AHC: Save Sears

"hey, instead of paying to print millions of catalogs... why don't we just put it on the internet?"

With 2400 baud modems, and most of America needing long distance charges ontop of the $12/Month Prodigy charge, would take forever to download a page with pictures, and that forever would cost a pretty penny.
9600 baud wasn't available til 1991, and then modem speeds stated to increase, 14.4k in '93? and 28.8 shortly after.

This is when it was first possible when graphic heavy pages could be done
 
Sears has three very strong brands: Craftsman, Kenmore and Lands End. Without those names, there is really little to nothing that Sears has to offer. But what if Sears had cut back everything else and focused totally on core brands only available at Sears to the exclusion of all other things (and not letting other stores sell those brands)? Since these core brands were very strong, they might have been able to attract and retain attention at a sufficient level to at least survive.
 
In 1985 Sears also introduced their own Credit Card: Discover. Do you have any idea what amazon today would give to have their own credit card instead of being reduced to promoting amazon branded Visa or Master Cards? At the same time Sears also still owned its own Insurance company: Allstate.

I was going to say that Uber has a credit card, with reputedly very great benefits, but it seems to be their own branded Visa card.
 
Problem with businesses like Sears is if you are the guy with the talent to turn Sears into Amazon, you would leave to start Amazon.

So buy Amazon. In the 2000's it was quite possible for them to do so. Sears was still a huge company and Amazon, though growing fast, was a lot smaller than Sears.
 
Problem with businesses like Sears is if you are the guy with the talent to turn Sears into Amazon, you would leave to start Amazon.
As noted, Sears had the beginnings of an online presence before online was even a thing. They just totally squandered it.
 
So buy Amazon. In the 2000's it was quite possible for them to do so. Sears was still a huge company and Amazon, though growing fast, was a lot smaller than Sears.

This happens all the time, big comany buys promising startup. The founders cash out and move on to a new startup. It’s hard to get ambitious hungry talent commited to making their corporate owners rich. Time and again you see upstarts beat out old giants. If IBM bought Microsoft, they wouldn’t get Bill Gates for long. Had Google founders sold their search engine to Excite for $100K they wouldn’t have turned Google into the company it is today. Amazon was a bookseller and they almost failed before Bezos reinvented it. They would’ve have died under Sears management.

Sears could have gone online, but they would be competing against themselves making their stores uncompetitive. Their management worked their way up learning how to run brick and mortar stores. Even if they had an online presence, another company like Amazon would likely out hustle them focusing like a laser on e-commerce. Barnes and Noble tried selling books online and offering the Kindle. They failed spectacularly.
 
Keep in mind though that Amazon started off in the world of online book sales by partnering with Borders and then broke off sometime in the mid 2000s. That always struck me as short sighted on Borders’ part to partner with them.
 
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