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A comment on Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by Animats on Sunday July 17, 2016 @07:03PM (#12112331)
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.

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Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by Spooky23 on Sunday July 17, 2016 @08:37PM (#12112627)
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.
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Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by Turing_Machine on Monday July 18, 2016 @12:24AM (#12113216)
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).
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Re:Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak? by Spooky23 on Monday July 18, 2016 @08:57AM (#12114761)
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.

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