
The History of Sears Predicts Nearly Everything Amazon Is Doing (2017) - kimsk112
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/09/sears-predicts-amazon/540888/?single_page=true
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okket
Somewhat related tangent (sorry), but see also this thread about how radical
the Sears catalog was in the era of Jim Crow:

[https://twitter.com/louishyman/status/1051872178415828993](https://twitter.com/louishyman/status/1051872178415828993)

~~~
Fricken
A little further down in that thread there's a link to an article about Sears
mail order homes. I live in a century old neighbourhood and there's a couple
dozen Sears homes within a 3 block radius of me. They're still standing, still
lived in, still looking good. They were built to last.

~~~
torpfactory
I live in one of the Sears catalog homes. Still haven't figured out exactly
which one, as it has had some additions and changes made in the intervening
years (its a 1927). Seems well enough built. Except for the electrical - knob
and tube is a crazy way to do it.

~~~
technofiend
It's what they had at the time. My knob and tube was installed by someone very
skeptical of electricity. So they ran the hot and the neutral about two feet
from each other. They only come together at the outlets and the fuse panel.

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bensonn
If Amazon buys Sears it will be a mind-boggling Inception of Amazon's present
history predicting its own past's future. What, OMG?!

I can actually see this happening. Sears locations might make pretty decent
mini-DCs/Echo sales centers. Ironically, I feel like they could turn Sears
into Borders and do OK. A mini DC center in the back- this could allow for 2
hour deliveries to more suburnban/rural locations. In the front they could
have shelves of Kindle files printed out on paper. I know, it sounds like Ye
Olde Book Store, but here an Echo thingy would replace the Dewey Decimal or
human employee. Alexa would manifest as a racially and gender ambiguous
animatron who would not only answer your questions but also serve free
Kombucha when you pick up your prescriptions or sign up for a checking account
(cash converts to Amazon credits).

I can see Amazon making them mini-malls within existing malls until the
already struglling other stores can't exist anymore. Once Amazon has the
entire mall- well that is when things get crazy!

~~~
btrautsc
I have been inaccurately predicting this for a few years (with a variety of
big box stores/ many location stores).

I think what I was most wrong about is AMZN thinks a lot about the geographic
overlap of their customers and where they will shop. That is why the Whole
Foods purchase was so brilliant. Both the overlap of wallets shopping in at
both AMZN (prime) and WF.

I wonder how well Sear's store footprint fits with the AMZN customer base.

~~~
lotsofpulp
With wealth and income gap divide, there not much room to bet big on the non-
rich part of town. Find the Whole Foods and and Apple Store and Nordstroms and
that's the mall or shopping area that will support higher profit margins.

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doe88
Related, a recent episode of 99% invisible about all kind of houses (even
schools) sold by Sears by Mail [https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-
house-that-came-i...](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-house-that-
came-in-the-mail/)

~~~
etrautmann
The house I grew up in was purchased from sears in 1919 or sometime right
around then. Apparently the house shipped as a kit via rail.

~~~
tim333
So can we expect to be living in Amazon houses soon?

Alibaba already have them, eg [https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Strong-
luxury-Modern-...](https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Strong-luxury-
Modern-Prefab-Light-
steel_60116320365.html?spm=a2700.galleryofferlist.normalList.277.141e629fMLEDBo)

Hotels too [https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Modern-Holiday-Inn-
Lu...](https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Modern-Holiday-Inn-Luxury-Hotel-
Design_60641156714.html?spm=a2700.galleryofferlist.normalList.156.141e629fMLEDBo)

I quite like the look of the house

~~~
sbradford26
Amazon feels like a a regular store to me. I find things that I would expect.
Alibaba always feels like Amazon with no rules, and it is awesome. If a vendor
wants to sell a house they can, and if a consumer wants a kit house they can
just contact them. I think the marketplace feel makes it a lot more
interesting.

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justdroppedin
Vastly superior to this article is this legendary MetaFilter comment on the
same topic:

[https://www.metafilter.com/62394/The-Record-Industrys-
Declin...](https://www.metafilter.com/62394/The-Record-Industrys-
Decline#1742245)

~~~
InclinedPlane
Still not the biggest such blunder, even in the late 20th century. That
dubious honor must go to Xerox. They created a research org (Palo Alto
Research Center or PARC) and tasked it with pushing the state of the art in
the industry, which it did. Xerox PARC invented the GUI, ethernet, laser
printing, WYSIWYG editors and desktop publishing, bitmapped graphics, the
smalltalk language, the MVC design pattern, and more, all in the late 1970s.
Xerox corporate leadership looked at this stuff (especially the ALTO computer
which represented the culmination of most of these innovations) and couldn't
see a future in it, so they shit-canned it. A few years later other companies
(specifically Apple and Microsoft) toured Xerox PARC and learned a great deal
about these things then repackaged it in their own forms (the Macintosh and
Windows). Meanwhile, some PARC employees quit and spun out their own startups
using the technology (3COM and Adobe).

Billions upon billions of dollars and entire industries (graphic arts and
digital design, ethernet based networking, the home desktop computer, etc.)
were built up out of the technologies that Xerox simply left abandoned on the
roadside because they were too myopic.

~~~
js8
IMHO, this shows why you cannot judge creativity only through the free market
(i.e. measure the creative output).

