This article is from today's FT Opinion email. Sign up to receive a daily digest of the big issues straight to your inbox. The giant US retailer Sears, the "everything store", offers a cautionary tale about how companies across the sector have failed to keep ahead of their customers' needs and shopping behaviour. For Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, who explores the company's bankruptcy filing in a column this week, it is not just a sad tale of a once-great American business fallen on hard times. The demise of the "19th-century offline Amazon", as Andrew describes it, is a warning to those other companies who have failed to come up with adequate strategies in response to the online retail threat.