Ironic that Sears, the original retail innovator, proved to be so poor an innovator in the 21st century when confronted with both brick-and-mortar and online competition.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, Sears was arguably a precursor to Amazon. Consumers across a vast and growing country thumbed through massive Sears, Roebuck and Company catalogs to order products to meet many of their needs — appliances, clothing, toys, medicines — and the list went on for hundreds of pages.

Much as Amazon employees do today, Sears workers in massive warehouses, the largest in Chicago, organized, sorted and mailed the products through the Postal Service to Americans who waited eagerly for their arrival on rural farms and in small villages.

As remote areas became fewer and the U.S. population spread across a vast suburbia during the post-World War II economic and population boom, Sears’ business model moved from its catalog to its growing number of stores, which by the 1970s were becoming the anchors for many a shopping mall.

Then the landscape changed. Walmart erected its massive super centers across the land, undercutting prices and stealing the working-class consumers that had made Sears such a retail giant. Big-box hardware stores Lowes and Home Depot competed for the consumers who had gone to Sears for their tools and appliances.

This first assault on Sears was soon followed by a second — the emergence of retail sales on the Internet, most successfully of course, by Amazon. Sears, which had written the catalog on direct sales to consumers, failed to successfully meet any of these changes.

Over the past five years more than 1,000 Sears stores have been shuttered, with company losses approaching $6 billion. Successful product lines were sold off, most prominently Lands’ End, a clothing line. On Monday, Sears filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in New York City, saying it faced $11.3 billion in liabilities against $7 billion in assets.

The filing is intended to provide a path to further shrink, reorganize and rid Sears of bad debt to save it. For the sake of its 68,000 workforce, and because many of its stores still anchor malls that are also struggling, it would be great to see this effort succeed. But the odds appear long, with a more likely outcome that Sears goes the way of Toys “R” Us or Sports Authority.

In this case, a part of Americana would pass into history.

The Day editorial board meets with political, business and community leaders to formulate editorial viewpoints. It is composed of President and Publisher Timothy Dwyer, Executive Editor Izaskun E. Larraneta, Owen Poole, copy editor, and Lisa McGinley, retired deputy managing editor. The board operates independently from The Day newsroom.