Sears Is Not a Failure
The retail giant may have reached the end of its run, but it’s been around longer than the four most valuable companies in the world—Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet—combined.
To appreciate the rise and fall of Sears, the retail giant that filed for bankruptcy on Monday, consider a 19th-century pocket watch.
To most modern shoppers, a pocket watch is boring. It’s an unfashionable, potentially broken piece of gerontic jewelry. But to others, it’s not merely an artifact. It’s an achievement: a silent symphony of mite-size screws, whirling in uncanny harmony.
So it is with Sears. Today’s consumers look upon and closed more than 1,000 stores. Not all bankruptcies are fatal, but the reporting around Sears’s filing seems rather funereal. Sunk deep into debt by its hedge-fund owners, Sears is almost certainly a goner.
