Скачать или смотреть The $3 Billion Mistake: How Sears Destroyed America's Most Trusted Brand

It’s November 2018. In Mattoon, Illinois, a Sears that stood for 45 years locks its doors for the last time. Red “STORE CLOSING” banners hang like surrender flags. A cashier of nineteen years hands in her name tag.

Now multiply that scene 3,500 times.

This is the fall of Sears — once the most powerful retailer in American history. Founded in 1886 by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Roebuck, the company revolutionized commerce with its mail-order catalog, bringing affordable goods to rural America. It sold everything — tools, appliances, insurance, even entire kit homes. Brands like Craftsman and Kenmore became household names. At its peak, Sears controlled roughly 1% of U.S. GDP and built the tallest building in the world — the Sears Tower — as a monument to its dominance.

But dominance bred complacency. As competitors like Walmart and category killers chipped away at its core business, Sears drifted. It killed its legendary catalog, lost its identity, and struggled to define what it stood for in a changing retail landscape.

Then came 2005. Hedge fund billionaire Eddie Lampert merged Sears with Kmart and began extracting value instead of rebuilding it. Stores were split into competing internal divisions. Investment in maintenance was slashed. Between 2005 and 2012, $6 billion went to stock buybacks while locations decayed. What had once been a covenant between company and customer became a balance-sheet strategy.

In October 2018, Sears filed for bankruptcy. 68,000 employees lost their jobs. Pensions were cut. Communities lost their anchor stores. Lampert survived. The stores did not.

Sears wasn’t destroyed by the internet. It was dismantled from within — a 125-year-old empire taken apart piece by piece, until nothing remained but empty parking lots and a name that once meant trust.