On Monday, Sears filed for bankruptcy protection, becoming the most fabled in a long list of old-school brick-and-mortar retail brands to go under in this eerie moment of late capitalism. A massive brand that was once the biggest retailer in America—selling everything from build-it-yourself houses to cocaine and opium via its famed catalog—is in the red at a time of historic economic growth, and that's thanks in part to the way the economy is structured today. Some of the company's problems seem to have originated or grown worse under the leadership of Edward Lampert, a billionaire hedge-fund guy who took over in 2005 and engineered a bunch of reorganizational schemes that failed to fully reckon with the trend toward e-commerce and pilfered its assets. But as with Toys R Us and other once-ubiquitous brands, it's tough not to suspect part of what happened here was that Amazon, the most powerful company in America (led by the richest man in ever Jeff Bezos ), squeezed Sears to death.