In the late eighteen hundreds you would have to walk, ride a horse or wagon miles to a store. Then came Sears.
It was a mail order company that sent its catalogs to everyone. I remember the Sears catalog in outhouses at my grandparents’ houses; people used the catalogs for toilet paper. By then, Sears had large stores in most cities, and horses as transportation had been gone for generations. It’s been decades since I’ve seen one of their catalogs.
Then came the internet and Amazon. At first, bookstores were the only businesses affected, then Amazon branched out. Soon, shopkeepers everywhere were scared.
Malls, very popular for decades, started closing. But the irony came this past week when Sears filed for bankruptcy, hoisted on its own petard. The store morphed from a mail order business into a sales behemoth, giving up its mail order decades ago, and was put to death by a mail order company, Amazon.
It seems a little ironic.
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