Posted on 05/11/2017 4:41:12 AM PDT by John W
HOFFMAN ESTATES, Ill. (Reuters) - Sears Holdings Corp Chief Executive Officer Edward Lampert blasted the media on Wednesday for "unfairly singling out" the company over the past decade and blamed "irresponsible" coverage for the retailer's woes.
Sears, once the largest U.S. retailer, warned investors in March there was a chance it may not be able to continue as a going concern after years of losses and declining sales.
Lampert, a hedge fund investor who is rarely seen in public, kicked off his appearance at an annual shareholders' meeting at Sears' headquarters in Hoffman Estates, Illinois with a slideshow of headlines about the company's financial distress, dating back to 2008.
"You'd think it was from a month ago, but it's literally been going on for a decade," Lampert told about 70 people in attendance.
The company has not reported a profit for six years, which Lampert compared to Amazon.com Inc's early unprofitable growth. He predicted people will look back and wonder how they missed the Sears' turnaround, which he said would be driven by the Shop Your Way rewards program.
Six shareholders questioned Lampert, including one who praised the CEO's hard work and efforts to return Sears to profitability but asked if Lampert was in denial about the company's losses and paranoid.
Lampert refuted his question, saying there were "behind-the-scenes" counterparties trying to take advantage of the company's situation and that he was trying to adapt and preserve as many jobs as possible.
"That's not about denial; that's about caring," he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
I think he’s watched Hillley Clinton too much.
Destroy the company.
Blame others.
Must be a Dem.
I often wondered at what point a “very rich a-hole” makes the transition to being “an Elite”.
I think this doosh has made the transition.
I do not see Sears hanging on much longer. Their most popular and profitable line was Craftsman tools. So they sold it to Black & Decker.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to just reorganize, get rid of the departments that are not profitable and keep those that still draw customers?
100 years ago the CEO of Buggy Whip, Inc said the same thing.
Yeah! That’s the ticket.
Irresponsible media—Yeah, that’s it.
Considering I can find better quality at Dollar Tree than I can at K-Mart.
I know people that have worked for him... he’s an effing nut.
I blame Comey and Russian hacking for the failures at Sears.
Sears was a wonderful retailer at one time. The stores have become ill-lit dumps, dingy and unappealing. The merchandise
seems like seconds in quality and appearance.
IMHO, Sears became fossilized.
They were the largest retailer and at one time up to 90% of America owed them money for purchases.
Inexplicably they gave up their base function: catalogue sales to concentrate on retail stores. Had they kept it they COULD have been as popular as Amazon became.
I have not been in a sears in forever. I occasionally look at their website but they just do not impress.
Another one bites the dust.
Last time I was in Sears was on Black Friday to buy a couple of tools for half price. On the busiest shopping day of the year I had to wait behind four people. They used to need employees to keep the line organized on that day.
I’m still mad at them for buying Land’s End and then ruining it. Land’s End catalogues were actually fun to go through, models looked like real people because they were Land’s End workers...something for everyone and a little humor thrown in; then Sears bought them and completely screwed up the catalogues so they looked like boring newspaper inserts. No indexes and targeted too narrowly, not for the whole family, and no humor.
They dropped every product I used to buy regularly.
Took our air compressor in to get it tested and their lazy employee marked it as cracked because he mistook a magic marker mark for a crack.
Pretty much says it all.
Of everyone in the retail industry, Sears is the one who could have out Amazon’d Amazon. They had the infrastructure, the retail chain to back up the catalog (web) sales, market penetration, and they still had some degree of consumer good will.
Not only did they miss the boat on the web, they found and used just about every possible means of disappointing their existing customer base and sending them to competitors.
I used to buy a lot of Craftsman tools. Recently needed a small table saw to replace my Craftsman (which should have lasted longer, IMHO, but that’s a separate issue). Go to the Sears web site, put in “table saw”. Of the first 10 hits, two aren’t even sold by Sears and aren’t Craftsman. There’s an ad on the right for a saw sold by yet another third party.
If you click “Craftsman”, you then get three hits, and they’re all essentially the same saw, with different mounting methods - and it’s the same crappy Chinese saw you can by from Black and Decker, or really any manufacturer. Heck, even Lowes has a house brand that differentiates itself from everyone else.
It’s like Craftsman became some red-headed stepchild to Sears. Well, sorry Sears, but that was the only reason I still used to set foot in your stores. When you essentially tell me you don’t want me as a customer, I’m happy to oblige.
Barf! Why did I look?
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