Sear & Horny Roebucks

Within minutes Paul finds out John is coming to rehearsal after all and I haven’t seen anyone beaming like this since the 1983 Sears & Roebuck catalog showed up at my house. - XMASTIME

I know this generation has become numbed to sex/nudity et al with the internet. I know I'm from the era of sniffing out the drawers section from Sears & Roebuck from a mile away, I know I'm from the days of renting a porn video and watching it in a room with 8 dudes, each of use trying to look bored. I know things have changed. - XMASTIME

Besides the coming-of-age-(heh heh heh) (hold on, this one's so good we're doing it twice: heh heh heh) mentorship the catalog brought me, I'm of the age from which the Sear & Roebuck WAS "shopping" for anything other than groceries. I fell into this video for a bit of nostalgia, but then was kinda shocked to see this:

Ironically, Sears a company that was founded on serving customers through mail order disbanded its catalog business in 1993, just as the internet was beginning to take off. Sears had the infrastructure, customer base and logistical capability to potentially transition into a leading e-commerce platform, and the company was uniquely positioned to leverage its extensive catalog experience into an online shopping environment mirroring what it had already been doing for decades through mail order, but rather than pursuing the opportunity to evolve its catalog model into a digital format that could have competed with or even preempted online giants like amazon.com, Sears shut down the catalog Division and dismissed workers who had filled the orders. Bankruptcy came in 2018.

I've never heard anybody else mention the company's disastrous timing; you'd think it be more legendary?