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lumosttoday at 11:36 AM1 replyview on HN

People are talking about putting a mail order catalog store online. Presumably, sears already had the catalog, shipping infrastructure - so it really should have been about digital payments, and an online storefront.

How significant their shipping catalog was in the 1990s I do not know, scaling the online storefront would have required Amazon scale investments which a dividend maximizing company was unlikely to do.


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throwaway173738today at 3:13 PM

people underestimate how slow picture loading was back then. Online storefronts seem to live and die by their product images. It wasn’t really feasible to sell anything other than books until DSL came along.

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