(quoted from post at 10:45:58 10/08/14)
(quoted from post at 15:17:36 10/06/14)
(quoted from post at 11:01:54 10/06/14) How can you say that dropping catalog sales is what killed Sears when that's all Montgomery Wards ever did, and they've been long gone for decades?
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Yet Cabelas, LL Bean, Northern (Hydraulics) Tool and many other near pure catalog stores continue to this day. Cabelas has grown from a 12 page flyer to a hard bound 300 plus page full color catalog. Northern Hydraulics used to be a 20 page newsprint rag. The model works. What Sears, Monkey Wards, etc. missed was the ability to bridge the gap from the end of the mail order era to the internet era. Like others have pointed out, Sears was the Amazon and Ebay of it's day. The Sears, Montgomery Wards and JC Penny catalog stores in the towns I lived in were always busy. To this day people still lament their closing. Yeah, Wallyworld did a job on Sears, but that was partly because Sears shut down the catalogs about 10 years before I saw my first Walmart. The rest was Sears retail stores trying to compete with a lower quality competitor. Nobody can compete with Walmart on price. That's why we went to Sears last year for good towels, for good, heavy duty cookware and flatware. That's stuff we can't get at Walmart and certainly can't afford from some high end Williams Sonoma type outfit. Sears and Pennys, to this day if I want a decent dress shirt that; where I head. I don't think I own a suit coat that doesn't come from Sears or JCP. I would just as soon have bought them from a catalog.
The thing about companies like Cabelas, Bean, Northern, etc. is that they 're all "specialty" stores. As such they were the only place to get certain things, so they had a captive audience to keep them afloat if not profitable.
As has been stated repeatedly in this thread, Sears was the "Amazon" of its day. They sold EVERYTHING. By the 1960s at least, and definitely by the 1970s, there was very little you could get at Sears that you could not get somewhere else, except it would be nicer, cheaper and quicker.
There was a huge gap between the catalog era and the internet era too. Nigh on 30 years by my estimation. That's almost an impossible gap to bridge especially when you stubbornly hold on to the belief that your customers will remain loyal.