/----/ Sears was the Amazon of its day. They pushed out the local Mom & Pop variety store who could not compete with the Sears, selection, prices, and catalog. They were the evil, greedy demon of their day. Sears, like Woolworth, had the $$$ resources and power to stomp Amazon into the ground but they ignored it and when they realized what happened it was too late.
The large retail chains were much more like the newspapers. Having been dominant for so many decades, they never considered the internet a threat. The big retail chains were in an ideal position to dominate the internet. They already had the distribution centers. Had they looked at the internet as the Sears Catalog of tomorrow, no one would have heard of Amazon today.
I agree that Sears failed to read the signs of the times and went about business as usual as it had served them well for a century. But as the bulk of America started researching products on line, Sears didn't understand what was happening, or their management were such dinosaurs that they didn't know how to respond to it. So as Lowe's and Walmart and Office Depot and Staples and most of the other big boys created user friendly on line shopping and were doing profitable on line business in addition to in store business, Sears was laying off people and wondering where the customers were.
Old School serves magnificently in culture and values, but it can be deadly when it comes to marketing or preparing oneself to prosper in a rapidly changing world.
I always had trouble with their service. I had to call them and fight about getting my mother’s wash machine repaired. They just hung up the phone on me.
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We have had much the same experience. As their customer base shrank they were no longer putting the training into employees who often were clueless about the products they were selling and lacked the most basic of people skills. All that was the slow but steady death spiral of a once magnificent corporation that dinosaured itself to death.
My father was always a diehard Sears customer, and I don't mean the battery. Everything in our house growing up was Sears.
When my mothers washing machine broke, she called Sears and told the person on the phone it was the belt; it was laying behind the washer. They said they would be out in two weeks. The guy finally came out and said "It's the belt, so I have to get one, it will take two weeks!"
That's when I called and complained. I told them "Look, I'm a driver, and even I knew it was the belt. You mean to tell me that you have all the info on the washer, and the guy couldn't bring a belt with him??? And I don't buy it takes two weeks to get a belt, it's just you come to this area every two weeks." They slammed the phone down on me.
My father used to buy their protection plans for all our appliances. He finally told them to F-off. If it's going to take them a month to put a belt on a washer, maybe if they start getting paid in cash, they will be more organized next time so they get their money.
