Sears, the 125-Year-Old Iconic Retailer, Has 24 Hours To Survive (cnbc.com) 271
An anonymous reader shares a report: Sears, the employer of more than 68,000 filed for bankruptcy in October. Its last shot at survival is a $4.6 billion proposal put forward by its chairman, Eddie Lampert, to buy the company out of bankruptcy through his hedge fund, ESL Investments. ESL is the only party offering to buy Sears as a whole, people familiar with the situation tell CNBC. Without that bid or another like it, liquidators will break the company up into pieces. But as Lampert stares down a deadline of Dec. 28 to submit his offer, he is quickly running out of time. As of Thursday afternoon, Lampert had neither submitted his bid, nor rounded up financing, the people familiar said. Should Lampert submit a bid, Sears' advisors would have until Jan. 4 to decide whether he is a "qualified bidder." Only then, could ESL take part in an auction against liquidation bids on Jan. 14. It is possible Lampert, Sears' largest investor, secures financing in time to meet the deadline, these people said.
Business Model (Score:5, Insightful)
When Sears operated in the 19th century their business model was to provide a large catalog of merchandise that was ordered by the customer electronically (telegraph) for fulfillment via delivery (railroad) to the customer. They switched to brick and mortar when their business model became obsolete. Ironically they're going out of business because they've failed to adapt to the return of their original business model.
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Re:Business Model (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Business Model (Score:4, Interesting)
It's got nothing to do with business model (Score:5, Informative)
The real problem is that in America you no longer make money by running successful companies. You make money by firing up a startup and waiting for a buyout or by buying up an existing, longstanding company and gutting it like a fish. That's the reason guys like Lampert go to school for business, they're learning how to legally do things that should be illegal.
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At the moment he's been loaning them money to set himself up as the primary creditor so he gets paid when they liquidate.
All the good stuff is gone. The assets of Sears that are left will barely cover the costs of bankruptcy. What *is* worth money are various tax credits that Sears holds. Lampert can use those to cover tax liabilities in other areas, but not if the company is liquidated.
https://webcache.googleusercon... [googleusercontent.com]
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The real problem is that in America you no longer make money by running successful companies. You make money by firing up a startup and waiting for a buyout or by buying up an existing, longstanding company and gutting it like a fish.
This is complete horseshit. You are cherry-picking one high-profile example of someone being a Trump-like dick in the aftermath of an enormous merger in the most turbulent sector in the entire world and painting the entire US economy with the same brush, which is just nonsen
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Do you have ANY numbers to back up your ridiculous claims?
He never does. He just makes outrageous claims that read well to people looking to buy into some outrage he's peddling. There was one some months ago where he was complaining about how much money Jeff Bezos made each day and if you bothered to do the math, it came out to some impossible yearly figure where Amazon would need to more than double value each year for it to work out. Either the figures were completely pulled from his ass, or he grabbed something he'd read and tried to extrapolate in a completely
It's not Ayn Rand's fault (Score:5, Insightful)
But Lambert was only doing the Ayn Rand thing for fun. His real goal was, is and continues to be bleeding Sears dry in a legal manner.
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Re:Business Model (Score:5, Interesting)
No, the first warning signs appeared back in the 80's as Sears began to slowly lose ground to big box retailers. Circuit City and Best Buy chipped away at it's home electronics and home appliances business. Lowes and Home Depot chipped away at it's tools and home appliances business. By the 90's, Target was eating away at pretty much all of Sears' traditional markets, and even Wal-Mart started to take it's share as the death of the middle class accelerated. And then there's Amazon...
There was also mismanagement problems as a great deal of power had devolved to the corporate buyers (who individually decided what Sears would and wouldn't carry) and the regional managers (who controlled where and when stores would be opened and closed).
Or, to put it another way - the problems at Sears go back a long way, and it's been quietly dying for decades. At worst, Lambert accelerated the process.
If you've been paying attention to American retail (as opposed to parroting crap you read somewhere but don't understand)... Chains are dying, and malls are becoming deserted. This isn't due to bricks and mortar being obsolete (though the net has played a role), but rather due to the loss of purchasing power among the American middle class.
