If you're familiar with the retail relationship between Apple and Sears, you know that, historically speaking, it's been spotty at best-- if by "spotty" you mean "like a train wreck and you can't look away." Sears was one of the national resellers that got axed back when Uncle Steve was cleaning house; while it was nice that potential customers could stop in at just about any mall in America and check out a Performa, it wasn't so nice that those Performas were generally off, crashed, mouseless, covered in graffiti, or on fire. The Sears method of selling Macs was apparently to set up a display model and then covertly invite the local Ritalin kids and gang members to deface the Mac as much as humanly possible while the store personnel studiously ignores all such activity.

So Sears was out, and didn't much care, since they rarely sold any Macs anyway. (Gee, we wonder why?) But then the iMac changed everything. Suddenly Apple had a bona fide hit on its hands, and Sears wanted a piece of that action; likewise, Apple had to admit that having iMacs on display in every Sears store would do great things for the product's visibility-- provided, of course, that the display iMacs hadn't been smashed in with a claw hammer and then melted into a blackened glob by means of an acetylene torch. Eventually a deal got hammered out. Sears promised to behave, and last June the chain returned to the Mac fold, selling iMacs (and eventually iBooks).

But do you remember what happened when Best Buy sold Macs poorly, got ditched by Apple, and came crawling back to get a slice of the iMac pie? One word: Hindenburg. Some retailers just never change their spots, and concerns over stocking multiple flavors of Apple's candy-colored space egg (not to mention a sales force that would seemingly rather bleed from the eye sockets than actually sell a Mac) led to Best Buy's return to "No Macs Here" status. Oh, the humanity.

Guess what? At least at our local store, Sears hasn't changed much, either. The display model iMacs and iBooks are always trashed (recently the iBook was missing every single key from its keyboard), the store "help" are masters in the field of active avoidance, and the prices are typically even $100 higher than Apple's. So it came as no particular surprise to us when we received an anonymous and unverified report that Apple is pulling back out of Sears as of the end of May. Remember, folks, at this point we have to classify this news as purely unsubstantiated rumor-- we rarely hear things first, so we're a mite skeptical-- but we have to ask ourselves, if Apple isn't ditching Sears, why the heck not?