https://web.archive.org/web/20200121105509/https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-sears-lost-the-american-shopper-11552647601
"Arthur Martinez: I came to the conclusion that we couldn’t do two jobs, fixing the catalog and fixing the stores. The catalog was the easy choice to be sacrificed.
After a very anguished debate, the board came to agree with me. The hard part was that 50,000 people lost their jobs.
Michael Ryan: That was eye-opening for everyone. We had antiquated distribution centers and the catalog was too expensive to print and we just closed it versus trying to fix it. It was a turning point".
"Frank DeSantis: Sears was the Amazon of its day. It sold everything for everybody. The catalog was the precursor to the internet. It gave access to everything in the store to people around the country. Over the course of 100-plus years, Sears had accumulated a wealth of customer shopping data.
Sears had anticipated the changing trends of retailing so many times in the past. But it missed the biggest change in recent history, the shift to online shopping.
Arthur Martinez: We closed the catalog in 1993. The internet hadn’t been created yet. We had to focus on the mother lode, which were the roughly 900 full-line stores.
In 1999 we started paying attention to the internet. And we did it much sooner than anyone else in the business. We already had the infrastructure to deliver appliances to people from a warehouse. So we launched sears.com with the appliance business.
Eddie Lampert talked about spending a lot of money, but he didn’t build much of an online business".