Walmart is an increasing threat to the economy not because bricks and mortar aren't obsolete... But because they sell stuff cheaply, and in real terms American's have ever less purchasing power.
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Revises my definition of Lifetime I guess (Score:4, Funny)
All those Craftsman tools I own with a lifetime warranty, appear to have just run out of life in the warranty...
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The warranty is still honored by the new owners.
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I believe Stanley Black & Decker bought out the Craftsman line (last January for 700 to 900 million?).
The lifetime warranty should still apply... ?
https://www.craftsman.com/cust... [craftsman.com]
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I used to shop Sears regularly because they sold quality stuff. I still have some Craftsman tools (purchased at Sears quite a while ago) and a couple Kenmore appliances (ditto). My cars used to always ride on Sears tires.
It’s been sad to watch the company go down the drain.
Yet another thing to make me feel old (Score:2)
When I was a kid, Sears was a cool store that sold Craftsman tools (most of my tools still are), and had a candy counter that was the only place to get Swedish Fish and chocolate covered orange candy.
Now it will be "back in my day there was a store called Sears..."
Amazon didn't kill Sears (Score:4, Interesting)
Eddie Lampert did.
He knew years ago the most valuable thing that Sears had was the land under the buildings. Sears, like many older companies owned the land on which their stores sat.
The long therm plan was always to milk the company of all its assets.
Sears performed a land leaseback deal in 2015 - essentially becoming a tenant on many of its own properties:
https://www.hbsdealer.com/news/sears-pulls-its-sale-leaseback-deal/
Once the retail business stopped spinning off cash, sale of the land assets is all that remains and the plunder of the company will be complete.
Sure, you can blame Amazon but Amazon is simply a fantastic cover for the enormous plunder of company assets pulled off by management in broad daylight.
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I'm not an MBA or accountant, but I think this is a very common thing. It's not in fashion accounting-wise to own a large number of assets. It's the same thing that's driving companies to the OpEx/cloud/subscription model of infrastructure.
What I don't know is why it isn't good for their accounting. Having untold quantities of prime retail space land and buildings on your books should be a good thing. For the MBAs or accountants out there...what's the reasoning? Is there some measure of revenue that gets hu
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Having untold quantities of prime retail space land and buildings on your books should be a good thing.
Not when the state tax man starts rubbing his hands together. You are better off structuring your business to lease everything. So it becomes a deductible expense. And having the land, building and other taxable assets held by a private entity that can structure them as a loss. Now, the loss isn't on your books, so your income statement looks good. The private entity can transfer the paper losses to highly profitable firms and wealthy individuals so they can use them to reduce income taxes. Basically, playi
Cause of death: hedge funds and myopia (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm 43 so I did grow up in an era where Sears, JCPenney and a couple of regional department stores were the source for everything that most middle class families bought. People forget how easy it is to find out about new products and buy them now, compared to even 20 years ago. Memories of Sears for me include the tail end of the catalog, and the place I saw home computers for the first time as well as video games. In those days, these stores were the way people found out about new things to buy, and in some respects were the tastemakers for the average non-fashionista crowd.
I think the hedge fund vultures swooping in and loading up the companies with debt was the accelerator (Toys R Us would probably still be here if they weren't in so much debt.) But the big thing appears to be too much inward focus and not keeping up with competitors. I wonder if this will eventually happen to Amazon as well. Sears was the country's largest employer for quite some time, and I'm sure most people would have considered it foolish to start a retail business that directly competed since they were untouchable. I think I read somewhere that Sears executives didn't even consider Walmart a competitor until they got bigger and started selling similar things.
Companies can't go chase every new idea like an ADHD kitten chasing laser pointers. But, they do need to keep an eye on what's happening and respond to trends. Walking into my local Sears is like walking back into 1985 or 1990. Too agile and you're just chasing the next fad, but milking the cash cow too much will kill it eventually.
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Walking into my local Sears is like walking back into 1985 or 1990.
At least you can walk into one. The one in my town is gone.
Put Sears on Layaway (Score:5, Funny)
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Best post ever.
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Mr Roebuck is laughing at last. (Score:3)
Now finally Roebuck can console himself, "I knew it would go bankrupt, eventually. Glad I got out with my investment intact!".
