They Invented Amazon. Then They Went Bankrupt | The Rise and Fall of Sears

Sears had everything it needed to become Amazon. For over 100 years, it was one of the most powerful companies in America. They mailed catalogs to 50 million homes, sold entire houses through the mail, built the tallest building in the world, and became so big they once made up nearly 1% of the entire U.S. economy. Then it all collapsed. This video tells the full story of Sears: the Wish Book, the Craftsman guarantee, the rise of the American mall, the decision that handed Amazon its blueprint, and how one of the most trusted companies in the country slowly fell apart from the inside. But this isn’t just a story about retail. It’s about what America used to feel like. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ CHAPTERS 0:00 The Wish Book 1:07 What Sears Actually Sold 3:01 The Catalog That Changed America 6:42 The Mistake That Built Amazon 9:10 The Man Who Ate Sears 13:22 The Store Became Physically Sad 17:58 Shopping as Grief 19:30 What We Actually Lost 21:27 The Pattern ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ If you grew up with the Sears Christmas catalog, I’d genuinely love to hear your memory. What did you circle first? ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ #sears #americanhistory #retailcollapse #amazon #deadmalls #documentary #searswishbook #mallnostalgia #retailhistory #businessdocumentary #americannostalgia #riseandfall #forgottenamerica #retailapocalypse #middleclassamerica #vintageamericana Sears, Sears history, Sears documentary, Sears collapse, Sears bankruptcy, what happened to Sears, why Sears failed, Sears Wish Book, Sears Christmas catalog, Sears nostalgia, Craftsman tools, Kenmore appliances, Eddie Lampert, Sears vs Amazon, Amazon before Amazon, retail collapse, dead malls, mall nostalgia, American retail history, rise and fall documentary, business documentary, American business history, Kmart merger, Sears Tower, middle class America, forgotten America, retail apocalypse, history documentary