Posted on 12/26/2019 6:48:23 AM PST by Red Badger
They won’t do it, but they do have ONE OPTION left:
Turn HARD RIGHT, and be PROUD of it. Part of that is FIRING their PR people. Put some bible versus in their stores, put up Christmas Trees and call them CHRISTMAS TREES. Call your sales CHRISTMAS SALES at the end of the year. Don’t sell crap like Hunchback Mountain and tell the country why you won’t (family friendly). Put signs on the bathroom doors that perverts will be detained and then ARRESTED.
...and probably a thousand other things they could do. In summary, go back to what you did 60 years ago socially...and you guys would OWN half of the country.
(and be SERIOUS about it, no Chick-a-Fill garbage)
Craftsman was sold to Stanley-Black & Decker which sells to Lowes.........................
Die Hard was. Christmas movie. Epstein didn’t kill himself. Central Jersey is a real place.
A friend has an old muscle car he bought new in 1968. He bought a Die Hard in 1973 when Sears had a special promotion for a lifetime warranty.
About every 4-5 years he would get a new battery for free when the old one failed..this when on until the early 2000’s when feeling guilty he stopped.
Sears should have made some exclusions.
Same with tools - lifetime warranty. Some folks really took advantage of that. Abusing tools and then exchanging.
Sounds like the old, old, Midas Muffler commercial from the early 70’s.
And old guy in a Model T would come in every few years for a new muffler.
At the end of the commercial he waved at the mechanics and said, “See ya’ll again, boys!” as he drove off with a big smile on his face.......................................
I remember reading a while back that Montgomery Ward's brass scoffed at the internet when it first started coming around. They were a rock-solid catalog company, after all. Apparently it didn't occur to them to put their name and catalog to use on the internet. Now there's Amazon, and there's no more Montgomery Ward (not in its initial embodiment anyway).
They sell the name but big deal. Craftsman from Lowes is nowhere near the quality it used to be. But I guess nothing is.
DieHard batteries are made in the USA by Johnson Controls
I needed a thermal fuse for my clothes dryer last weekend. Sears Parts Direct is an excellent place to find appliance replacement parts, and I had used them many times in the past. I called Sears Parts Direct to see if a nearby store was open nearby on a Saturday.
The Sears Parts Direct division closed all their stores a year ago and they were an online business only. The salesman said they could get me the part by Monday. I explained that I needed the fuse today and that there were other small appliance stores that were open to sell this common part.
The salesman wouldn’t let me hang up. It was kind of pathetic. He was almost begging me to buy this $10 part.
Sears is dead. I miss what it once was.
“What else do they have left to sell?”
Other than the Kenmore brand name not much. After Whirlpool, LG, and Frigidaire (manufacturers of their appliances) puts Sears on credit hold that will be the end of the line for Kenmore appliances.
They have been trying to sell their mall real estate without much success. They opened three smaller stores this year and apparently these stores were failures. Maybe the re-acquisition of Sears Hometown stores will help but I doubt it.
I worked there for three months this year and found Sears is a big joke. They had outdated equipment, no employee training, and overdue maintenance.
This is how you can tell that Sears is over:
They are selling the moneymaking parts of the enterprise, i.e. Craftsman, Diehard, etc., and they are holding on to the money losing part of the enterprise.
The executives are collecting money to pad their bonuses before they write off into the sunset.
Sears once had good brands with good quality control over many of them.
Having read many articles on the long decline of Sears, I am convinced one of it’s biggest problems has been too many senior executives got to their positions by rising up through the ranks. They knew very well the instiution they had risen within, and their own roles in that as well. With so many insiders, and even with a CEO from the outside, internal resistence to change and lack of vision among those insiders made most needed changes arrive half backed, too slowly, poorly implemented or not at all. Sears also has had a board of directors that bent too much invested in a model that was past and not allowing sufficient investment in new ideas.