Loved Sears (Score:2)
They didn't adapt quickly enough, sadly.
Ferret
Re: Loved Sears (Score:2)
Collectors' items (Score:2)
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Yeah, most of it's cheap quality Chinese shit now. Old US-made Craftsman hand tools should be treasured and never sold.
Bye bye escalator (Score:4, Funny)
Poor planning (Score:2)
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As Bones McCoy said... (Score:2)
The last straw for me.... (Score:5, Interesting)
...I needed a car battery. Looked at Sears.com, found one on sale that fit my car. Drove to Sears to buy that battery and found out that said battery was priced wayyyyy higher than online.
I asked how that could be. The answer was staggering: "[Brick and mortar] Sears and sears.com are owned and run by different entities with different pricing structures."
In other words, how to fail at both at one time as neither got my business.
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Brick and mortar Sears wouldn't match/honor. I should have said that in my post instead of just implying it.
Sears was a fly, and Eddie Lampert was the spider (Score:2)
Sears struggled for multiple obvious reasons - online competition, the hollowing out of the middle class, etc. - but Eddie Lampert sucked a lot of juice out of the body while Sears was still alive. And he stands to gain even more [prospect.org] from its bankruptcy:
"As of now, Lampert’s ESL and a related fund called JPP own roughly $2.66 billion in Sears debt. The cash flow just on the interest on these notes is between $200 million and $225 million per year.
"This figure continues to grow—ESL announced on
Re:They should go online only (Score:5, Interesting)
They're by far not the only catalog retailer that got killed by the internet.
Yes, they should have been what Amazon is now. They had it all going for them. They had the whole logistic and infrastructure in place, all they had to do is to simply trade catalog for online presence.
For this, though, you need managers that actually see past their quarter report and can anticipate trends. Old, entrenched corporations rarely have that.
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Re: They should go online only (Score:2)
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They programmed Prodigy
That's kinda sad - maybe they came in too early? Unrelated to Prodigy, I seem to remember that back in the late 1970's my parents (I think using a touch-tone phone) could dial a number, enter the product & account numbers (or by voice), and the package would be magically shipped! The amount due would be appended to the phone bill, or to the charge account. Sears was my Amazon of the '70's: Cassette players, stereos & K-Tel type records, groovy bell bottom pants & platform shoes - even a begin
Simply (Score:2)
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Converting catalog sales to internet sales should be comparatively simple because structurally it's very similar - there's an almost one-to-one mapping between the components & steps of the paper process and the computerised one.
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They did not get killed by the internet. They got killed by Eddie Lampert.
sears killed the catalog before the Internet took (Score:2)
sears killed the catalog before the Internet took off.
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The problem is that by the time Amazon rolled out, Sears had mostly traded catalog for brick and mortar.
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The problem is that by the time Amazon rolled out, Sears had mostly traded catalog for brick and mortar.
No, Sears trade catalog for real estate. Most of their business has to do with land and building holdings, rather than selling goods...which is why they have existed for the past decade, long after their foot traffic had been lost to Wal-Mart and Amazon.
To the bigger topic, I don't know if Sears could have truly made the transition to the internet the way Amazon did. Bezos knew the key was "get big fast", and they did it by offering $20 books for $10, basically letting their early investors subsidize purcha
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"Sears definitely could have positioned itself as "Amazon" but as with Kodak's management at the early stages of digital photography, the management at Sears clung to the past decrying online shopping as "a fade that will not sustain itself into a viable business model.""
Wow. This damn near brought a tear to my eye. No, seriously. I used to work for Kodak, and this is EXACTLY what happened.
Idiot management really thought they could "bury" digital photography after they invented it, so as not to hurt film sa
Re:They should go online only (Score:5, Informative)
They should have won the online race with their catalog history.
They did. They sold them all off and left behind the rotting corpse of brick and mortar to die.
Sears liquidated long ago. The financial term is cash cowing. Selling off everything of value and abandoning the rest.
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Their stores seem way to big for the volume of traffic.
Sears has been out maneuved by the car and now the internet. They should have won the online race with their catalog history.
No. They put K-Mart clothes on the racks and moved Crafstman tool production to China.
It used to me my go-to store for everything. After that, I never went back.