Because at the time when new a thing is being created, only the creator (if
even) understands the purpose of it. So any other external actor who is
supposed to measure the output (be it company CEO, or grant commission, etc.)
is not equipped to understand why. Were they equipped to understand, they
would just commission the work in the first place.

~~~
InclinedPlane
This is also why I call bullshit on the concept that "good ideas don't matter"
in business. Execution is important, but good ideas can be just as valuable.
But the problem with innovative ideas is that they can be difficult to
communicate. My favorite example of this is the adaptation of novels into
feature films. It's usually the norm rather than the exception for a truly
excellent novel to be adapted into a truly mediocre film which not only misses
the mark of the book but also just doesn't seem to "get" the book at a
fundamental level (e.g. themes, characters, etc.) And here you have a case
where an "idea" (the entire novel itself) is fleshed out into a work
containing tens of thousands of words, replete with scads of detail all over
the place. And you also have proof that thousands if not millions of people
are able to learn this "idea" and "get it". Yet that system of communicating
an idea is still so fraught with the potential for error that it cannot
reliably result in a feature film that even expresses the themes of the book
with any semblance of authenticity. Because communication is hard, especially
when innovative and novel ideas are involved.

And this is true in business just as it is in art. You can have a fantastic
"good idea", one that is worth billions even if it is executed with only
mediocre success. But that doesn't mean you could simply hand that good idea
over to someone else and they would succeed with it to the same degree,
because there is a very high chance that they just won't "get it". They'll
hear the idea and think that you meant something else. Or they'll think some
inconsequential aspect of it is the important part while ignoring the truly
important part, and so on.

And we see many examples of this in history. We see XEROX looking at a nearly
fully executed "good idea" in the form of the Alto and concentrating on
temporary, less consequential aspects of it such as the high unit cost of the
first generation computers and not seeing the enormous potential (a computer
that was so easy to use anybody could use it, and a computer that was so
useful that anybody could benefit from having one).

~~~
jryle70
Good idea doesn't matter because good ideas are rarely exclusive. If one has a
good idea, there is a good chance someone else has also came up the same idea.
Thus how to execute that idea becomes critical, including access to capital,
talent, market, etc. Amazon was certainly not the first to come up with
e-commerce

There are always exception on both ends of the spectrum of course.

Your novel adaption analogy isn't exactly apt. You can't test a movie the way
you can with business iteration. There are also no metrics to measure a
movie's success the way you can measure revenue, customer retention, user
usages, etc.

------
aiCeivi9
Can Amazon as a company fail unless they spin-off AWS to separate entity?

~~~
neaden
Sure, they could make some colossal mistakes and get in a huge amount of debt,
or some new competitor could come into cloud computing in a way we can't
predict and Amazon can't compete with. The future is weird and things that
seem like they will last forever can quickly vanish, and afterwards it seems
inevitable.

------
yellowapple
I'll believe it when Amazon starts selling kit houses.

~~~
technotony
You mean like this? [https://www.amazon.com/Allwood-Eagle-
Point-1108-Cabin/dp/B00...](https://www.amazon.com/Allwood-Eagle-
Point-1108-Cabin/dp/B00LYGIEU2/ref=sr_1_17?ie=UTF8&qid=1539708228&sr=8-17&keywords=container+house)

~~~
yellowapple
Well I'll be damned.

------
jdlyga
What does Amazon need to do to avoid falling to the same fate as Sears?

~~~
onetimemanytime
Maybe it's inevitable, but who cares...SEARS milked it for 130+ years. That's
about 4-5 generations. But I tell you, no one is going to allow AMZN control
50++% of online sales for decades to come.

~~~
8bitsrule
I've wondering why that's been true for 10 years and yet noone's even close.
Cuz if they were waiting for AMZN to make a big mistake, they waited too long.

------
jroonc399jdj
A few hundred years ago, some humans overthrew an aristocracy they felt
ignored them, took a swing at updating their social contract.

Traditionalists were mad. Modern thinkers won out more or less.

Are we repeating that again?

These loops are fascinating for their recurring appearance in human history.

~~~
dvtrn
It's odd to me to find this comment downvoted, nearly completely grayed out
for applying the lessons of history of antiquity to the modernity of
[e]commerce, after just reading quite a few others making the exact same
statements only with more recent participants and industry juggernauts.

I found it quite apt.

~~~
jpttsn
Vague is apt on easy mode.

~~~
dvtrn
How was that comment remotely vague? I'm sure it would seem so if one were
lacking a few history lessons in high school but beyond that?

~~~
ectospheno
It is a transparent attempt to inject a political discussion into a topic
where it is not appropriate. Your use of ad hominem in supporting this is just
as transparent. There are other places where this discussion would be
appropriate.

~~~
dvtrn
I am TRULY sorry to put this burden out there but someone explain to me the
"transparently political" here because it's either too early in the morning or
I am just not seeing it in that comment for some other reason.

Am I somehow out of line here for reading that comment as an allegory for
what's happening with Amazon, as it happened with Sears, as it happened with
many other institutional market players with enormous market power going back
several hundreds of years? Is it wrong to ask if that loop is repeating itself
now with Amazon and other giants of commerce in 2018? Because that's what I
got from that commentary. It's an interesting thought experiment and I'm happy
to oblige that.

Playing a game of knee-jerk word association just to torpedo the commentary as
ad-hoc political, yes, in my opinion signals some lack of appreciation for
history. If you want to call that ad hominem that's fine, but I'm not taking
it back.

