Sears Quit Selling From Home One Year Before Amazon

The story

In 1993, Sears shut down its famous catalog. One year later, Amazon was founded. Sears had been selling to people at home for a hundred years.

This is the story of the store that sold everything: the watch seller from Minnesota, the catalog that sold entire houses, the tallest building in the world, the Kmart deal, and the slow sale of everything Sears owned.

Three lessons

1. 1

   Don't abandon the channel you invented. Sears closed its catalog one year before Amazon was born.

2. 2

   You can't sell your way to growth. Selling famous brands brings in cash once. Fixing the business brings it in every year.

3. 3

   Size is not safety. Joining two struggling chains just made one bigger struggling chain.

Chapters

1. 0:00Intro
2. 0:27The watch seller
3. 0:56Everything by mail
4. 1:37The tallest building
5. 2:12Losing the crown
6. 2:56The Kmart deal
7. 3:27Selling the pieces
8. 4:03What's left
9. 4:31Three lessons

Sources

Every fact in this file is checked against published sources before release. See our standards.

• History.com, Sears catalog sold everything from houses to hubcaps (1886 watches, Alvah Roebuck, 322 pages in 1894, 70,000 to 75,000 kit homes from 1908 to 1940)
• Fox Business (Oct 2018), Sears through the years (1893 name, Kenmore 1913, Craftsman 1927 for $500 and 2017 sale for $900M, Allstate 1931, Sears Tower 1973, Discover 1985, catalog ended 1993)
• The Motley Fool (Oct 2018), Now-bankrupt Sears was once the Amazon and Walmart (Walmart passed Sears by 1991)
• PCWorld, Exploring the lost world of Prodigy (run by IBM and Sears, 1988 to 1996)
• NBC News (Nov 2004), Kmart to acquire Sears in $11 billion deal (about 3,500 stores, third biggest US retailer)
• The Motley Fool (Oct 2018), Sears bankruptcy: how it got here ($11.3B liabilities, Lands' End, Seritage, store closures)
• CNBC (Jan 2019), Sears chairman prevails in bankruptcy auction with $5.2 billion bid (425 stores, up to 45,000 jobs)
• CoStar (July 2025), Once-giant Sears could soon be down to just five locations (eight stores left)