Those who tell stories, rule society. Amazon's story of starting in a garage selling books to selling millions of things was just more interesting than Sears, which had been around for so much longer.

Amazon also wasn't like Sears, they depended heavily on 3rd party sellers to built their initial catalog. Sears didn't have 3rd party sellers until much later on. Amazon just leveraged those 3rd party sellers to figure out what they should carry and sell as Amazon down the line.