Vintage Things That Will NOT Disappear In Your Lifetime

[LizzieMaine]

In some ways the business world is in the same position it was in 1900. That was the era of the super rich (first time around). There were new business that were changing the ways people shopped and one of them was Sears, Roebuck. Maybe they should have kept Roebuck! Anyway, there were lots of new companies starting up around then and on through the next 20 or 30 years. Some became very big fairly soon and got the organizational problems worked out a long time ago, like General Motors. To think the government thought GM dominated the auto industry at one time. News, including news about business, tends to be sensationalist and things are not necessarily as they seem.

Large corporations do not control things as much as is sometimes claimed. And an industry does not necessarily control the market, although that's hard to see at times. Sometimes even entire industries almost disappear because of technological changes. The savings and loan industry, if you can call it that, is a thing of the past. I also worked in photofinishing for about 25 years, another industry that has virtually disappeared.

I've said before what I thought killed Sears -- and let's face it, Sears is dead. The remains may be kicking around on life support, but it's still dead -- is that the company dumped its catalog system about four years before the Internet exploded. In the 1910s, Sears *was* Amazon -- it had exactly the same distribution model, servicing orders from a network of distribution hubs around the country. If that system had survived, intact, for just a few more years deeper into the 1990s, Sears could have *become* Amazon, and no one would ever have had to hear a single word out of the mouth of that repellent toad Jeff Bezos.

 

[2jakes]

H.E.B. grocery stores and the cockroach.

 

[BlueTrain]

Basically what killed Sears and other larger retailers was a string of bad management decisions. This is not to say I make good decisions by any means but I don't run a chain of department stores. But I imagine it's hard to let go of a business model, to use an expression, that worked so well for generations. They survived the shift from the big downtown store to the move out to the suburban malls, which were up and coming fifty years ago. I'm not sure when enclosed shopping malls were at their peak, perhaps in the 1980s or later.

It is usually some technological change that enables a new form of shopping. Obviously, it was the internet that permitted on-line shopping, along with the wider use of credit cards and similar payment methods. When Sears was becoming a household name, it was Rural Free Delivery that allowed catalog sales to grow. For shopping malls, it was probably wider automobile ownership after the war that made them work. Malls in their heyday were criticized for killing the downtown shopping districts, too. And automobile ownership put a dent in public transportation, especially in smaller towns and cities where you may not have imagined it ever existed.

Who knows what will happen next?

 

[Fading Fast]

I've said before what I thought killed Sears -- and let's face it, Sears is dead. The remains may be kicking around on life support, but it's still dead -- is that the company dumped its catalog system about four years before the Internet exploded. In the 1910s, Sears *was* Amazon -- it had exactly the same distribution model, servicing orders from a network of distribution hubs around the country. If that system had survived, intact, for just a few more years deeper into the 1990s, Sears could have *become* Amazon, and no one would ever have had to hear a single word out of the mouth of that repellent toad Jeff Bezos.

Your analysis is right in theory, but my guess, it wouldn't have worked as Amazon had two things Sears didn't: (1) the passion for an on-line concept which started as books at Amazon and (and this is the key) (2) the ability - funded by willing capital markets - to stay with a losing business model for two-plus decades (Amazon still loses money on its retailing / it makes money on cloud computing but that only happened several years ago).

Sears absolutely had the right physical infrastructure as Lizzie notes, but I doubt it would have seen the web in the messianic way Amazon has nor could it - an old-line "boring" retailer - have "sold" the capital markets on a money losing strategy for two decades.

 

[DocCasualty]

Sears absolutely had the right physical infrastructure as Lizzie notes, but I doubt it would have seen the web in the messianic way Amazon has nor could it - an old-line "boring" retailer - have "sold" the capital markets on a money losing strategy for two decades.

Though that is the natural history of essentially all businesses. You either create or quickly embrace the new paradigm or perish by the old one. The Swiss with the watch industry, Detroit with automobiles, etc. Sears created or adapted to many changes throughout their history. This one, not so much.

 

[Fading Fast]

And back to Amtrak, just saw this story on MarketWatch (basically, another successful CEO has signed up to bang his head against the wall for a few years and then quit):

Amtrak taps former CEO of Delta to lead passenger railroad

ASHINGTON—Amtrak named a former Delta Air Lines Inc. DAL, +0.09% chief executive, Richard Anderson, as the new president and CEO of the national passenger railroad, which is grappling with a backlog of repairs even as ridership continues to grow.

