Sears was once so dominant it sold everything from houses to life insurance through its iconic catalog, a retail empire that defined American consumer life for over a century. Under hedge fund manager Eddie Lampert — who merged Sears with Kmart in 2005 and became CEO in 2013 — the company pursued financial engineering and stock buybacks instead of the store investment needed to compete with Walmart, Target, and Amazon, while internal divisions competed against each other for resources. Sears filed for bankruptcy in October 2018, closing hundreds of stores and leaving behind one of American business history’s starkest illustrations of how short-term financial thinking can hollow out even the mightiest of institutions.
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