Sears Used To Be Like Amazon, But You Could Buy Whole Houses And Cars From It: COTD

The advent of e-commerce has changed the world. You can buy entire vehicles from across the world and have them delivered to your door without ever leaving bed. Sites like Amazon, eBay, and Alibaba have countless items all just clicks away. In the past, that was the job of stores like Montgomery Ward and Sears.

Today, Matt wrote about how automakers tried to become software companies, but that isn’t really working out so well. Really, it joins a long list of things carmakers have tried to become, like lame “lifestyle” brands or in the case of my beloved Smart, a “viral” Internet brand. While you’re cleaning up the vomit off of the floor, let our readers take you on a nostalgia trip.

EXL500 starts it off with:

Sears could have been Amazon.

Andrew Daisuke correctly points out that stores like Sears actually was Amazon before Amazon became a thing:

sears was amazon! every house in the country got the catalogue and ordered tons of various stuff.

Rob Schneider notes some of the cool stuff you could buy from Sears:

For a while, you could even order the house from the Sears catalog. I’ve been in a couple of them. They were nice. Small by current standards, but overall great little homes.

As does Peter d:

I had a relatives who had a Sears house. They were farmers and as the suburbs encroached on their farm they had lots of stories about their new neighbors’ incompetence in the wilderness of their new neighborhood. Lots of stories about had to help this one do something simple… also they made the best cinnamon rolls ever. Always loved to visit and explore the barn.

Sears not only sold houses, but motorcycles, engines, tires, batteries, tools, and oh yeah, whole cars. You could have lived your entire life out of a Sears catalog, even more so than you could from Amazon from today.

Moving on to Cold Start, Jason showed us the deceptive-looking Ley T6. Gilbert Wham wins a nomination for this one-liner:

That is the most Richard Scarry looking car to ever exist IRL.

Finally, we land at Mark’s Shitbox Showdown, where Sid Bridge tells you how to build your own Tamaro:

Best I can guess here is that the Tamaro owner had a milkshake made out of cocaine, Mountain Dew, Aderal, Monster Energy Drink and Gelato, used that to down a bowl of pills, washed it back with a case of 4Loko he had been hoarding, stuck a handful of LSD sugar cubes in his mouth, took a nitrous oxide enema, had a serious craving for tacos, went outside to his Taurus and woke up to this thing three months later.

Have a great evening, everyone!