Jan 20, 2019 3 min read

The year is 2127. And the death knell is being sounded for Amazon.

There will be all kinds of articles recounting how, in those primitive days of the 1990s, the online retailer was born in the wake of the World Wide Web’s Big Bang. The analysts of the 2120s will look back on how Amazon leveled the landscape, putting bookstores out of business first, then department stores and malls, and then becoming so big that it financed movies and television series and launched an airline. It will surely be noted how Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, came to be worth more than $100 billion just two decades after conjuring up Amazon in his garage.

But, the commentators will note, even the most imposing giants can and will fall.

Since we’re living in Amazon’s heyday right now, it’s hard to imagine what could make Amazon come a cropper a century hence. Of course, there’s always the possibility that Amazon will still be going strong when the 2120s come around. Or that it will die in this century. Who knows? The point is that it’s tough to imagine Amazon could ever perish in 2019, just as it must have been similarly hard to envision Sears ever dying in 1919.

Now, the possibility that Sears will be the latest retail dinosaur to stumble into extinction is quite real.

On Thursday, it was announced that a hedge fund owned by Eddie Lampert, the largest investor in Sears Holdings, would be purchasing what is left of Sears three months after it went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy for $5.2 billion. This means that its remaining stores, as well as the Kmart stores that fell under the Sears umbrella, have won a reprieve. If the deal is approved, 45,000 jobs will be saved, including those at the Sears store at Washington Crown Center. But “a shrunken Sears still has an uphill battle dealing with the same forces that helped lead it to file for bankruptcy protection in October,” USA Today reported. “Its stores are often criticized for being shabby. Merchandise categories Sears once dominated are now available at more agile or attractive rivals like Best Buy, Walmart and Amazon. And for a new generation of shoppers, Sears and Kmart are hardly top of mind.”

The word “icon” is overused, but the designation fits Sears given the role it played in building the United States’ retail culture. Its catalogs brought a cornucopia of products to isolated pockets of the country a century ago. If you needed a hat or a baseball bat, it could almost certainly be found in a Sears catalog. Sears even sold houses, and would ship the components to buyers.

Despite competitors that mimicked or improved upon Sears’ formula, it remained a solid competitor until the 1990s, when the one-two punch of big-box stores like Walmart and the birth of online retail sent it reeling. From many reports, Sears’ plight has not been helped by Lampert and a management approach that has not lifted morale or the company’s fortunes.

Given the livelihoods at stake and its formidable legacy, one can only hope that Sears can hang on a while longer. The uphill climb it has to undertake, however, looks awfully steep.