Yes, they could have survived, but Sears like a lot of other big department stores couldn’t see the internet as an outlet for selling. Most of them were created about 120 years before they went out of business. Sears started as a catalog sales company, so the jump to the internet shouldn’t have been to big for it, but they lost their roots. You know, Sears used to sell houses out of catalogs and ship them to your location to build (they were metric measurements, too). They forgot how to do that, apparently.