The Core

I remember thinking in 1993 that it was a mistake for Sears to discontinue its catalog.  In 1995 eBay and Amazon both launched.  I remember thinking around that time that they should bring their catalog back and put it on the web.  Sears really could have been a (maybe THE) dominant player if they just had more persistence and vision.

From fortune.com back in 2012:

Sears, which opened for business in the late 19th century, called itself “The Cheapest Supply House on Earth,” and, in its heyday, dominated home delivery with 75 million catalogs distributed each year[!], bringing goods to far flung farms, towns and other locations. But today’s customer, who can browse the Sears website but not order from its catalog service, which was dropped in the early 1990s, is likely to be ordering from Amazon’s marketplace instead.

“Amazon is the new Sears,” says Robert Spector, a retail historian who wrote Amazon.com: Get Big Fast, and other books on retailers. “It’s also the new Walmart, the new Barnes & Noble and the new Best Buy.”

Sears (shld, -17.69%) has not retooled its venerable brand for the technology age, which was underscored this past holiday season when retail sales rose, and Internet sales soared, but the venerable store racked up such poor sales that it announced that it will close 120 stores, and projected that its earnings are likely to sink more than 50% for the most recent three months — usually the time of the year that retailers rake in their biggest revenues.

Sears, says Spector, “tried to hold onto what they were rather than trying to invent themselves. Like Kodak, Sears did not leap forward when it needed to do so.”

Sears didn't die, it was killed.  The current owner, Lampert, has systematically sold off or re-positioned assets (leaseholds) for a decade or more. 

Here's a short article from 18 months ago.

https://nypost.com/2017/04/22/sears-owner-has-milked-iconic-retailer-dry-analysts-say/

>catalog

You're clinging to nostalgia.  This is the age where Travoli walked around Yellow Page tomes rotting on his front porch.

>catalog

Well yes the catalog alone would not have saved them.  But when they gave up the catalog, they gave up the infrastructure to ship direct to the customer which would have been useful when Amazon came along later.

Sears had a lot of short sighted leadership, bad decisions and later people just intent on milking the carcass.

My order and subsequent followup recently with Sears Parts Direct is, hands down, the worst online customer service experience I have ever had.

In addition to moving the catalog online, Sears would have had to recognize that the standards for service had changed and they needed to overhaul everything. I think that would have been harder for them than moving online. Maybe their service is so bad because of lack of resources, but the two people I talked to really didn't understand what service was and why I was upset. It was astounding.

At one point in the conversation with the manager at Sears, I found myself saying: "Look, I do some reputation management for a medium-size hotel. We p##s customers off a lot. We drop a lot of balls. Our service isn't what it should be. But our Yelp! rating is 4.7. Your Yelp! rating is 1.0. Are you not ashamed to be managing a service that gets a 1.0 on Yelp?"

He was completely unapologetic. Completely didn't understand my complaints, which were identical to most of the one-star reviews on Yelp

https://www.yelp.com/biz/sears-parts-direct-mobile

>>Sears Parts Direct

That is one part of the company that is actually doing well.

Astounding. Surely that is due to lack of competition for many specialty parts or something. A truly horrible experience in anti-patterns and dark patterns.