That puzzled me, too. Sears was the first company to figure out large scale order fulfillment, around 1890. They had the back end operation figured out. They had merchandise for everything you really need in stock. All they needed was online ordering, which is the easy part.

What's left of Sears is now owned by K-Mart. (K-Mart is descended from S.S. Kresge, which operated "dime stores". Dime stores were like dollar stores, before inflation.) Now they can go down together.

Worse, they figured harder problems out -- they had solved the delivery problem in suburban and rural areas for large items. there was a Sears franchise network where you could pick up stuff delivered by an 18 wheeler or rail rather than wait for parcel post or ups.

Yep. Those were called "catalog stores", as I recall, and if you had your item sent to the catalog store shipping was free (or maybe reduced price -- it's been a long time, but there was definitely some kind of break on shipping costs).

I think they had a dock and you could get really big items too. IIRC, the farmer I worked for picked up a giant generator on a flatbed at one of these places.

Not sure if that was a Sears purchase or not though.

A legendary Metafilter comment re: Sears' shortsightedness: https://www.metafilter.com/62394/The-Record-Industrys-Declin...

They also had a share of Advantis, which evolved into IBM Global Network. They sold off their share to IBM some time in 1996 or 1997 just as the Internet shifted from crazy to insane.

IBM, in turn, sold off IBM Global Network and much of their web hosting business to AT&T in 2000.

edit: I forgot that Kodak also had a role in the formation of IBM's Global Services business...ISSC (an acronym which I can't remember the expansion of other than the I was IBM) started as the bundling up of Kodak's I/T services organization, eventually selling completely to IBM.

According to Wikipedia: "The beginning of IBM’s involvement in IT services can be traced back at least to 1989 when Eastman Kodak Company and IBM completed an agreement by which IBM designed, built and managed a new state-of-the-art data center for Kodak in Rochester, New York under the brand name ISSC, Integrated Systems Solution Corporation."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Global_Services

To be fair, though, the first 15 (27?) years of the web were terrible. There was no way Sears was going to go whole-hog on 1990's web. Or 1993's web. Or 1999's web. It's barely usable now (he says, typing this into a web forum in 2016). A cow-orker of mine has a paper copy of the "1994 Internet yellow pages" and guess how many web sites are included? 0!

Yes, somebody should have come up with Amazon before Amazon did. But they didn't, and here we are now.

That one has always astonished me a lot more than Kodak, even as a foreigner. Why the hell would you close down a successful business operation, especially of that sort?

By the mid-1990s Sears was getting destroyed by Walmart, which was running circles around them with their logistics operation.

Robert Gordon mentions that in The Rise and Fall of American Growth.

Sears shut down its catalog division in 1992. Amazon launched in 1993.