Anderson, 62, will succeed current Amtrak CEO Wick Moorman, who joined the company in September 2016. Moorman, a longtime freight railroad executive, will serve as co-CEO with Anderson through the end of the year, overseeing some ongoing Amtrak projects, including critical repair work at New York’s Penn Station.

Amtrak officials say that Anderson is the sort of leader Moorman had been tasked with recruiting when he arrived last year: a veteran of a competitive industry with the experience of passengers at its heart.

“He literally took a company out of bankruptcy and made it one of the more efficient air carriers in the world,” said Anthony Coscia, chairman of Amtrak’s board of directors, referring to Anderson’s career at Delta. “That’s an accomplishment in an industry that’s just as difficult if not more difficult than passenger rail.”

 

[BlueTrain]

That is essentially correct, the natural history of all businesses. But it goes without saying that many new companies don't get as far as Amazon. I don't know how they'll do in the grocery business but the owner apparently has a lot of money to play around with.

It is well to stop and think about the purposes of a business. Ultimately, it's supposed to be to enrich "the residual owners." Usually that's supposed to mean the stockholders but in a widely held corporation, it's usually the upper management that is enriched.

A corporation has other goals, too, the first one of which is to stay in business. Even that is subverted now and then. Making a profit will seem to fall to third place. Providing employment is not a corporation objective. A corporation cannot be said to be patriotic, either. A corporation cannot be said to ever be a good citizen. An employee might be and in rare circumstances, so might an officer of a corporation.

 

[DocCasualty]

And back to Amtrak, just saw this story on MarketWatch (basically, another successful CEO has signed up to bang his head against the wall for a few years and then quit):

Amtrak taps former CEO of Delta to lead passenger railroad

ASHINGTON—Amtrak named a former Delta Air Lines Inc. DAL, +0.09% chief executive, Richard Anderson, as the new president and CEO of the national passenger railroad, which is grappling with a backlog of repairs even as ridership continues to grow.

Anderson, 62, will succeed current Amtrak CEO Wick Moorman, who joined the company in September 2016. Moorman, a longtime freight railroad executive, will serve as co-CEO with Anderson through the end of the year, overseeing some ongoing Amtrak projects, including critical repair work at New York’s Penn Station.

Amtrak officials say that Anderson is the sort of leader Moorman had been tasked with recruiting when he arrived last year: a veteran of a competitive industry with the experience of passengers at its heart.

“He literally took a company out of bankruptcy and made it one of the more efficient air carriers in the world,” said Anthony Coscia, chairman of Amtrak’s board of directors, referring to Anderson’s career at Delta. “That’s an accomplishment in an industry that’s just as difficult if not more difficult than passenger rail.”

Anderson did do amazing things with Delta, no question. He always struck me as the kind of guy who is always up to a challenge. Problem as noted above is that the US rail system has not been a national priority since WWII, other than some niche markets.

Credit to those upthread who noted that transportation types cannot compete against other types if they aren't subsidized too.

 

[tonyb]

Online retailing essentially is catalog retailing, without the paper.

I do believe Elizabeth had it right. Sears failed to recognize that it already had what others had to build.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a lengthy story on this matter for The New Yorker something like 15 years ago. The piece was titled "Clicks and Mortar." He opened with the story of something called the King Road Drag, a device to pull behind a tractor or a team of horses that effectively put a crown on a dirt road, thereby making rural dirt roads more passable in more kinds of weather, which in turn made year-round parcel services to remote areas more feasible, which made catalog sales more feasible.

The makers of the King Road Drag didn't get filthy rich, seeing how it was easy to copy and make for oneself, as many rural denizens did. But the gist of the tale is that the catalog, or the website, is the easy part, as many an investor in a failed dot-com can tearfully attest.

 

[Fading Fast]

That is essentially correct, the natural history of all businesses. But it goes without saying that many new companies don't get as far as Amazon. I don't know how they'll do in the grocery business but the owner apparently has a lot of money to play around with.

It is well to stop and think about the purposes of a business. Ultimately, it's supposed to be to enrich "the residual owners." Usually that's supposed to mean the stockholders but in a widely held corporation, it's usually the upper management that is enriched.

A corporation has other goals, too, the first one of which is to stay in business. Even that is subverted now and then. Making a profit will seem to fall to third place. Providing employment is not a corporation objective. A corporation cannot be said to be patriotic, either. A corporation cannot be said to ever be a good citizen. An employee might be and in rare circumstances, so might an officer of a corporation.

