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Comment by lotsoweiners

2 days ago

I worked at Sears at the time when Amazon first started becoming a household name. I for the life of me couldn’t understand why they didn’t make a copycat site called the Sears Catalog Online. But then I think about it and management wanted salesmanship because selling maintenance agreements was their cash cow. Low margin sales won in the long term hence we have Walmart and Amazon as the biggest retailers.

Likely standard management failure. Sears got burned badly when it put its catalog online on Prodigy in the 80's, so obviously online sales were doomed to failure.