A sad story.
Sears was the "go to place for everything" for much of my lifetime and I do still own many Craftsman tools.
Chicago’s station WLS is named after Sears - World’s Largest Store. Sad to see Sears headed downhill.
I had a 1963 Sears aluminum boat. I think it was originally just a rowboat but we put a makeshift transom on it and ran a 15hp motor. Sold it around 2010. Good boat.
Sears really messed up when they started selling their brands at other retailers such as Ace. I bought a Craftsman compressor at an Ace hardware. The thing started having ‘issues’ before the warranty ran out. So I brought it to the Ace store I purchased it at. The Ace manager stated that they only SELL the brand, but do NOT honor the warranty. For that, I’d have to find a Sears store and bring it there. So I did, and it took over a month for the minor repair to be done, and done incorrectly at that! Meanwhile, I had to buy another compressor (not Craftsman) to keep my business running.
Really sad. There was a time when Sears and their brands were great.
Later, when I bought my first house, I had a toilet that needed a new part... it was a Sears toilet, and you could only find the part at Sears. They wouldn't let me simply pay cash for the part... they said I could only order it if I got a Sears charge card and used that. So I told them to pound sand and replaced the whole toilet.
Sears going the “softer side” ruined an excellent store.
I have a small Kenmore fridge that my mom bought new in the mid 1970’s. It still works fine. So does the Kenmore air conditioner which is about 30 years old. Roars like a monster, weighs more than I do, and cools a 15x35’ room in a few minutes.
New stuff — no freon, all plastic, no thank you!
There is no such thing as the “Kenmore” brand. They are all made by someone else. I had a Kenmore washer (came with the house), and that thing was a tank. It was actually a 70s vintage Maytag. It lasted about 40 years.
Sears also sold radios, TVs, other electronics under the Silvertone name. Again, that stuff was all made by other companies.
We used to get everything at Sears when I was growing up. So many memories. My dad had an old Monte Carlo that had Diehard mufflers on it. I don’t remember how many times he sent me with the rusty old one to exchange for a new one. I bet they regretted selling anything with a lifetime warranty to my dad. He always insisted that they give him the floor model of the TV because they always had the bugs worked out of them & he didn’t want to have to take them back if the ones out of the box didn’t work. He’s been gone 25 years..I miss him so much..
I went to a local SEARS a few days ago. It was like a morgue. No one there except me and a couple of other people.
One branch of my (in Illinois) family was a Sears family in the forties, fifties and sixties. A great-uncle was Treasurer and Comptroller of world-wide Sears. Many uncles were buyers, great-paying, respected, sophisticated jobs in those days, travelling the country and the world to select the best products for the hundreds of departments in the chain's stores. Having a good job with Sears carried great cache in the retail world.
What a shame that management slipped from the best to the incompetent. There are millions of Sears-raised generational families still in existence who were long-time loyal employees and who are saddened by what has happened. When I walk through my mostly-empty local Sears and talk to an employee here and there, the long-timers are demoralized beyond belief and thinking of early retirement.
One thing to remember is that nowadays malls are becoming mausoleums populated daily with teeny-boppers hanging out, lunchers in the food courts and seniors doing walk-laps...fewer and fewer actual paying shoppers.
The high-rent, high maintenance Sears stores which have anchored almost every mall nationwide since malls were invented are now stones around the company's neck...and it won't get better for many varied reasons.
As an aside, I bet Trump could save Sears, I wish he would, but he's otherwise occupied, LOL.
Leni
K-Mart is still around? Maybe Sears should ditch that instead. Without Craftsman or Kenmore there really is no Sears.
Because Sears has been so poor performing I bought a lawn tractor direct from a JD dealer instead of Sears. Sears has been run into the ground.
I sometimes buy vintage Craftsman stuff on Ebay.
Modern era Craftsman hasn’t inspired a lot of confidence in me.
My wife got me this set for Christmas and I use it a lot and will put it with my frontline Craftsman.
Yeh its a common practice called selling off your assets before going bankrupt.
This is all Bad Kharma for dumping Mr. Roebuck all those years ago!
:-)
(No, I don’t really believe in Kharma.)
What a shame.
Eddie Lambert (Sears owner) did for Sears what Obama has done for America.
Dumb decision. Sears had a chance to change their entire identity back to the old Sears of yesteryear, a store of the people at the prices of the people.
They could have reflagged all those “K-Marts” as Sears and Roebucks. Could have exited the high cost shopping malls. Could have used the K-Mart name to compete in small towns with Dollar General, Family Dollar, etc., and had a “Name” to do it under.
Instead, they kept doing the same dumb stuff that wasn’t working for either K-Mart or for Sears.
Sears just did not keep up with the times. It became a giant because of the Sears catalogue, but could have regained its glory days by in effect, becoming Amazon.
Instead of trying to preserve its brick and mortar stores, as such, they should have converted many of them to local mostly delivery and large item assembly warehouses, with local pickup to avoid postage and handling.
This would have meant their local inventory would only be smaller items; with the big stuff assembled on site for delivery. It would slash their costs.
They could even subcontract space to specialized businesses, somewhat like they did before, things like watch repair to product customization.
Selling off the successful parts and keeping the failures. That’s not a winning strategy ( to put it mildly). Just the contrary, in fact.