A closer look
Sears Roebuck and Company completely revolutionized the retail economy in the late eighteen nineties by mailing out massive catalogs that allowed rural Americans to purchase literally anything from bicycles to entire mail-order houses. They essentially built the exact same monopolistic everything-store model that Amazon uses today, but completely failed to adapt when the internet arrived, eventually bleeding out in slow motion while watching Jeff Bezos steal their exact business blueprint. It is a remarkably depressing cautionary tale about how dominating a market for a century means absolutely nothing if your board of directors becomes too lazy to realize that people might eventually prefer clicking a glowing rectangle instead of flipping through a five-pound paper brick to buy their cheap socks
