What Happened to Sears? The Store That Could Have Been Amazon

What happened to Sears is one of the strangest stories in American business: long before Amazon existed, Sears built nearly every piece of it, from the everything catalog and giant warehouses run by the clock to home delivery, store credit and even an online shopping service. The real story of what happened to Sears is not one mistake, because Sears did not miss the future, it held every piece of it and let them go one at a time. This is Sears history told through five crossroads: a crate of watches nobody wanted in 1886, the Sears catalog farm families called the Wish Book, the 1906 Chicago mail-order plant, the first Sears store in 1925 and the Discover card. We stop at Prodigy, the online service Sears co-owned with IBM in 1990, and at January 1993, when Sears closed its famous catalog a year and a half before Amazon was founded. The rise and fall of Sears ends with the 2018 bankruptcy, and one last detail about Sears and Amazon you may not expect. Watch next: Kodak History: Why the Best Tech Failed to Save Them —    • Kodak History: Why the Best Tech Failed to...   Full playlist: Rise and Fall of Global Companies | Business History Documentaries —    • Rise and Fall of Global Companies | Busine...   Chapters: 00:00 The Box on Your Doorstep 01:01 A Box of Watches Nobody Wanted 02:30 Sears, Roebuck and Company 03:51 The Wish Book Comes to the Farm 05:26 The Catalog and Jim Crow 06:52 The Machine on the West Side 09:27 The Founder Walks Away 10:09 Following the Customer to Town 12:04 The Sears Tower and the Empire 13:09 A Store Inside a Screen: Prodigy 14:54 Walmart Takes the Crown 15:30 The Worst Quarter Since 1933 17:16 The Winter They Closed the Big Book 18:25 A Garage in Bellevue 19:25 The Long Unwinding 20:51 What Really Happened to Sears Subscribe to Business History Stories for more long-form stories about the companies and people that built America, and the choices that undid them. Narration uses an AI-assisted voice. Illustrations are AI-generated reconstructions, not archival photographs. #businesshistory #whathappenedtosears #sears #searshistory #riseandfall #historydocumentary #companyhistory