I think your last paragraph is political, but if the moderators are okay with it, then here goes my response:

A corporation is in business to make money for its stockholders (if management enriches itself at the expense of stockholders then the stockholders are not electing a board of directors that is doing its job - but the losers are the stockholders in that case, not the public). All of a corporation's customers buy things from it by choice, not force. All of its employees work there by choice, not force.

Hence, it has to offer its customers competitive value and its employees competitive compensations. That all sounds good and fair to me - it doesn't, IMHO, fall in the realm of patriotic or not - it's a fair business offering fair value and fair employment or it goes out of business. If it abides by all relevant laws and regulations (if not, it should be fined or shut down), then it is a part of the free market capitalistic system. It is what it is - a fully voluntary entity: shareholders voluntarily invest, customers voluntarily patronize and employees voluntarily agree to work there.

Let me emphasize two things: (1) if it is corrupt or plays fast and loose with rules and regs or is part of some crony capitalistic game (hand in pocket with politicians / the government) - then I want the full force of the law to come down on it hard, but if not, it is, IMHO, an expression of freedom in everything it does and is at the core of the individual freedom envisioned in our Constitutions and (2) this post and yours should be deleted by the moderators as they are too political.

 

[LizzieMaine]

To get back to Sears, it's interesting to note that the first misstep the company made that would lead it to the path it now follows was made in 1925, when they decided they just *had to* open retail stores in order to keep up. The company was about forty years old at that point, having become the "World's Largest Store" *exclusively* thru mail order. It wasn't until the late 1930s that Sears stores became common, and it wasn't until the *1970s* that they became the focal point of its operation. Within twenty years of that, the retail store end had completely swallowed catalog operations, and the handwriting was on the wall.

Moral -- it's better to stick to the one thing you know you do well than it is to throw away that one thing in favor of something you do poorly, just because the Boys tell you that you have to do it in order to "keep up." Just because the Boy in charge of that move called himself "General" and used to run the Quartermaster Corps -- a "store" with a guaranteed market -- doesn't mean he knew what he was doing.

 

[Fading Fast]

To get back to Sears, it's interesting to note that the first misstep the company made that would lead it to the path it now follows was made in 1925, when they decided they just *had to* open retail stores in order to keep up. The company was about forty years old at that point, having become the "World's Largest Store" *exclusively* thru mail order. It wasn't until the late 1930s that Sears stores became common, and it wasn't until the *1970s* that they became the focal point of its operation. Within twenty years of that, the retail store end had completely swallowed catalog operations, and the handwriting was on the wall.

Moral -- it's better to stick to the one thing you know you do well than it is to throw away that one thing in favor of something you do poorly, just because the Boys tell you that you have to do it in order to "keep up."

On a much smaller scale, J.Crew has followed a similar path. It was a successful small catalogue company in the '80s, opened stores in the '90s / '00s (took on too much debt) and now is struggling to survive. That said, I have no idea if Sears or J.Crew could have survived if they had just stuck to being catalogue companies - it seems that the on-line winners today are mainly new companies that started as on-line retailers and not old-line catalogue companies that shifted to on-line.

Also, for a lot of years, Sears and J.Crew made money hand over fist in their stores. Hence, it's hard, IMHO, to say that was the wrong strategy as - had they remained catalogue-only companies - they might still be struggling owing to the web (i.e., they might not have successfully transitioned their catalogue business to on-line) and not have had all those decades (in Sears' case) of profitable brick-and-mortar retailing.

I think the real lesson is business is hard - very, very hard - and being successful for years and decades is incredibly hard. A company has to make a lot of right decision to stay alive which is why the story of business is one of mainly failure even for those that have some period of success.

 

[Bushman]

Not sure if either of these have been named yet, but denim clothing for sure is one, and so is movies.

 

[Fading Fast]

Interesting anecdote about how hard it is to be successful in business. A friend of mine had something very similar to the Ebay model back in - I kid you not - '94 when the web was just starting to make inroads with the general public. He poured most of his money into the business (and asked me to invest, which fortunately I didn't, phew), but basically he ran out of capital before he could turn it profitable.

I think about him all the time as he truly had the spot-on idea, but not enough capital (and he put a lot of his and other investors in it) to survive long enough. As noted above, business is very, very hard. Even with a forward-thinking idea that eventually became hugely successful, he failed - ugh.

