Comment by tombert 3 days ago
Today I learned that Sears founded Prodigy!
Amazing how far that company has fallen; they were sort of a force to be reckoned with in the 70's and 80's with Craftsman and Allstate and Discover and Kenmore and a bunch of other things, and now they're basically dead as far as I can tell.
My favorite anecdote about Sears is from Starbucks current HQs - the HQs used to be a warehouse for Sears. Before renovation the first floor walls next to the elevators used to have Sears' "commitment to customers" (or something like that).
To me it read like it was written by Amazon decades earlier. Something about how Sears promises that customers will be 100% satisfied with the purchase, and if for whatever reason that is not the case customers can return the purchase back to Sears and Sears will pay for the return transportation charges.
Craftsman tools have almost felt like a life-hack sometimes; their no-questions-asked warranties were just incredible.
My dad broke a Craftsman shovel once that he had owned for four years, took it to Sears, and it was replaced immediately, no questions asked. I broke a socket wrench that I had owned for a year and had the same story.
I haven't tested these warranties since Craftsman was sold to Black and Decker, but when it was still owned by Sears I almost exclusively bought Craftsman tools as a result of their wonderful warranties.
FWIW, I bought a Craftsman 1/4" drive ratchet/socket set at a Lowes Home Improvement store last year, and when I got it home and started messing with it, the ratchet jammed up immediately (before even being used on any actual fastener). I drove back over there the next day and the lady at the service desk took a quick look, said "go get another one off the shelf and come back here." I did, and by the time I got back she'd finished whatever paperwork needed to be done, handed me some $whatever and said "have a nice day."
Maybe not quite as hassle free as in years past, but I found the experience acceptable enough.
I think that's as much about Lowes as it is Craftsman... I don't think Craftsman tools have been particularly well build, just that they had and are able to have enough margins to have a no questions asked policy... it probably helps that a lot of the materials are completely and easily recyclable.
> My dad broke a Craftsman shovel once that he had owned for four years, took it to Sears, and it was replaced immediately, no questions asked. I broke a socket wrench that I had owned for a year and had the same story.
This is covered by consumer protection laws in some places. 4 years on a spade would be pushing it, but I’d try with a good one. Here in New Zealand it’s called ‘The Consumer Guarantees Act’. We pay more at purchase time, but we do get something for it.
Lots of tools have lifetime warranties. Harbor Freight's swap process is probably fastest, these days, for folks with one nearby. Tekton's process is also painless, but slower: Send them a photo of the broken tool, and they deliver a new tool to your door.
But I'm not old enough to remember a time when lifetime warranties were unusual. In my lifetimes, a warranty on handtools has always seemed more common than not outside of the bottom-most cheese-grade stuff.
I mean: The Lowes house-brand diagonal cutters I bought for my first real job had a lifetime warranty.
And before my time of being aware of the world, JC Penney sold tools with lifetime warranties.
(I remember being at the mall with my dad when he took a JC Penney-branded screwdriver back to JC Penney -- probably 35 years ago.
He got some pushback from people who insisted that they had never sold tools, and then from people who insisted that they never had warranties, and then he finally found the fellow old person who had worked there long enough to know what to do. Without any hesitation at all, she told us to walk over to Sears, buy a similar Craftsman screwdriver, and come back with a receipt.
So that's what we did.
She took the receipt and gave him his money back.
Good 'nuff.)
harbor freight will take literally anything back, and put it right back on the shelf.
There were quite a few small ISP's in the 1990's. Even Bill Gothard[0] had one.
[0]https://web.archive.org/web/19990208003742/http://characterl...
Prodigy predates ISPs (internet service providers). Before the web had matured a little in 1993 the internet was too technically challenging to interest most consumers except maybe for email, and Prodigy was formed in 1984 -- and although it offered email, it was walled-garden email: a Prodigy user could not exchange email with the internet till the mid-1990s at which time Prodigy might have become an ISP for a few years before going out of business.
They weren't wrong. Its core business in what is still a viable-enough sector collapsed. Or if it were truly well-managed, running an ISP and a retailer should have been enough insight to be Amazon.
It wasn't possible for them to be well managed at the time it mattered. Sears was loaded with debt by private equity ghouls; same story for almost all defunct brick and mortar businesses; Amazon was a factor, but private equity is what actually destroyed them.
Thank you for bringing this up. Sears really didn't have a choice, they were a victim of the most pernicious LBO, Gordon Gecko-style strip mining nonsense on the PE spectrum. All private equity is not the same but after seeing two PE deals from the inside (one a leveraged buy out) and another VC one with the "grow at insane place" playbook I think I prefer the naked and aligned greed of the VC model; PE destroyed both of the other companies while the VC one was already doomed.
I worked at Sears at the time when Amazon first started becoming a household name. I for the life of me couldn’t understand why they didn’t make a copycat site called the Sears Catalog Online. But then I think about it and management wanted salesmanship because selling maintenance agreements was their cash cow. Low margin sales won in the long term hence we have Walmart and Amazon as the biggest retailers.
Likely standard management failure. Sears got burned badly when it put its catalog online on Prodigy in the 80's, so obviously online sales were doomed to failure.
For more on this -- and how Sears had everything it needed (and more) to be what Amazon became -- see this comment from a 2007 MetaFilter thread: https://www.metafilter.com/62394/The-Record-Industrys-Declin...
On the topic of how Sears used to be high-tech: back in 1981, when IBM introduced the IBM PC, it was the first time that they needed to sell computers through retail. So they partnered with Sears, along with the Computerland chain of computer stores, since Sears was considered a reasonable place for a businessperson to buy a computer. To plan this, meetings were held at the Sears Tower, which was the world's tallest building at the time.