They should have been... after Prodigy (an early online service that Sears and IBM co-started) failed, their CTO (or whatever the position was) was certain "the internet is just a fad" and they didn't invest. They literally had the infrastructure that if they'd just put their catalogs online for phone orders to start with, Amazon might not have expanded beyond books and taken off like they did. I remember when Sears shut down catalog sales, I knew they weren't going to last at that point.