 

[Harp]

The National Guard was still using M1s and BARs in the 1970s.

For the 1970s Guard such arm was understandable within the prescribed limits set by political and practical dictate.
Hellenic Special Forces were issued M16s and M60s, the latter I tried to order requisition for my draftee infantry company
as I disfavor BARs for fixed perimeter defense or mobile force use.

 

[Zombie_61]

Basically what killed Sears and other larger retailers was a string of bad management decisions...They survived the shift from the big downtown store to the move out to the suburban malls, which were up and coming fifty years ago. I'm not sure when enclosed shopping malls were at their peak, perhaps in the 1980s or later...

The two largest shopping malls here in my home town went from being "open air" to "enclosed" at various points during the 1980s, and it almost ended both. Putting a roof on them inadvertently but effectively turned them into dreary places that few wanted to visit, and before long the turnover rate of the lesser and lesser stores that came and went was higher than the L.A. County Morgue. Both have since been demolished, reconfigured, and rebuilt, and now instead of each having two perfectly serviceable rows of shops facing each other with a common walkway between them they have become glorified strip malls with the string of shops snaking their way around the properties. The end result is that shoppers are once again exposed to the elements while they do their shopping, with the added bonus of either having to walk four times as far to get from one end to the other, or drive from shop to shop. That's "progress" for ya'.

Coincidentally, at the larger of the two malls the "bookend" stores were, and still are, J.C. Penney and Sears. Their original buildings survived the demolition of the original mall; the developers simply built the new configuration around them. That J.C. Penney has gone from two floors to one, with all of their goods crammed into the ground floor as best they could. Sears kept both floors open, but they've spread their goods out to make it appear they stock more merchandise than they actually do. Based on recent observations, between the two I'd guess the Sears store will close before J.C. Penney, but at this point it's such a slim margin that even the oddsmakers in Las Vegas would have trouble predicting which of these dying horses will cross the "you're finished" line first.

...Who knows what will happen next?

That question is both interesting and frightening. Just as Target, Wal-Mart, and the "big box" stores like Costco and Sam's Club have all but supplanted Montgomery Ward, J.C. Penney, and Sears, surely they will eventually be replaced by the next generation of low-price/low quality retailers. And how much lower can the quality of the products get? I hope I don't live to see it, but I predict there will come a time when everything humans wear and/or use will be of the "use it once and dispose of it" variety.

 

[Stormy]

Hollywood will be standing long after I'm gone.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Hopefully, Ibuprofen!

I didn't need much Ibu in my 32 years. In comparison to the average western prosperty-people, I needed only a "homeopathic" dose over the years (only 2011 and 2016). But I think, Ibu is basically such a great invention for the masses, especially, when you think about harsh Diclofenac!

Really a friendly, such versatile NSAID-medicament and Ibu 400 is available non-prescription in german apotheke.

Before I would decide to visit crappy doctors, I would always grab a package of Ibuprofen 400, take one in the morning and one in the evening and wait at least one week, if the inflammation of any kind will go.

Be honest:
What do you want with cooling-technics, if the cooling can't reach the inflammation??

 

[2jakes]

Hollywood will be standing long after I'm gone.

Hollywood and the Christmas Story
“leg lamp”....

Was inspired by:

​

Shep, of course, was writing about the trademark for Nehi (pronounced "knee-high") pop. The Nehi brand was a major force in the soft-drink market in the middle 1920s through the time period of A Christmas Story. The name of the brand was coined by an entrepreneurial Georgian named Claud Adkins Hatcher (1876-1933), a pharmacist who grew a modest Southern grocery business into a national beverage franchise. The story goes that Hatcher overheard one of his route salesmen talking about a competitor's pop bottle that was so tall it was "knee-high." Hatcher applied the name - trademarked as "Nehi" - to his line of fruit-flavored concentrates that were shipped to franchisee bottling companies across the country. The product line was so successful that in 1928 Hatcher's company changed its name (Chero-Cola Co.) to the Nehi Corporation, and its franchisees became Nehi bottling companies.

 

[Edward]

It's long fascinated me that while the US idealised notion of Christmas is very inter-war based, in the UK it's very late-Victorian (despite the fsct that many of the things we now think of as long-standing Christmas traditions are as recent as the seventies in the UK, e.g. turkey for Christmas dinner). Probably says something about how the dominant media / national interests view our respective socieites.