Now we may find out if that theory will work. As an operating company, the new Sears is in trouble. So it plans to cut costs, fire employees and sell real estate. This week Sears reported that same-store sales for the last two months were down 5.2 percent from a year ago. There are a few weeks left before its fiscal year ends on Jan. 28, but Sears faces a stark reality: Retailers make all their money at Christmas. Or they don’t make money at all.

Through the years that Mr. Lampert dominated Sears as chairman and principal shareholder, he made it clear that he thought retailers worried too much about sales growth and not enough about profitability. He thought they spent too much money on fixing up their stores. He hired retail executives, then shoved them aside when they did not accept his wisdom. The current chief executive, Lou D’Ambrosio, had a long career at I.B.M. and ran Avaya, a technology company that went private during his tenure. Mr. D’Ambrosio never had any experience in retail before he was hired to run Sears.

Mr. Lampert declined to be interviewed this week. His last public comment on Sears seems to have come nearly a year ago, when he told shareholders the company’s “financial results remain at unacceptable levels.” They are much worse now.

When things were better, he wrote to investors more frequently. At the end of 2005, he explained why the rest of the industry was foolish:

“One subject where the conventional wisdom has been much on display recently is the issue of capital expenditures. As I made clear in my very first letter to shareholders, we do not subscribe to the view (seemingly widely held) that more is better, or that there is a certain amount that must be spent on cap ex every year. The question we ask at Sears (and I believe every business should ask) is: ‘What is the most productive way to allocate the capital that we have on hand and the cash flow the company generates?’ In some cases, spending money on the construction of new stores or the updating of existing stores produces real bottom-line benefits. In those cases, increasing capital expenditures is an attractive option. But if the analysis shows that allocating capital in some other way — for example, on acquisitions or stock repurchases — will generate superior returns, then it would be a mistake to plow money into capital expenditures merely because that is the ‘accepted practice’ or ‘expected.’ (That approach — of uncritically following accepted or prevailing practice — is what led many telecom companies astray as they tried to ‘keep up’ with WorldCom’s expenditure levels.)”

That comparison to WorldCom was telling. If he was going to seek out an example of the folly of following conventional wisdom, he might have tried to find one that did not involve fraud.