How business 'that could have been a second Amazon' went from $135,000,000,000 valuation to bankruptcy

A once-popular US department store that could've been as successful as Amazon today instead suffered a brutal decline.

Sears revolutionized American consumer culture, using mail order to sell everything from household goods to auto supplies.

Founded in 1893, its famous catalogues and its expansion to brick-and-mortar stores in 1925 saw business boom.

Sears was once the world's largest retailer, with almost 3,500 stores at its peak.

By 1972, Sears was valued at $18 billion, which today is worth a huge $135 billion.

Sears used to be the world's largest retailer (AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)

In 2018, though, Sears' parent company filed for bankruptcy and now just 10 stores remain.

Where exactly did it all go wrong?

What happened to Sears?

The once-thriving business made a couple of fatal errors over the years, leading to a major decline in sales.

Which is surprising when you consider that, in 1984, it partnered with IBM to offer online message boards and email services on Prodigy, one of the first ever proto-internet service providers.

E-commerce was never offered - which would've been an absolute game changer, some five years before the World Wide Web was even created.

Ironically, it's this branching out that put Sears on a downward trajectory.

How the mighty have fallen (Tim Boyle/Getty Images)

Its infrastructure slowed right down as the company put its attention on other investments, including financial services like credit cards.

And rather than addressing the issue with a much-needed rehaul, the business made cuts instead.

In a move that makes me physically cringe, Sears' axed their catalogue and delivery functions in 1993.

Jeff Bezos then founded Amazon a year later. Yeah...

In 2005, hedge fund owner Eddie Lampert bought out Sears in a bid to help it compete against competitors in an increasingly difficult market.

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon a year after Sears made major cutbacks (Paul Souders/Getty Images)

Those competitors being absolute giants, like Walmart and, erm, Amazon...

Instead, Sears' sales continued to decline, and the company began closing down more stores.

To quantify this, sales fell from $43 billion in 2010 to less than $17 billion in 2017.

Hedge fund ESL Investments bought out what was left of the business in 2019 for $5.2 billion.

There are now only 10 Sears stores left in the US as of 2024; four in California, two in Washington, two in Florida, one in Massachusetts and one in Texas.