Clearly Sears already had the infrastructure in place to bring customers and “home delivery” together, they’d been doing it for decades

I had to drive past this place to head off to college: en.wikipedia.org - Sears, Roebuck %26 Company Mail Order Building(Los_Angeles,_California)

"In December 1926, Sears, Roebuck & Company of Chicago announced that it would build a nine-story, height-limit building on East Ninth Street (later renamed Olympic Boulevard) at Soto Street to be the mail-order distribution center for the Rocky Mountain and Pacific Coast states...
The building was erected in six months, using materials that were all made in Los Angeles County, with the exception of the steel window sashes.[6] To accomplish the feat, the contractor had six steam shovels and a large labor force working night and day shifts. It was reported that rock and sand for the cement work were being delivered to the site at the rate of twenty carloads daily.[5] When the building was completed in late June 1927, the Los Angeles Times reported that:

"All records for the erection of a huge structure were believed to have been broken when last week the Scofield Engineering Construction Company turned over the new $5,000,000 department store and mail-order house at Ninth street and Boyle avenue to Sears, Roebuck & Co., having completed this height-limit project in 146 working days, or 171 days of elapsed time."[6]

The building had nine stories and a basement, with a total floor area of approximately 11 acres (45,000 m2).[6] The building was one of nine Sears mail-order distribution centers built between 1910 and 1929.[2][7]

The sprawling distribution center was a marvel of technology when it opened; employees filled orders by roller-skating around the facility, picking up items and dropping them onto corkscrew slides for distribution by truck or rail. The building was one of the largest in Los Angeles, and it attracted more than 100,000 visitors in its first month of operation, not including shoppers at the ground-floor retail store.[2][8]

Over the years, the building's 226-foot (69 m) Art Deco tower and "Sears" sign became a "beacon for Eastsiders returning home on area freeways,"[8] and has been described by the Los Angeles Conservancy as "one of the dominant visual icons of the Eastside" of Los Angeles.[9]"

This enormous distribution center adjoins not only I-5 - the artery connecting San Diego through Seattle - but a large spaghetti interchange interconnecting with two more major LA freeways and is within a couple of miles of a third.

Ever wonder how all the stuff gets from the Port of Long Beach to the rest of the country? The Long Beach freeway can't nearly handle it all.

Much of it goes via the Alameda Corridor, a 1990s retrofitting of the rail line that used to service the Firestone and GM plants before they closed in the 1970s. It starts at the Port of Long Beach and terminates in a rail yard pretty much just behind the Sears building. en.wikipedia.org - Alameda Corridor

Workers? Boyle Heights is next door.

Electricity for all that newfangled computer stuff? Bethlehem Steel had a major foundry a mile or so away. It closed in 1982. Don't know much about metallurgy except that steel production is an electricity hog, so the grid in that area was robustly built.

--> Agree with goofy that in retrospect 1970s Sears management couldn't have done much worse.

--sutton
whose mother took him for back-to-school clothes there a time or two in the late 1960s/early 70s. Not a lot of hand-me-downs for a growing boy from two older sisters