re: #282 Eric The Fruit Bat

In its heyday Sears was freaking huge - it was not only a retailer but it had a big finance arm with its captive private label credit card operation, and it also owned Allstate and Dean Witter (who launched the Discover card.)

If there is a case study of sometimes things get too big to manage, Sears was the canary in the cave. Now you’re seeing the same thing happening with other conglomerates like GE spinning off lines of businesses they can’t/don’t want to manage.

Sears was positioned to be Amazon. Between Prodigy and their catalog order fulfillment operation, that had the pieces in place, but management was incompetent. They were shutting down their catalog division, just as it was about to become very valuable.