A lot of this reminds me of Sears.
For those of you who are too young to remember, at one time Sears was the retail juggernaut. If you were an average family and you needed something, anything (quite literally), you went to Sears.
Sears was at it's peak in the 1970s and built the Sears Tower, now the Willis Tower, in Chicago. They leased out the upper floors but they were on fire and fully expected to fill the building within a decade or so. They never filled more than 1/3 of it. Then they started doing other things like H&R Block, Dean Witter Financials, Discover (which was spun off and became successful), and all kinds of odd stuff.
They started losing it in the 1980s. Their stores started looking crappy/junky and the products on their shelves were junk. At one time you might buy a Sears TV which was nothing more than a rebranded Zenith or something similar (made in USA, quality) and then someone decided Sears needed it's own brand and started selling LXI. These were, I think, manufactured by Goldstar or some other crap-company at the time and you knew it. You could tell by the looks of it that it was crappy and people stayed away. These weren't budget-priced, either, but repackaged crap selling at the price (or higher) that you'd pay for a well-known brand somewhere else.
Sears went from THE place you'd go shopping to NO PLACE you'd go shopping in just under a decade but all of these little cuts / changes looked good on paper!
They even tried to win people back towards the end of the 1980s or beginning of the 1990s with upscaling their stores (looking like a presentable "Mall Store" instead of a K-mart - which they bought a few years later (how that made sense is beyond me).
They cut back on staff, though. I remember being in stores a few times in the early 1990s and I swear I was the only one on the floor. No one to check me out. No other customers. Outside of being really creepy, how do you run a business like that? How can you not have people there to take someone's money? With the declining business and sales, it probably looked good on paper to not have anyone on the floor. (maybe they were on the first floor and I was on the second - no idea).
What is Sears now? Well, if you're like me then it's that store that may, or may not, be close to you but you pass by one every so often wondering, "How does that company stay alive?" For the longest time they lived off of the profits that they banked in the 1970s. Now they're closing stores and I think most of their revenue (not profit - they eludes them) comes from the management of their real estate. The current game plan is to close stores and lease out half of the stores remaining (like in a literal sense, cut the store in half, and then sublet the half they're not using).
They weren't killed by the internet. They weren't even killed by Walmart. They did it to themselves. If you think about the position that they were in around the end of the 1970s, they, had they just kept the quality and value going, could have continued quite well into the 1980s and beyond. They would have had to adapt for internet sales but if you think of their buying power (at one time) and catalog/distribution network, this should have been easy. Nope. Lots of bad choices that looked great on paper.
The point being that the bad management decisions started about a decade before they really started to feel the repercussions from them. The repercussions have lasted far longer than the decade of bad decisions.
