401–410 of 568 posts
Sears died because of Lampert, that's the beginning and end of the story. While they were far from perfect, post-Kmart "acquisition" both the service and stores became garbage and he used Sears as a personal slush fund.
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Agree wholeheartedly with everything you said except: > They didn't build the other pieces they needed for a 120-year business while they had the protection I would argue they did with things like AWS.
Similarly (or more importantly, even) is they've now built out a proprietary fulfillment and last mile delivery infrastructure that runs parallel to USPS/UPS/etc. Any new entrant is going to have to compete with Amazon on shipping cost/time. Yet Amazon can do it using their own distribution and sorting hubs, from which gig workers use their own cars to do the deliveries.
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Even with Prime, the couriers Amazon uses to service some areas take long enough to deliver that most other online retailers are preferable.
For me, they’ve “fixed” that. I finally got their amazon couriers blacklisted, so they are shipping usps. But, if i order from an account without prime, they wait 11 days to ship, thus giving me 12 day delivery (just within their promised 2 weeks). If i order from an account with prime, it alternates between next day and two days. Editing to add: Last order without prime, Dec 28. “Shipped” yesterday (usps shows it ar…
There was an article [1] from 2017 about USPS couriers lying about packages being delivered to keep up their Amazon delivery statistics. This routinely happened to me.
[1] https://www.aol.com/article/finance/2017/12/05/postal-worker...
The thing is, she knew that youngster, and he really did work at Sears, for their webstore. He wasn't the only guy, but it was apparently pretty close. Other than getting on the cover of that magazine, my understanding is he got rather little access to top management, and he certainly didn't get to set strategy on things like pricing and shipping. Sears, like a lot of other incumbents, could neither understand the New Thing, nor turn over enough control to the people who did (in part because the people they hired were too young and inexperienced in retail to trust with t hat), and that is why they failed, when as a catalog company they should have been well positioned for the comeback of ordering things delivered to your home.
Minneapolis dwellers know.
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The pricing benefit really cannot be understated. Amazon was 40% less than list for books -- which was a massive amount, even if you lived in Barnes & Noble markets (and B&N wasn't as pervasive in 1996/1997 as your average mall bookstore was), where there were similar markdowns. And of course, you could get any book you wanted from Amazon. And then Amazon very quickly moved into media like CDs and DVDs. I used to ord…
Don't forget the reviews! Buying the right one is often more important than buying one today.
Amazon itself seems to have forgotten this; reviews used to be very useful, but either they're not trying very hard to combat fake reviews or they're not up to the challenge, because they're almost useless now for big-ticket items.
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I would spin culture the other way too. Sears was a more premium company. They had commission salesmen working the floors. (I think it was as recently as like 2010ish, I walked in to one and looked too long at something was was swarmed) You didn't go there for the "lowest price" you went there for good stuff and when you bought something big they helped you figure it out, they'd show you a dozen fridges, maybe with f…
Reading this, it makes it seem that Sears died because the middle class died. Why did people ditch this middle-of-the-road experience for the cheaper one? Because they were forced to .
Neil Saunders wrote a good Twitter thread last week about how mid-scale US department stores don't execute the basics of retail very well: https://twitter.com/NeilRetail/status/1079785924966445058 Others have pointed out that Target seems to do a much better job with organization, presentation, and flow. Not coincidentally, it seems to be performing much better than legacy department stores that historically targeted…
Good thread, found it really interesting! I am processing some research on DICK's Sporting Goods, 750 stores and 90% are their core brand. I knew the reality was something along these lines but just didn't expect the % to be so small: "The Company's eCommerce sales penetration to total net sales has increased from 2.8% in fiscal 2010 to 10.3% in fiscal 2015."[1] It's certainly growing every year for them, easy to see…
How much of Sears's demise was due to Walmart? It's not like retail completely died. The home improvement chains hurt them too, once they started selling tools and appliances. We bought everything at Sears in the 80's. Electronics (including computers), appliances, toys, clothes, tools, lawn and garden... Was Sears too 'friendly' with their suppliers? When I worked at Sears at the end of the 1990's (the store was a g…
Funny enough, I've heard anecdotal evidence that the complete opposite was true. This comes from work I've done with a company that engineers, tests, and certifies tools under a dozen different brand names, one of which was Craftsman back when Sears owned that name outright. Whether it was official policy or not, Sears' practice was to rotate their buyers every ~3 years specifically to address the issue of buyers getting too chummy with the suppliers in their assigned sector. Unfortunately, this led to the issue of buyers being unable to develop subject-matter expertise in any one area and a broader problem where any compwtencies that were developed were often useless in their new assignment. According to those I've talked to who were around in the 80's and 90's when Sears' was starting to get pressured by other specialized Big Box retailers, whoever rotated into the position would have 0 experience with power tools or outdoor power equipment as they had spent their previous rotation buying anything from linens for the home goods group to clothing, or even flowers and plants for the gardenjng department.
The final product that wound up in consumer's hands was typically of competitive quality (hence the continued reputation of the Craftsman brand even today among the older generations) but the speed with which Sears' could expect new products to be developed and the costs involved was greatly hampered. This eventually led to Sears' losing the competitive edge in providing superior house-brand goods for the same price as the competition. Sears' had the market share and clout to get suppliers like the one I've worked with to justify the lower margins that come with designing/making a higher quality product to sell for the sams price. Once the whole buying process became incredibly time intensive due to a lack of expertise on the buying end the margins once spent on increased quality were instead swallowed up by plain old inefficiency. The end result was Sears buying a similar quality of product to what these suppliers were offering to the competition but without a cost advantage. Consumers noted the fact that a Craftsman chainsaw was no longer superior to the "X" brand this supplier provided to a store like Home Depot, except the Home Depot one was $15 less, thus began the death spiral ending in today's news.
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Is that really a primary growth factor? I've never once acted on an Amazon recommendation, and it's always felt almost entirely useless - "you just bought a vacuum, here's 15 more vacuums just in case you're a vacuum-obsessed lunatic"
True, I think like most market incumbents, Amazon has become lazier lately. The vacuum-obsession problem, the proliferation of counterfeit goods, and subpar third party sellers are all more recent problems. But if you just bought 1984 for example, there's a good chance you'd also want to buy WE, Brave New World, Erewhon, etc. The algorithm made sense for the book store, but it makes less sense for the "Everything Sto…