From an article by Derek Thompson in the latest issue of The Atlantic:
In the late 19th century, soon after a network of rail lines and telegraph wires had stitched together a rural country, mail-order companies like Sears built the first national retail corporations. Today the Sears catalog seems about as innovative as the prehistoric handsaw, but in the 1890s, the 500-page “Consumer’s Bible” popularized a truly radical shopping concept: the mail would bring stores to consumers.
But in the early 1900s, as families streamed off farms and into cities, chains like J. C. Penney and Woolworth sprang up to greet them. Sears followed, building more than 300 stores between 1925 and 1929 that specialized in “hard” goods like household appliances and spare parts for a mobile technology revolutionizing retail: the rapidly proliferating automobile. The company’s focus on the emerging middle-class market paid off so well that by mid-century, Sears’s revenue approached 1 percent of the entire U.S. economy. But its dominance had deflated by the late 1980s, after more competitors arose and as the blue-collar consumer base it had leaned on collapsed.
Now that Internet cables have replaced telegraph wires, American consumers are reverting to their turn-of-the-century shopping habits. The car is fading in the American imagination. Malls are shutting down. Families, meanwhile, have rediscovered the Consumer’s Bible while sitting on their couches, and this time, it’s in a Web browser. E‑commerce has nearly doubled in the past four years, and Amazon now takes in revenue of more than $60 billion annually. The Internet means to the 21st century what the postal service meant to the late 1800s: it welcomes retailers like Amazon into every living room.
“Sears took advantage of the U.S. postal system and railways in the early 20th century just as transportation costs were falling,” says Richard White, a historian at Stanford, “and Amazon has done the same with the Web.”
