[Leica] IMG: Remnant of the Past

Fri Oct 8 12:24:51 PDT 2021

I agree with much of your analysis, Don. Of course hindsight is 20/20, but indeed large companies are notorious for either ignoring or misinterpreting paradigm changes. I joined the old AT&T in 1990, at the HQ in New Jersey, 6 years after the monopoly was broken up by the consent decree. At that time, AT&T decided that the action was in the traditional long-distance and international phone service, calling card and operator calls etc., and the boring local business could be divested to the Baby Bells. Well, we all know how that ended. The AT&T of today is in fact one of the babies, having swallowed the parent.

In retailing, companies in the middle like Sears, JC Penney, Kmart, are all dead meat.

Cheers,
Nathan

Nathan Wajsman
photo at frozenlight.eu

http://www.fotocycle.dk/paws
http://www.greatpix.eu
http://www.frozenlight.eu

YNWA

> On 8 Oct 2021, at 16:34, Don Dory via LUG <lug at leica-users.org> wrote:
> 
> I hope Nathan chimes in to what I am going to say.  My opinion is that
> large companies develop myopia when large changes in their environment
> happen.  Sears owned the tool and appliance business in the U.S.  They had
> warehouses and distribution down.  Home Depot happened and they didn't
> respond.  Amazon started up and they discontinued their catalogue
> operations.  They fiddled on the appliance front and lost to a thousand
> cuts: now Home Depot sells tools, lumber and appliances as well as all
> kinds of things for the home.
> 
> Personally, I believe that management fell in love with high margins on
> soft goods and made a decision to expand in that direction. Not their
> specialty so they were  killed by competition both upscale and downscale.
> 
> Kodak essentially invented digital photography but couldn't let go of the
> high margins from the total film business.  Xerox couldn't imagine what
> computers could do.  Ford and GM can't see how fast the change to EV cars
> will be: my prediction is that the change from ICE cars will be in the same
> exponential S curve that digital photography was.  Self driving taxis will
> do the cars what the iphone did to point and shoot cameras.
> 
> On Fri, Oct 8, 2021 at 9:22 AM Jim Nichols <jhnichols at lighttube.net> wrote:
> 
>> Thanks for your comments, Nathan.  I think Sears got caught up in the
>> shopping center craze. In Nashville, they had a fine store near downtown
>> in the 50s and 60s which we always visited.  Then, as suburban shopping
>> centers opened, they tried to open a smaller store in each of them, and
>> the large store deteriorated.  In a few years, people lost interest. The
>> large store was sold to the Salvation Army, which uses it as its main
>> location in Nashville.
>> 
>> On 10/7/21 11:56 PM, Nathan Wajsman wrote:
>>> Jim, you must do a book of those stories some day!
>>> 
>>> As for Sears, I remember shopping there quite a bit when we lived in
>> Gainesville, FL from 1984 to 1987. I still have my very first tripod,
>> bought there and branded Sears, when I took up photography as a hobby in
>> 1985.
>>> 
>>> I think I was last inside a Sears a few years ago during a visit to
>> Puerto Rico. A sad, rundown appearance, clearly a place in terminal decline.
>>> 
>>> Cheers,
>>> Nathan
>>> 
>>> Nathan Wajsman
>>> photo at frozenlight.eu
>>> 
>>> http://www.fotocycle.dk/paws
>>> http://www.greatpix.eu
>>> http://www.frozenlight.eu
>>> 
>>> YNWA
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> On 5 Oct 2021, at 15:47, jshulman at judgecrater.com wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> You indeed paved the way in color printing, which had been renowned for
>> not only inaccurate color but iffy registration.  I recall seeing purple
>> hams from K-Mart circulars, usually slightly out of register ("purple ham"
>> became shorthand in our house for a K-Mart shopping trip.)
>>>> 
>>>> In the 1980s and 1990s I was the marketing director for a catalog
>> company that, though considerable growth, printed more than six million
>> catalogs a year in eighteen variations.  After considering several major
>> printing companies, including Donnelley (also famed for printing telephone
>> directories,) we chose World Color Press, a relative newcomer that was
>> building brand new plants around the nation.
>>>> 
>>>> Our catalog was slated for production at a rural Wisconsin site,
>> recently opened in what had been farmland.  During a tour of the facility
>> my rep mentioned that they printed Playboy magazine, and that some
>> potential clients refused to do business with them for that reason.  I said
>> it sure didn't matter to us, so long as our job was done properly and on
>> budget.   We arrived at the proofing room, with 5000K lighting for a
>> uniform standard of judging match of the original files to printed pages.
>> There was a huge proofing table filled with copies of that month's
>> centerfold, being proofed by about six ladies who could have been
>> archetypes of Grandma from a Normal Rockwell illustration.  They were bent
>> over the table, peering through 10X Zeiss loupes, makes sure the pubic hair
>> was in register.
>>>> 
>>>> I walked up to one of the ladies and said, "Interesting job."  Without
>> pickup up her head she replied, "Keeps the family fed and the kids in
>> school," with uninterrupted attention to some model's pudendum.
>>>> 
>>>> When I think of all the teenage boys who were worried that mom would
>> find the stash of Playboys hidden under the bed, I also consider that
>> Grandma wanted to make sure they were completely satisfied.
>>>> 
>>>> Jim
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: LUG <lug-bounces+jshulman=judgecrater.com at leica-users.org> On
>> Behalf Of Brian Reid
>>>> Sent: Tuesday, October 5, 2021 9:23 AM
>>>> To: Leica Users Group <lug at leica-users.org>
>>>> Subject: Re: [Leica] IMG: Remnant of the Past
>>>> 
>>>> Sears Roebuck was a major force in advancing color printing, and was
>> THE pioneer in digital color printing.
>>>> 
>>>> By the 1960s, Sears realized that its customers expected the colors
>> printed in its catalog to be spot-on correct. As its VP of catalog sales
>> noted, "Your grandmother will hold the catalog up next to her curtains to
>> see if the colors match. If they match, she will order new sofa cushions.
>> If when the sofa cushions arrive they do not match the curtains, she will
>> return them angrily and stop buying from Sears for a while. The colors in
>> the catalog must be exact."
>>>> 
>>>> By the time I got involved, Sears catalogs were all printed by R. R.
>>>> Donnelley & Sons at its printing plant on Calumet street in Chicago. RR
>> Donnelley won and kept the contract because they were able to do a better
>> job of printing accurate colors than the competition. My involvement was
>> advising them on digital color separation technology so they could use
>> 7-color presses; the classic optical separation process didn't work well
>> past 4 colors and the filters were mind-numbingly expensive.
>>>> 
>>>> When my mother buys sofa cushions by mail order, she evaluates their
>> color using the screen on her iMac. Even if she could lift it to hold it
>> next to her curtains, proper comparison of glowing-screen colors with
>> fabric colors is impossible. The catalogs were better. I sometimes wish I
>> had kept one.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> On 2021-10-04 13:29, Jim Nichols wrote:
>>>>> As I glanced around me on a cloudy morning, I saw this reminder of the
>>>>> days before Amazon and other on-line sources.  Sears Roebuck, and its
>>>>> rival, Montgomery Ward, were the mainstay of rural America.
>>>>> 
>>>>> http://www.gallery.leica-users.org/v/OldNick/20211004-DSCF3289-Enhance
>>>>> d.JPG.html
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>> 
>>>> 
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>>> _______________________________________________
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>> --
>> Jim Nichols
>> Tullahoma, TN USA
>> 
>> 
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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Don
> don.dory at gmail.com
> 
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