The irony is that Sears figured out shopping from home long before Amazon’s Jeff Bezos even was born.
The company’s catalogs once were ubiquitous in American households, allowing consumers to browse merchandise from their living rooms — and pioneering the trust between a retailer and its customers that a century later would be the bedrock of e-commerce.
You could even buy an entire house, delivered in pieces by train, from the Sears catalog. Amazon hasn’t figured that one out yet.
Sears’ parent company, Sears Holdings, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection early Monday, the latest retailer to become roadkill in an industry upended by technological advances and changing consumer tastes.
Sears will stay in business (for now) but will close an additional 142 stores even as it tries to figure out a way to squeeze desperately needed profit from the holiday season.
It’s easy to point at the various wrong turns the company made in recent years, the inability to develop a cogent online strategy, the increasingly unattractive stores.
