Wow. I remember Sears being the Number 1 place for families to shop. Every year we would pour over the Christmas Catalog. I remember the year there was a catalog that showed um....a bit of a male model modeling briefs along with a bit of his bits... a real SCANDAL that was at the time. Oh, my age is showing. LOL
They ignored the internet.
My home is a 1919 Sears Catalogue home. It was called “the Castleton” in the catalogue. Sears delivered the materials to a nearby railroad spur, and they had a local contractor dig a foundation to spec. I don’t know who put the kit together, but it is overall excellent quality. For being “mass production” the interior millwork is beautiful, especially compared to what one gets today. A magnificent combination of American labor, creativity and craftsmanship.
When you think about it, it was an extremely innovative concept for the time.
THEY NEED TO ANNOUNCE THAT THEY WILL BE SELLING A FULL LINE OF TRUMP PRODUCTS
They should have shut down all their stores and gone completely online. I miss the brick and mortar stores but that’s where this is going.
A sad end to a once great company. Many middle class families relied on Sears for everything but groceries: clothes, tools, paint, carpets, furniture, appliances, electronics, car service or parts, and even family photos!
Not only is the website bad, who’s idea was it to make Sears and Kmart look like a flea market?
I’ve never understood. Is Lampert just using Sears Holding Company as a tax writeoff? And why does Jim Cramer from “Mad Money” keep recommending it?
Another American institution down the drain.
My family shopped a lot at Sears when I was growing up. My Mom worked there part time for several years.
Id you broke a Craftsman hand tool, even if using it for something it wasn’t designed to do, Sears would replace it, no questions asked. They are good tools, too. Still have a bunch.
I cannot understand Sears as they have been purposely steering towards the gutter for years. Their best paying departments being tools and appliances were sold off.
IMO, they should have gotten rid of their losers instead like GM did when they dumped Pontiac and Olds. GM’s best selling being Chevy was kept.
We have a VERY small Sears here... only appliances, tools, and lawnmowers. I went in last week knowing with certainty that I could get a set of Torx screwdrivers. The employee was quite helpful searching for them, but we both came up empty and he referred me to Harbor Freight Tools down the street.
So sad as Sears was once THE PLACE for tools. Now they’ll be joining Montgomery Wards in the memory bin.
This was predicted over forty years ago and is being done deliberately.
Eddie Lampert was a pretty good stock portfolio manager. He’s a lousy retail CEO, probably one of the worst ever. Instead of hiring someone who knows retail to run the place, he jumped in with both feet and not only lost his shirt, but the shirts of long-suffering investors who held on to Sears throughout his disastrous tenure. Mercifully, that tenure is almost at an end.
That's not why they are failing.
I know that people have been watching this disaster for years. But few of them realize the employment issues associated with bankruptcy. When I last paid attention, they still had about 100 k employees. That’s a lot of folks out on the street.
When Sears and KMart merger was announced, I knew that they would kill each other...and now, no KMarts in Hillsborough County (had 6 in the 1990s)
I just hope that someone will buy the Sears name from Eddie Lamebrain and set it up like it should be done - clothing, tools, toys, appliances and autoservice. I’d love to buy the KMart store name, but There were 3 better stores I loved better than KMart -the ABCs - Ames, Bradlees and Caldor.
No vision.
They had the assets and capital to not be pushed behind by the Walmarts and Amazon, but the Sears leadership had no vision. The Sears K-Mart merger was not part of any grand new vision, it was done as a last ditch effort at merely saving its status quo. It was a costly blunder.
They could have transitioned their catalog sales over to the internet. I have no idea why they didn’t do that, of course they had a website but it was pitiful, like an afterthought and they did not encourage online buying.
Another thing I noticed is they stuck with their same customers, which is great but as those customers aged and passed away they had not done anything to build a new loyal customer base with younger people. All my life when my mom and dad went to Sears they were treated very well, yet when I was newly married and having babies I went to Sears for my first new appliances and they acted as though their stuff would sell itself. I couldn’t even get answers to some basic questions. The sales people acted like there is the washing machines, you are on your own. There was none of the special treatment I had seen my parents get at Sears. The magic was gone.
No idea what happened to them but it was as if they stopped trying to get any new customers, instead depending on the old ones to keep coming. They did not even attempt to get the children of their loyal customers, we should have been easy to snag. Maybe they thought they would just keep going on their past reputation.
My last experience with Sears was when a lawnmower we bought new from them needed work. The old Sears my parents loved had a service center for appliances, ETC even after warranty they would repair things and you would pay. So simple. My husband and I took the lawnmower to Sears in a major city and they told us they had closed their service center and the mower would have to be sent to another city over 200 miles away...with no estimate on costs or even being able to talk to the service people. It was crazy, nope no more Sears for us.