Sears just confuses the heck out of me. They had everything they needed to basically be what Amazon is now, before Amazon even existed. Heck they were basically Amazon before the web existed.
I suspect internal political dysfunction is likely to blame for that. Many would rather have their bonus, unchallenged fiefdom, or to not have to learn things rather than success so that is what they wind up with and afterwards rather than admit fault by changing their ways they double down.
An online store would "take away" business from their retail fronts and would face plentiful sabotage. It isn't like they had a frontier out west to ship to as the "new ___domain" that respected their nice little boundaries.
This is one of the most important roles of a strong leader: to swashbuckle through this kind of misalignment.
Organizations age poorly by default. People become motivated to climb the org chart--or, even easier, to stay in place while sprouting new branches under themselves. People become risk averse and unimaginative.
The only way to avoid that fate is with strong leadership. Starship will replace the Falcon 9, and I'm sure there are people on the Falcon team who are not thrilled about that, but the show goes on anyway. Everyone is on a shared mission. It's clear that SpaceX culturally doesn't tolerate people more concerned with internal politics than they are with going to space. Culture comes from the top--the founders, the CEO, and flows from there.
They could be great again if they leveraged their old "good, better, best" strategy. Instead of trying to sell all the things like Amazon and Walmart do, they should be offering a broad, curated set of items that are reliable and binned by those three quality descriptors.
This specifically addresses the issues many people have with buying from Amazon.
