My dad keeps a red Craftsman box in his garage that is older than I am. Half the sockets have wandered off over the years. The ones that are left have his initials scratched into the chrome, because he worked in a shop where things walked. When a ratchet snapped, he drove to the Sears at Washington Square and they handed him a new one without asking for a receipt. That was the deal. That was the entire brand, performed at a counter in under four minutes.
Sears Holdings filed for Chapter 11 two weeks ago, and the commentary wrote itself before the ink was dry. Amazon killed Sears. Another one falls to the retail apocalypse. A hundred and twenty-five years, undone by free shipping.
It is a tidy story. I do not believe it.
Sears did not lose to a competitor. It lost the ability to say what it was for, and then spent twenty years selling off the parts that could have answered the question.
Look at what got sold, spun, or starved. Craftsman went to Stanley Black & Decker last year. Lands' End was cut loose in 2014. Kenmore and DieHard sat inside dimming stores as the last two assets anybody outside the company could still name. Those were not line items on a balance sheet. Those were the answers to why a person would drive past three other retailers to get to that one. You cannot sell the reason and keep the store.
Here is the part that gets lost in the Amazon version. Amazon has a sentence. Costco has a sentence, and it is about not letting you get ripped off. Trader Joe's has one so clear that people say it out loud in the parking lot. Ask a shopper in 2008 what Sears was for and you would not have gotten hostility. You would have gotten a pause. That pause was the bankruptcy filing, ten years early, available free to anyone willing to stand outside a mall entrance and ask twenty people a question.
Toys R Us liquidated this spring with the same obituary stapled to it, and the same thing was true there. Children still exist. Toys still sell in enormous quantities. What ended was any reason to choose that particular building over a Target on the way home.
You cannot sell the reason and keep the store.
I called my dad about the news, expecting sentiment. He said he had not set foot in one since maybe 2005. Then he went out to the garage anyway and found the box and made me look at the initials over the phone. That is what a brand is worth after the lights go off. One man in a garage outside Portland who can still tell you exactly what the store was for, thirty years after the last good year.