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Have you actually tried buying something from sears.com? It's a pretty bad experience. Their selection sucks, the prices are higher than Amazon's, and it's filled with "affiliate" retailers that basically just drop ship stuff from other retailers.
I bought something from them this Christmas, but only because I had a gift card that I wanted to use before they finally went bankrupt.
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Re: Goodbye Sears (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, I didn't know that Sears used Linux; else why would this article be posted here?
The downfall of Sears is a consequence of the migration of commerce from brick-and-mortar to online. Like many other retailers, they were Amazonized, despite their own online presence. So this story is in the ethos of "news for nerds, stuff that matters".
Re: Goodbye Sears (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, it's also a result of Eddie Lampert's management.
He bought it, skimmed off the value and directed to his own company, and then left a failing business behind him.
This really is a story about how predatory capitalism can strip the value out of a large business, and lead to the failure of that business. This was a transfer of wealth out of one corporation and into another, to the detriment of the corporation being sucked dry.
One might argue that the fiduciary duty to the shareholders of Sears took a back seat to Lampert's holding company. I would argue this was theft on a large scale by a vulture capitalist.
Here in Canada they basically did this, and left all of the employees with no pensions.
This shit really is the most awful aspect of capitalism, rich assholes only looking out for their own profits can destroy large corporations.
You think all those jobs at Sears are coming back? The societal cost of this shit is staggering.
Re: Goodbye Sears (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Goodbye Sears (Score:4, Interesting)
Too many once great businesses have been killed by Wall Street greed.
Sears (and K-Mart).
Toys R Us.
Dick Smith here in Australia.
And no doubt others.
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Which seems rather Odd. Because Sears origin was with Mail to Order Catalog shopping. Online shopping really isn't that much different then from that model.
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Which seems rather Odd. Because Sears origin was with Mail to Order Catalog shopping. Online shopping really isn't that much different then from that model.
Indeed. Other posters have pointed that out. Sears didn't even drop the ball -- they joined the game too late.
Re: Goodbye Sears (Score:5, Interesting)
Which seems rather Odd. Because Sears origin was with Mail to Order Catalog shopping. Online shopping really isn't that much different then from that model.
Indeed. Other posters have pointed that out. Sears didn't even drop the ball -- they joined the game too late.
Hit enter too soon. More correctly, they left a game they were once the masters of, and then re-joined it too late, after the game had changed.
Further extensions of the metaphor are left as an exercise.
Re: Goodbye Sears (Score:5, Interesting)
The downfall of Sears is a consequence of the migration of commerce from brick-and-mortar to online.
Which is pretty crazy considering they were the original mail order phenomenon. Sears' past is not a brick and mortar past. It was catalog orders and many of its customers never saw a store.
They were essentially beat at the game they pioneered. The only real differences between Amazon and the Sears of years ago (that was the only source for goods in much of rural America) is a live catalog versus a paper catalog and a modernization of the distribution system to take advantage of computer-based tracking and organization to partially decentralize it.
I'd have to look carefully at the numbers to decide if Amazon is any more dominant today than Sears was in rural America in the early 1900s.
Re: Goodbye Sears (Score:5, Interesting)
Since, for some reason, we are talking about the Sears and the catalog here on /., I figured I would toss in some trivia that is just as relevant.
The original Sears catalog was printed on outhouse friendly paper. It was done so because the main place the Sears catalog would end up was in the outhouse. Where a it would be the primary reading material while one was taking a shit. Then when you where done you would just rip a page out of the catalog and wipe your ass with it.
Sears knew this was what the primary purpose of the catalog was being used and designed it to act accordingly.
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Re: Goodbye Sears (Score:5, Interesting)
Here is an interesting shot of toilet paper being sold on toilet paper. :-)
Note toilet paper being sold in 1897 Sears Catalog [hathitrust.org]. The offerings start at the bottom left corner of page 23 with a picture that is very much like the modern TP roll, perforations and all. A case of 100 rolls started at $2.25, an amount that was comparable to a day's pay at the time.
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Well it is kind of hard to improve on toilet paper, even after a hundred years. That is if they got it right in "The Puritan." One of the biggest issues with toilet paper, it took them awhile to come up with a perfect way to get all the splinters out.
