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Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

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Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#481

Post by ascar »

JadeNB wrote: post #406
lallysingh wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the reviews! Buying the right one is often more important than buying one today.

> 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.

In my experience the reviews are most useless for small items, where fake reviews can easily manipulate the reviews or are even the only reviews available.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#482

Post by kalleboo »

excalibur wrote: post #89
ams6110 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of stuff I don't buy online. Clothes -- I like to try them on first. Tools -- I like to see if they are well made and how they feel in my hand. Photos on a website don't provide this. Food -- I want to check produce and meat before I buy it. And it's easier to stop at shops I'm passing on my way home anyway. Household supplies -- I don't want to deal with disposing of shipping boxes, styrofoam peanuts a…

Pretty much in agreement here, although I do find it more convenient to buy appliances through the big box store's website than to go in person and spend an hour guiding an associate through the options in their arcane inventory system.

For our last 2 appliances (fridge, washing machine) we went to the store and found last year's model on sale at a steep discount to anything online. Also managed to haggle a little.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#483

Post by lscharen »

stinky613 wrote: post #289
filmgirlcw wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Very good points. I'd like to add that Amazon began in a time when the typical person didn't trust ANY online shopping options. To my recollection, Amazon and eBay were the two biggest players that found ways to give people confidence that they could safely shop online.

Re: Trust; I always found it a bit ironic back in the late 90’s/early 00’s that people would not trust ordering things over the Internet, but happily call a mail-order number and give a complete stranger (and anyone within earshot) their name, address and credit card number.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#484

Post by dba7dba »

filmgirlcw wrote: post #422
ghaff wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Amazon was 40% less than list for books Furthermore, it's easy to forget just how hard it could be to track down even an in-print book and how long it could take to actually get your hands on it. Some big city bookstores were better but, in many cases, (assuming the bookstore would special order books at all), it would basically be put into the next batch order from a publisher which might be a month or two.

Yup -- I remember in college (in the early 2000s) how slow it could be for a bookstore to get a book in that a professor required for class (there was a book of poetry I literally could not find in the state of Georgia and my professor let me photocopy the work she had assigned until I could get my copy from Amazon b/c she recognized that I had literally called every single major and minor bookseller in Atlanta and t…

That reminds me of the time I worked in the stock room of student book store in a major university on the west coast of US in mid 1990s. The stock room was in the basement of the school student bookstore. Before and beginning of each semester, we'd get crates of books, books that only college student taking a class would be required to buy.

The crazy thing was, once the semester was nearing the end, we'd pack up all the unsold books (some classes had many unsold books) and ship them back to the publisher, at a significant loss from what I remember.

The student union was run independently from the university as a non-profit and was running a big deficit. However, the office people upstairs had humongous 24 inch CRT monitors, ones that surely cost a pretty penny. In 1998, 17 inch CRT sold for nearly a thousand dollars. I just looked it up. But I digress.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#485

Post by fnord77 »

wombatpm wrote: post #5

Sears had everything. Global supply chain, check. Top notch distribution operation, check. System and infrastructure to take orders and handling billing, check. Name recognition and established customer base, check. They threw it all away, ending catalog operations in 1993 a year before Amazon.com opened in 1994. They owned part of Prodigy in 1984! Yet somehow thought it was a better move to expand into bigger box re…

and the people responsible for throwing it all away will never be punished. They all probably got nice packages over the years.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#486

Post by nkohari »

logfromblammo wrote: post #151
reaperducer wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying online and picking up from a store really isn't that advanced of a concept. You're right. Service Merchandise build an empire around it, just by mail or phone instead of computer. Other stores did it, too. JCPenny comes to mind. Even some local and regional chains. Amazon and others think they've invented something. But once again, it's just SV re-inventing something that worked last century.

Amazon introduced the ability to seamlessly and automatically blend counterfeit goods into their supply chain, from sellers that you never heard of before, and may never encounter again.~ But recall that Amazon started with books. The catalog for books is the size of the card catalog that used to be at your library. A row of cabinets, filled with rank and file of drawers, each filled with index cards. One could not s…

> Amazon's innovation was bigger catalogs, easier ordering.

I don't know, I'd say Amazon's innovation was logistics. They don't need patents when they have a distribution network capable of delivering an order in most major population centers of the US in two days or less.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#487

Post by dba7dba »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #456
filmgirlcw wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup -- I remember in college (in the early 2000s) how slow it could be for a bookstore to get a book in that a professor required for class (there was a book of poetry I literally could not find in the state of Georgia and my professor let me photocopy the work she had assigned until I could get my copy from Amazon b/c she recognized that I had literally called every single major and minor bookseller in Atlanta and t…

Which brings an unrelated point of how much understanding a typical university professor has for the idea that their course may not be the be-all-and-end-all of student's life. Making an unavailable book a requirement for a course? Ahh how much I don't miss those days of being at the mercy of every university prof or bureaucrat's whims :-)

Some profs just over ordered books. Some students bought books from other privately owned book stores across the street. Some students dropped out of class and hence did not buy books that were needed for 2nd half of the semester.

Above reasons contributed to quite a bit of the books not getting sold.

But yeah, I had to uncrate the dang books, and a few weeks later, crate the same books to ship back to publishers.

I bet I'm one of the very few of the student body who learned how to work with Pallet trucks.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#488

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

heurist wrote: post #375
wombatpm wrote: post #5

Sears had everything. Global supply chain, check. Top notch distribution operation, check. System and infrastructure to take orders and handling billing, check. Name recognition and established customer base, check. They threw it all away, ending catalog operations in 1993 a year before Amazon.com opened in 1994. They owned part of Prodigy in 1984! Yet somehow thought it was a better move to expand into bigger box re…

One day, Amazon, Google, and Apple will also die. It's the circle of life. Sears operated for 126 years - astounding in our era.

maybe they will turn into world government, like in Wall-E.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#490

Post by [deleted] »

acdha wrote: post #227
xigency wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought this as well until I heard a counter-point [0] which was very convincing. The reason Amazon is successful is not because you can shop online (from a catalog) and receive items in the mail. The reason Amazon is successful is because you can do those things and receive your items within two days. Before Prime existed, Amazon had very quick fulfillment, and after Prime two-day it became even better. The Sears…

There was a significant gap between Amazon launch and having two-day shipping — it took years of behind the scenes development before orders started arriving notably faster than other retails. Sears' numbers include regular postal delivery in both directions so switching to online ordering would have cut them in half with no other changes (and don't forget the efficiency wins from orders arriving as validated electro…

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