[wkat4242]

What did they sell? A bit of everything?

[silisili]

Literally almost everything, up to and including entire houses. I've lived in two Sears houses, great quality stuff if not a bit small by modern tastes.

When I was a kid it was normal for parents to let their kids read the huge yearly Sears catalog to get ideas or pick gifts. By then they'd stopped selling items like firearms and houses but had pretty much everything else.

If they had the foresight, they should have become a better version of what Amazon is now.

[cwyers]

Ironically they had the foresight, they were just too early/didn't execute. They ran an online service (co-owner with IBM and CBS) called Prodigy that competed with AOL and CompuServ, and they tried to do online shopping there.

[kstrauser]

One thing that Amazon absolutely mastered was fast logistics. Sears thrived in a time where TV ads would sell things with an asterisk saying “allow 4-6 weeks for delivery”. They had 100+ years to bring their timelines down, yet Sears Prime with free rush delivery wasn’t a thing. I don’t know what it would have taken to revamp their supply lines to make that possible. And neither, I suspect, did they.

[ksec]

Do they sell it all under their own brand? i.e Costco Kirkland like or was it like old Amazon where every brand have their own exposure?

[chuckadams]

One of Sears' house brands was Acme, and one of the items sold under that brand was anvils.

[heavyset_go]

It was a mix of Walmart, except with higher quality brands and without groceries, and Kohl's, with some Lowe's and Best Buy mixed in.

[glimshe]

The original Sears was the Amazon of the 20th century.

[nubinetwork]

I would argue that they were a lot like Walmart (when Walmart was starting out)... clothes, electronics, sporting/seasonal goods... then they ventured out into additional services like family photography, optometry, pharmacy... really, the only difference was the mail order catalog.