I wonder if the "The Puritan" is guaranteed to be free of that issue too?
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My favourite is the "Climax" at $3.95 per hundred rolls. Sounds like it was marketed for more than one use in the bathroom. ;-)
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This is a very possible. I'm fully embracing the urban myth part of the Sears catalog here. More of that urban myth is the catalog stopped being used for this purpose some time after they switch to glossy paper. This could have been because by then most houses had access to purpose made cheap toilet paper. But I prefer to believe that it was because shit would simply no longer stick to the glossy pages.
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The explanation given elsewhere that thin paper = cheaper postage seems a lot more feasible.
You are probably correct and this is the original reason. But as to what could be gained from doing that? Well it was well known that a number of the Sears catalogs where used as toilet paper. Good cheap paper was hard to come by on the prairie. It would make good business sense to embrace this use.
Think about it. What would have happened to the catalog after the family got through ordering from it? It probably would have been thrown out if it couldn't be repurposed. If it finds its way in to the
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At one point it seems like it did. Although "need" would be a generous term for it. What I find interesting is today we conciser ads being stuck to things to be something new. Its nice to know that 100 years ago people had the same problem with it that we have today.
Since we are well in the territory of useless trivia I learned one more thing about advertising through out the ages. Did you know that Roman gladiators would give product endorsements? They cashed in on their fame just like modern athl
Re: Goodbye Sears (Score:3, Interesting)
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Not at all. It has been happening for 40+ years; they failed at every opportunity to deal with any form of competition. A stupid example, but the Sears store near me used to reek of mold, miserable merchandising, and no brand differentiation. But, people shopped there because they had a good appliance selection (and reputation), it was the closest place for a lot of people with reasonably good tools and basic sporting goods, and it was somewhat functional.
When they closed, it was torn down and they built
Re: Goodbye Sears (Score:5, Informative)
It's actually a combination of competition from many faces. Clothing is a major item for Sears, and yes Walmart and Target (and Kohls) are competion for thier price point. But another big item for Sears is appliances (at least in my mind, that is what they are best known for, but I'm not sure if that's the biggest part of their bottom line). In that area they've faced competition from Best Buy, Home Depot/Menards/Lowes, Costco, and others.
Along with clothing and appliances, tools is the one other thing that comes to mind when I think Sears. And again, Home Depot/Menards/Lowes is big competition here, but I really feel like (and I may be way off) Harbor Freight is a huge source of competition for them here. Yes there is a bit of a quality difference (though that is a bit diminished as I don't think craftsman quality is quite what it used to be), but honestly for most people the cheap Harbor Freight tool is sufficient 9 out of 10 times, and for the price of the craftsman tool you can just replace the harbor freight tool 5 times (and that's not even considering most of the HF non-power tools have a lifetime replacement warranty anyway)
Of all the things out there, I really feel like Amazon is one of the smallest contributors to Sears' demise.
Re: Goodbye Sears (Score:5, Interesting)
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I would agree on Harbor Freight being a factor, though on tools Home Depot and Lowes are very convenient these days. Appliances are one place where Sears should still have had the upper hand, because they were the only store in my area that had a large locally-stocked selection. Forget Home Depot and Best Buy -- in recent years they have dwindled their in-store appliance inventories to practically nothing. So it's Sears vs Lowes around here, and Lowes wins for me because Sears' website is garbage. My me
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I grew up with Sears and I wanted to shop there, but the last 20 years or so the customer service has just sucked. I don't really mind that the workers are clueless if I ask a question; I should have just read the manual anyways. But at Sears, there are so few workers that it is hard to get any help, and when you ask a question they're a bunch of jerks. At Home Depot or Lowes, they have lots of employees to ask questions, and they actually know the answer. The danger is that they might follow you around lik
Re: Goodbye Sears (Score:5, Informative)
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I think it is more indirect, Sears use to be a major Mall Corner Store. Walmart/Target was in competition with all those little stores between the corner stores. Which then cause the malls to be waste lands. So no one wanted to go there. Thetop three rules for Retail Business is Location, Location, Location. Malls use to be the Hip and trendy place for the Late Boomers and Gen Xers. Now no one wants to go there. So they are stuck in bad locations.
