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178 years of history, and now this?!?
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Are the guys who sold out Woot about to destroy another beloved brand?
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Hammacher Schlemmer may be next victim of serial ecommerce bunglers
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NEW YORK, NY - MARCH 19, 2026 - With breathtaking hubris, the disgraced Woot.com leaders who sold the company to Amazon emerged today to shamelessly announce that they'd somehow gotten their hands on the beloved catalog brand Hammacher Schlemmer.
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Showing little awareness of how deep they're in over their heads, the ex-Woot sellouts declared that the venerable 178-year-old retailer had fallen into the lap of their anonymously named shell company, Stores.com.
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"Hey, look, I can't believe it myself," said Matt Rutledge, CEO of Stores.com and founder and ex-CEO of Woot, blinking in bewilderment at the vastness of the task before him. "You sell a few Bags o' Crap, have a few laughs, next thing you know you've got the keys to one of the 20th century's most fascinating retailers.
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"Wow. I mean… just… wow…" Rutledge continued, staring into the middle distance, his voice trailing off.
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Rutledge and much of the Woot founding team fled the mess they'd made at Amazon in 2012, stealthily regrouping to launch a near-identical "funny" daily deal store at Meh.com because they couldn't think of anything else to do. That store remains in business as of this writing.
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When asked how the old gang planned to avoid the fate that turned Woot into a hollow parody of its once-vital self, Rutledge paused a long time before answering. “Sell cool stuff, I guess,” he finally, tentatively replied. “Like, remember when Hammacher Schlemmer sold that one-person submarine for like a million dollars or whatever? That was cool.”
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When asked how the old gang planned to avoid the fate that turned Woot into a hollow parody of its once-vital self, Rutledge paused a long time before answering. "Sell cool stuff, I guess," he finally, tentatively replied. "Like, remember when Hammacher Schlemmer sold that one-person submarine for like a million dollars or whatever? That was cool."
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Myriad questions remain about how exactly the Stores.com operation will overcome its limitations to restore the past glories of the esteemed Hammacher Schlemmer, whose now-defunct Manhattan store was a landmark for decades in the greatest city in the world. Can it credibly take back the mantle of innovation from the likes of Kickstarter? Can it translate the appeal of the classic catalog into the digital age? Pressed for details, Rutledge changed the subject.
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"The name Hammacher Schlemmer still means a lot to people," said Rutledge. "At this point, that's all we've got."
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Watch the tragedy unfold at
hammacher.com, if you can stand it. Or
commiserate in the Meh forum.
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