O NCE UPON a time the thud of the Sears catalogue on American doormats brought the possibility of a shopping bonanza. The arrival of its Christmas “Wish Book” heralded the dog-earing of pages with thousands of dollars of imagined gifts. At one point it was the world’s largest retailer. But on October 15th its parent firm, Sears Holding Corporation ( SHLD ), filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, bringing a storied name in shopping to its knees.

It was the Amazon of its day. From the end of the 19th century Sears, Roebuck and Company sold through its catalogues everything from ready-to-build houses and dog treadmills to men’s girdles and opium. It transformed shopping, shipping its goods to every part of America. Black Americans living in the South could shop without being mistreated at local stores, either on price or service, says Louis Hyman, a historian at Cornell University.

Its collapse in recent years has been startlingly rapid, even as many big retailers struggle to survive Amazon’s innovations. The firm’s stockmarket value has crashed, from $30bn in 2007 to $69m on October 17th; it is carrying almost $5bn in debt. Revenues were $16.7bn last year, down from $50.7bn in 2007, and the company has not been profitable since 2010. Of the 3,418 American stores it had in 2007, only 866 remained by August this year.

Much of the blame has been directed at Eddie Lampert, a hedge-fund manager who oversaw the firm’s ill-advised merger with Kmart, another struggling department store, in 2005. ESL Investments, his fund, is SHLD ’s main shareholder. Mr Lampert, who became chief executive in 2013 (and stood down on October 15th), had no experience in retail. He flogged valuable brands such as Craftsman, a line of tools. He refused to invest in bricks-and-mortar stores. He did spend on Sears’s website, but it is still considered clunky. He split the business into scores of divisions, hoping competition between them would increase profits. Instead staff revolted, even promoting other firms’ brands rather than Sears’s own to avoid paying royalties to rival units.

Mr Lampert does have defenders. He took over a dying firm, argues James Schrager of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Once innovative, it had been stagnating for decades. Its stores had become shabby and it had diversified too far, into areas such as insurance and property. In 1993, the year before Jeff Bezos started selling books online, it had abandoned its mail-order business, which had once given it a competitive advantage.

Other big retailers, such as Target, Walmart and J.C. Penney, will benefit from Sears’s collapse as they too strive to fend off Amazon. But the long-term prospects for department stores are dim. Between 2000 and 2017 their share of American customer spending declined by 4.4 percentage points, more than any other kind of retailer. Sears was not alone in occupying the uncomfortable ground between discounters whose prices it could not match and high-end retailers whose stores and products outshone its own. The Kmart on W Addison Street in Chicago, Sears’ hometown (whose last Sears closed in July), has the look of a hard discounter, with deals advertised on neon-yellow cardboard signs and cashback promises, but not the low prices. Meanwhile, non-store retailers are ever more popular with consumers.

Mr Lampert insists that Sears will become leaner and profitable again. Few believe him. Soon all that may remain of Sears are copies of its old catalogues, on sale on Amazon for $1.88.