Then What I think they really did to kill their business wa
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Sears made many mistakes. They were hit by Walmart on the low end, and "prestige" stores like Nordstroms on the high end. It is hard to survive in the middle, although Target is thriving there.
They were in decline long before Amazon, yet they were better placed than anyone to compete with Amazon. They had done mail order for more than a century. All they needed to do was move the ordering on-line. Instead they shutdown their catalog operation. In hindsight that was an insane move, although it didn't m
Re: Goodbye Sears (Score:5, Interesting)
I did a lot of work for Sears in the 80s thru the mid 90s. They were constantly changing their idea of who they needed to be. One year they're trying to compete with K-mart on the low end, the next year Walmart eclipsed them both, and they switched to trying to compete with high-end department stores. One year clothing is the answer, the next it's hardware, and then maybe appliances, or electronics, or small specialty stores, or big department stores, or whatever the big idea of the year is.
At their heydey, they were a big conglomerate that owned real estate, banking, insurance, and they launched Discover Card. Then one-by-one they divested or spun off their profitable divisions in order to concentrate on their core (in)competency - Retail Sales.
But their biggest mistake was closing the mail-order catalog sales just before internet sales started to take off. They could have been Amazon if they had tried.
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Another mistake (in my opinion) was their move to "zones" with separate checkout counters in each zone, rather than a row of checkouts near the exit.
Zones require a lot more employees, and employees only know about the products in their own zone. If you ask a random Sears salesperson what aisle had the power drills, the answer is often "That's not my department". I never get that answer at Walmart or Home Depot.
If no one is staffing the checkout register in one zone, you have to wander around the store lo
Re: Goodbye Sears (Score:4, Funny)
your power drill in the ladies lingerie
sounds like a movie title ;)
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Location, Location, Location is not the top three rules for retail.
It is a book. About fast food restaurants. It is a good book with lessons for all types of retailers, but it is more of a biography of a businessperson than it is some sort of textbook. As penance for referencing it, you should be expected to go and actually read the whole thing, cover to cover! Repent!
Sears was a destination store; people would be at home, decide they wanted to go shopping, and drive to Sears. Location is a bigger concern f
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Sort of. That competition forced them to brick and mortar. Prior to those stores building out in rural regions, Sears had a catalog / mail order based monopoly in much of America which was far more rural at the time.
Essentially, what Walmart / Target / KMart did to Sears is what many would like to see happen to Amazon.
Ironically, it opened the door for Amazon to be the one ready to take advantage of new technologies that gave new life to the very old mail order business.
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Their catalog mail order wasn't that big a monopoly. They did actually have good competition in that arena from Montgomery Ward and JC Penny.
Still, the annual Sears Wish Book was always my favorite every year.
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Re: Goodbye Sears (Score:4, Insightful)
For me, Sears hit a threshold when they began to think of the short term rather than long term relationship with the customer.
We purchased a mattress from Sears, and the wrong item showed up (different firmness). The retail side of Sears said that we would have to contact the shipping and logistics part of Sears to return the mattress, and the shipping and logistics part said that we would have to wait six weeks for them to pick it up (when they answered the phone, which was rare), and we could schedule then.
When six weeks had passed, both parts of Sears finally got on the same page: they wouldn't take a return because six weeks had passed.
I realized then and there that I'd be played by a company that just wanted my ~$1k and was willing to lose me as a customer to get it. I never went back to Sears. Never set foot in there, never bought a Craftsman tool, nothing.
It is far easier to lose a customer's trust than to gain it, and Sears has lost me forever.
Sears dying is a lesson in the value of customer service. Act like a shitty fly-by-night scam shop, disappear like one.
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Everything dies in time.
Yup, one day we will see Amazon end the same fate.
Quite possibly, but it's hard to see how right now. Amazon's business model essentially is to provide things efficiently. Things that include merchandise, computation, cloud storage, and more recently, entertainment. They work constantly on improving their infrastructure to this end. The risks to their business might include becoming frumpy (like Sears), over-diversifying (like General Electric), running into legal problems (like [insert-your-favorite-example-here]), and others. I can imagine Amazon being h
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He moved the to spice channel after that.