Remember the Sears jingle from decades ago, "Sears has everything"? Well if they ever did, they sure don't now. With the demise of Service Merchandise, Ames (ugh) Zayres (not quite ugh), and no K-Mart for miles, anyone who wants to shop at anywhere-but-Wal-Mart, Sears is about all there is.

But it's still not enough. Our local Sears (Brunswick, Maine) has an ugly storefront, and is dismal within. When my son decided that the time had come to buy a riding lawn mower to use for summer work from now through college, we checked to see what Sears had to offer. At the low end (that's where he was, he was just 15), the Sears mower was $80 more and the warranty was 2 years shorter than the same model down the street at Lowes.

The Sears Audio Department is flat, the Appliance Department doesn't apply, and if you want to don anything besides cheap work clothes, well Sears is not the place for one stop shopping.

My wife and I have marveled that Sears has lasted, here, as long as it has, and speculate that the reason it has is becuase of the Naval Air Station next door. Since that was one of the bases named for closing in the last round, the clock is ticking, and Sears has, at most, a few years to ramp up or this branch will be down for the count, and out.

They make good appliances and tools, but that is absolutely it. (And those are fairly high-priced compared to other retailers.) Their stores are simply depressing. We have two in my city: one somehow manages to look 20 years older than any other store in the mall, while the stand-alone is terribly laid out and would surely be razed by any self-respecting retailer. And the scary thing is, our K-Mart stores are even worse!

The real problem with the death of Sears (and it's been a walking corpse ever since it ditched its catalog sales more than 20 years) lies in the fact that both Sears and it's former rival Montgomery-Ward missed out on what should have been their saving grace -- the Internet.

What made these two retailers not just sales powerhouses but cultural icons was their ability to bring almost anything, almost anywhere, via mailorder. Both either missed or just completely ignored the catalog business while Wal-Mart started cutting into their storefront sales. By the time e-tail was common, Wards was already dead. When Sears chopped its catalog in 1993, e-tail existed, but not from Sears. All that left for Sears to compete with was storefronts and merchandise. As has been said above, except for a very few items, Sears is no longer merchandise competitive, and it was never really competitive on price compared to the discount houses, even when K-Marts were still run by Kresge and weren't part of the Sears organization.

What's going to ultimately happen isn't a mystery. Sears will die, and it's profitable lines, such as Craftsman tools, will be spun off, possibly to be manufactured offshore. It's a shame, as some of the happiest hours of my childhood were spent pouring over the Sears catalog, and the loss of Sears as a brand name is almost as sad for people of my age (mid-40s) as the death of Oldsmobile was. I suppose that I'm mourning the loss of buggy-whip makers, in real terms, but I still find it a little sad.

What I've been waiting for is Sears to make an agreement with Home Depot or Lowes to sell Craftsman tools and Kenmore appliances. Doing that would pretty much doom their retail stores, but if they're going down the tubes, anyway, they'll make the deal because it would unquestionably be lucrative.

This may already be in the cards. Ownership of brand names Kenmore, Craftsman, and DieHard was transfered last year to a third company (KCD IP) and Sears Holdings license the names from it. This would make licensing the names to another set of retailers easier.