not know, scaling the online storefront would have required Amazon scale investments which a dividend maximizing company was unlikely to do.
I would argue that they were a lot like Walmart (when Walmart was starting out)... clothes, electronics, sporting/seasonal goods... then they ventured out into additional services like family photography, optometry, pharmacy... really, the only difference was the mail order catalog.
I was there, 3000 years ago when Walmart didn't even sell groceries, I still remember mom commenting "It feels weird buying food at Walmart now and not even going to [regional grocery chain]".
And now, decades later everything is full circle. I avoid Walmart and Amazon like the plague and try to only shop at smaller outlets, whether brick-and-mortar or online. It might be slightly more expensive but I assume that's just the tax you pay to avoid a corporate monopoly hellscape.
1911: https://archive.org/details/sears-roebuck-catalog-122-spring...
1922: https://archive.org/details/SearsRoebuckAndCoCatalog1922_201...
When I was young, they were especially known for their tools:
1974/1975: https://archive.org/details/SearsCraftsmanPowerAndHandTools1...
More here:
https://archive.org/search?query=title%3A%28sears+catalog%29...
Same guy dug the original ditch by driving back and forth with his jeep for an hour during spring rain. This gives a perspective on his can do attitude.
But really, I'm living in the house still, so it can't be that bad.
wtf? how deep is the ditch?
I dug it out properly after buying. It was a perfectly good ditch though, but I wanted to drain more water at the back of the property, so I lowered it another 2 feet.
By the end, in a lot of their stores they would have people with iPads walking around accepting payment right there in the aisles.
People also forget that what helps build sears’ reputation was their supply chain and curation, they mostly sold brands of good-quality stuff, a lot made in America too! They would rebrand good but basic quality items (like a wrench or sewing machine, or a shotgun or a guitar) and keep it running for years or decades.
My dad was given a shotgun in the 1950s, a Remington made sears-brand. It was, apparently, great! He used it a lot for like half a century.
I feel like a big part of the downfall was the huge lumbering corporate culture unable to cope with JIT supply lines and race to the bottom economies of consumer goods.
Oh well!
I wanted the manual.
Sears parts still existed, and they shipped me a complete copy of the manual(photocopied) for 10 bucks.
Manual listed all parts, breakdown, etc. I was able to confidently order parts, keep it running for a decade.
That was one reason Sears was so liked.
(for reference, my new mower manual has as much detail, I checked before I bought)
i think its simpler than that. they got so big that they didnt pay any attention to all the waste, e.g. all the ad time that they spent on the old "I'll call today" A/C commercial.
If those ads were pennies compared to other spots, it could be deemed worth it. Parents often are nearby when kids are watching TV.
Sears' jewelry was... definitely marked up. This is from a SNC (SEARS Network Communicator, just a fancy term for their Symbol PDTs) showing true cost on a "$1299" necklace. $1299 down to $324? What a steal! It still only cost Sears a hundred bucks.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4rqZZgVxnCk&pp=ygUMaWxsIGNhbGw...
The weird market of things-on-kids-channels-for-adults was always to try to turn the kid on the parent to use them to close the sale ;)
They were Amazon before Amazon, but just didn’t realize it.
And fair enough: When the ship is that big and there are that many people on board, you often don't want to "move fast and break things," because the downstream effects can be extreme. Now you've just broken a company that had been working for decades. You're incentivized to take small risks with high likelihoods of reward.
Of course, the problem is, at some point that becomes fatal. A balance can be struck, but it can be hard when the original driving force is long gone.
Amazon also wasn't like Sears, they depended heavily on 3rd party sellers to built their initial catalog. Sears didn't have 3rd party sellers until much later on. Amazon just leveraged those 3rd party sellers to figure out what they should carry and sell as Amazon down the line.
(I vaguely recall some realisation that he had made money but the public equity did not… It was a bit of an awakening for the young investor who had bought into fiduciary duty, shareholder interests, etc.)
This is empirically the default operational behavior. It should always be assumed as opposed to our current strategy of always being baffled and shocked that it happens.
We could be serious about this and restructure incentives away from naked kleptocracy to avoid it.
I mean we never will, but we could...
It's no small irony that Buffet's retirement aligns with the close out as an iconic holdout of long view valuation - even his more recent moves I think showed some retreat from his previous values. Perhaps not really his direct fault, but he had fewer and fewer good investment options as time went by.
Slavery kept going until we said that's illegal.
Child labor kept going until we said that's illegal
Putting heroin in baby food formula kept going until we said that's illegal.
We don't defer to the free market for everything.
Nobody is like, well child porn, I guess there's a market demand for it so it's right over there with the magazines
It is neither strange nor unusual to value things more than the freedom of the market. We do it all the time.
We should do that with societal harms and not just individual ones. Criminalizing obvious crime shouldn't be some kind of wild eyed fantasy. It should have been done 150 years ago.
My 9 year old brain was convinced that it was somehow inferior to the Atari-branded version of the 2600 and I was sad when my parents got me the Sears version for Christmas (it was probably cheaper than the Atari, I can't remember).
It didn't take me long, however, to realize it was the same thing with a different logo.
The OLD Radioshack, obviously.
When I was a kid it was normal for parents to let their kids read the huge yearly Sears catalog to get ideas or pick gifts. By then they'd stopped selling items like firearms and houses but had pretty much everything else.
If they had the foresight, they should have become a better version of what Amazon is now.
How significant their shipping catalog was in the 1990s I do not know, scaling the online storefront would have required Amazon scale investments which a dividend maximizing company was unlikely to do.
And now, decades later everything is full circle. I avoid Walmart and Amazon like the plague and try to only shop at smaller outlets, whether brick-and-mortar or online. It might be slightly more expensive but I assume that's just the tax you pay to avoid a corporate monopoly hellscape.