Sears Canada is effectively dead. Now, as the once successful retailer plans on closing every store in the country, there are bound to be post-mortems discussing why Sears couldn’t make it in the modern era.
In this case, it’s actually a bit of a mystery, because of all the old-school retailers who could have adapted to the marketplace, Sears should have found it an easy transition.
The most common explanation for the death of an old retail company now tends to put the blame on online shopping. People are buying more stuff online rather than in a retail location, and because of that the easiest explanation for a retailer going bust is that they’re being eclipsed by online stores. It’s not wrong, especially with products that you don’t really need to see in person to purchase.
However, Sears was a catalog company, and frankly the catalog sales should have made switching to an online market very easy. They had the infrastructure for it, they had their shipping logistics largely figured out.Changes would have to be made to the system overall, but Sears should have understood shopping by remote and how to move all manner of product across the country to people shopping at home. They were already doing that for years already. If anything, they should have had a competitive advantage over any online upstart.
Even their early website was pretty decent, going from memory. There were daily spotlight deals to keep people checking regularly, they had free shipping to their locations back when free shipping was a relative rarity, and they had an easy return policy. Unlike today’s online giant, Amazon, they didn’t even pester you to buy a Kindle. It should have worked.
As a kid, I was grateful for the catalog system because it meant I could find the things I wanted that my local, small-town stores didn’t stock - video games and toys, mostly, which is still what I generally want because I haven’t really grown up. The annual Wish Book was very quickly commandeered and annotated in order to create a wish list for the Christmas season. I’m not going to lament that today’s kids don’t know that joy - they’re just going online to do the same thing. They just didn’t go to the Sears website to do it, which was a huge missed opportunity for the retailer.
What made Sears a success, their willingness to sell almost anything to anyone through the catalog system, is what makes any of the online retailers work. The catalog allowed me to pester my poor mother with dreams of a Super Nintendo, but it’s Amazon where my nephew is pestering his mother with dreams of a Super Nintendo, because everything old is new again. It’s a screen instead of paper, but the same process, which makes it baffling that Sears couldn’t transition into the online marketplace.
Plenty of blame is going to go around, mostly to Eddie Lampert, the CEO of Sears whose mismanagement style has been blamed for tanking both Sears and K-Mart. But one can’t help but think that Sears dying is an example not of online shopping killing business, but instead of how a business should, by all logic, have been able to transition itself into being an online giant and yet being completely unable to do so.