For instance Lampert early on - before the rise of Amazon - saw the need to get Sears catalgoue up on the Internet. All the things I cited in the paragraph above squandered not enough money and too much time and too little vision in the effort. Lampert was prepared - then - to shutter stores to make the investment needed, and couldn’t get the board to go along.
Mergers - Mergers with both Best Buy and Home Depot were considered. Internal discussions about them identified some things that should have pushed the executives and board in favor of either merger. One thing they knew was the retail landscape was no longer growing in malls and was becoming very successful with company brands in their own locations. They also knew that “hard goods” (home appliances, hardware, electrical goods, electronics, automotive and furniture & carpeting) was where most sears profit came from. Those profit-center goods of Sears was the type that Best Buy and Home Depot sold.
With no vision, the group of executives asked by the board to make a recommendation recommended not approving either merger. A possible deal with Home Depot was shut down because they could not identify a vision for how the real estate adjustments would be made, and stuck in the past the only thing they feared most was closing any stores. The deal with Best Buy was on the table with a share price Best Buy was asking for their company. The Sears board thought the asking price was too much. So no deal. Within three years the Best Buy share price had shot way past what the Sears board thought was too much.
I am only trying to say that Eddie Lampert was not Sears only problem, and at times has not been its worst problem. I think the full history will ask why he has stayed on as long has he has.
Sears is circling the drain...and has been for some time. I find that sad...Sears is,IMO,part of “Americana”.
Sears was internally raided by corrupt managers and CEOs. I knew they were history when they dropped the catalogs.
Sears does die hard.
spintreebob to null and void
Not at all the Sears story. The Brenn and Brothers ran Monky Wards and Sears into the ground in the 80s.(The same boys who drove the GOP into the ground post Reagan as they controlled all RNC money.) They nutured a hierarchical structure of many dozens of layers of bureaucracy. The mid-level bureaucracy of men in their 40s and 50s and 60s were paid based on how inefficient they were.
The bigger their staff in Sears Tower, and then Hoffman Estates, the more important they were and the bigger their salary and perks. The stock holders finally got rid of Brennan and brought in Martinez.
Martinez brought in good people at the top. They had good ideas. But the Asst VPs, Directos, Managers.. 50+ levels of bureaucracy in Hoffman Estates actively and blatantly obstructed everything that the Matinez team tried to do.
The middle management also blocked every good idea from the bottom. I was on various IT teams as a consultant. My IT team lead had extremely good ideas on how to implement The Softer Side of Sears . His ideas involved checking what was selling in real time with my online programs. Lee, Levi and other suppliers were begging us to re-order in real time. In the back to school season, Sears most profitable season, we had no clue what styles would be hot... and if hot would vary by store location.
Online tracking of sales and re-order in real time was so obvious. But to do so would eliminate the entire buyer department of hundreds of self-important lazy buffoons and their managers.
Middle management insisted that they would run inventory re-plenishment off the quarterly report, meaning Back-to-school replenishment would be ordered about October 15, way too late to compete with Walmart and others.
A sister team to mine had a great plan on how to turn the Sears Catalog into an online catalog. It was a vision ... an Amazon. But Middle Management shot it down. All they saw were character based 3270s. They did not understand how people could shop on a computer because a compute had no pictures of the item like a catalog did. That is how much in the 1950s middle management was living in the 1990s.
Sears and IBM partnered to buy Prodigy and to create the first Cloud. Neither Sears nor IBM management had a clue what to do with what they bought. Middle management of both companies shot down every good idea, most of which came from the bottom in this case.
Lands End bought Sears and had good ideas. Sears middle management refused to implement them. Lampert bought Sears and Kmart for the real estate, not the retail business. Sears was one of the largest owners of real estate in the world.
Sears was not done in by some young MBA. It was done in by the Sears Swamp, the Sears establishment of middle aged and older men who wanted to protect their bureaucracy because their bureaucracy protected them.
Lambert looted Sears.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.