Sears could have been the next Amazon.

Sears could have been the next Amazon. Or not even the next Amazon, they could have been Amazon. And they somehow managed to fumble a 50 billion dollar bag. Because back in 2005 they were doing 50 billion dollars a year in revenue. How does a company go from 50 billion dollars in revenue to filing for bankruptcy only 13 years later in 2018. If you're old enough to remember Sears, you know that it was the store. I'm not just talking a department store, I mean you could buy anything at Sears. It was America's go-to place for clothes, appliances. You could even buy houses at Sears. I'm not joking, look at these things. For 1800 dollars or 2400 dollars you could buy a full-on house from a department store. And Sears really was that girl. She had it all. A massive distribution network, millions of loyal customers, and real estate in literally every major city around the US. And the only reason why they failed is because they failed to adapt. They became obsessed with cost cutting, stopped focusing on customer service, and they refused to go into e-commerce. Meanwhile while Sears was refusing to adapt, this little company named Amazon started getting bigger and bigger. And while Amazon doubled down on logistics and customer obsession, Sears closed doors and cuts down and eventually faded away from relevancy. They filed for bankruptcy in 2018 and by 2024 I'm pretty sure almost every single store is gone. There might be like one or two left over, I honestly have no idea. I was shadowing on a real estate deal back in 2016 and actually went to Sears headquarters, which is a campus that's a little bit outside of Chicago. And it was genuinely pretty eerie at how empty this place was. I mean you can see this building, it was massive, and only half of one floor actually had people working out of it. So what's the takeaway? Sears had infrastructure, they had the customer base, they had the first mover advantage, but they lacked one single very important thing: vision. They could have easily been Amazon, and instead their biggest legacy is becoming a business school case study, which is exactly what happens when you stop evolving. Follow for more business breakdowns.