On Sears Roebuck and its demise

The New York Times has a big feature today on Sears, "The Incredible Shrinking Sears."  Of course, the entity used to be Sears Roebuck and Company, and it was associated with the massive catalog that showed up one a year in your mailbox, in late summer, with a smaller follow-up for the Christmas season.  The focus of Julie Creswell's story is how a "financial wizard took over" Sears and "presided over its epic decline."  But I want to take a moment to be sentimental about what Sears used to mean in rural America.  Here's a salient except:

At the turn of the 20th century, as Americans established roots across the nation, they turned to Sears. Through its robust mail-order business — some catalogs were more than 500 pages — Sears shipped groceries, rifles, corsets, cream separators, davenports, stoves and entire prefab houses to some of the most remote regions of the country.

As Americans moved from rural communities to larger cities, many no longer needed to shop by thumbing through the catalog; they preferred to visit dazzling department stores. Sears began opening hundreds of stand-alone retail stores, some with soda fountains, dentist’s offices and pet shops alongside tombstones and farm tractors.

The comparison to amazon.com is inevitable, of course.  Sears was the amazon of its day.  The rest of the story is, quite frankly, too depressing to describe--read for yourself what Edward S. Lampert, that Wall Street wiz kid, has done to Sears Holding Company, all while essentially telecommuting from his home in Miami, rarely setting foot in a Sears store.