Its big book couldn't compete with the onslaught of specialty catalogs.

Mail order operations were shut down to focus on saving retail.

- So why shop anywhere else?

Electric Avenue at Montgomery Ward.

♪ Montgomery Ward, the brand name savings store ♪ - [Narrator] Sears was in danger too, but executives ignored alarm bells.

Retail sales were down, but revenue was up, thanks to profitable financial service offerings and the launch of the Discover credit card.

♪ The dawn of Discover ♪ - [Narrator] While executives focused elsewhere, Sears' retail dominance slipped away.

In 1990, Walmart overtook the sluggish giant as the country's largest retailer.

- One of the last heads of Sears said, "Sears is like a dinosaur.

"If you whack its tail with a baseball bat, "a decade later the impulse will get to the brain."

- When I worked at Sears, the younger guys that worked at the store, we always talked about how old the customers were.

It wasn't a place that my friends and I picked to shop.

- [Narrator] Not only were there new and more exciting places to shop, but by the mid 90's, there was an entirely new way to shop, the internet.

At first, the mail order giants tried to adapt.

- One of my last jobs was running their internet operation, as small as it was.

We got wards.com going.

We made some dollars with it, just very early stages of it.

- [Narrator] But the 125-year-old company couldn't hang on.

Montgomery Ward filed for bankruptcy in 1997 and closed all stores in 2001.

Sears was not much better off.

After discontinuing its once-famous catalog, rival Kmart corporation purchased Sears in 2005.

The combination of two struggling brands didn't revive either one.

Just as Amazon's Jeff Bezos was named the richest man in the world in 2018, Sears' parent company entered bankruptcy.