Posted on 06/25/2017 8:56:12 AM PDT by ARGLOCKGUY
I haven't been inside a Sears store for more than 10 years, until Thursday, June 22. And, wow, did I learn a lot.
Mainly, I came away with a better understanding of why Sears Holdings Corp. is closing an additional 20 stores on top of the 245 it already planned to shutter. And why it has failed to turn a profit in 29 out of the last 37 quarters and seen same-store sales decline in 11 of the past 12 quarters.
I observed alienating treatment of a loyal customer at the store in Jersey City, N.J., which was also messy and uninviting inside.
When I came upon customer Stephanie Rosso, a resident of Jersey City, she was struggling with four employees to get a simple return transaction completed for a dryer she'd bought and sent back to the warehouse that day with the delivery man. Normally, getting a refund takes about two minutes tops.
Yes, you are correct. Also, I believe they set up toll free numbers a good 5 years or so after their competition had done so!
Yes, Sears was still tops when they retired on good pensions. They also owned Sears stocks, plus Sears had one of the first and best profit-sharing benefit programs in the U.S.. a new concept at the time.
Remember, we're talking the Sears heyday time period.....decades and decades ago, the thirties, forties, fifties. All the uncles are long gone now...and it's a bet that some of my living first and second cousins are looking at their inherited Sears stock shares and probably weeping.
Leni
They started dying when they did away with their catalog. If they’d switched over to Internet at the time they would be ruling the world instead of Amazon.
I don't know exactly how Sears should have changed to stay alive and vibrant...but whatever it needed to do, it didn't.
I spent a summer in the 1960’s on a Virginia farm while my mother went back to college. The farm had electricity, but no running water. The outhouse had a big catalog that we used for toilet paper.
Not the worst experience, but not something I’d want to repeat.
I’ll go against the grain on this thread. I can’t think of a single bad experience that I have had in a Sears store throughout my entire life. They were great stores. The old Kenmore appliances were solid and lasted. Had a fridge for 25 years. I still have one of their lawnmowers. Of course you can’t say that anymore and that is the case everywhere - Lowes etc due to the wonderful Chinese “quality control”.
Sear’s strength of having everything and being spread so thin however has also turned out to be their weakness in today’s online environment. I am surprised they have lasted this long.
Worked in the service department back in the early ‘90s. They soon “centralized” the five shops closest to ours and we found ourselves running service calls sometimes 60 miles from our “home” shop. At the end of the day we were putting 200+miles on our trucks as oppposed to well under 100 before. With the lower pay and management expected to do more with less I just found something else.
Just my experience of how maybe they were trying to “keep with the times”...
I think a lot of teenage boys looked at the female lingerie
section in the Sear catalog for hours!
Sears, however, was uniquely placed to be an internet giant -- they already owned the shop-by-mail industry and had been in catalog sales for over 100 years. All they had to do was put their catalog online. That has to be the biggest missed opportunity in forever.
Eventually nobody will own cars. For longer distance travel, people will punch up an app and a driverless vehicles will pull up and swoosh them away.
It's just the way it is going to be. There is nothing us old codgers can do about it.
What you said is exactly right. The days of the single story mall set way back from the road are definitely gone around here. Everything new is high-density, 5-10 stories mixed use with lots of underground parking.
To us old codgers, it’s just not natural to go to the grocery store, park underground, and walk up to the store. That’s just not right.
What do you need a bank teller for? Also bank tellers are not a profit center.
“which was also messy and uninviting inside.”
We have a little Sears store in our small town virtually un-maintained failing “mall.” You walk out the door of the Sears into the mall and the carpets look as if they have not even been vacuumed in decades. All of this mere yards from where they sell vacuum cleaners complete with the demonstration area where they dump stuff on the floor to show the prowess of their products.
I just shake my head.
In 1940 my aunt who divorced my uncle married the chauffeur
to the CEO (or president) of Sears.
My parents were die hard Sears shoppers; especially appliances because of their customer service. Their appliances were very reliable and after warranty was up their repair service was still available and fantastic.
I was a Sears shopper for years and then they stopped doing customer service. Getting anyone to talk to you was a challenge but then they didn’t know their product. The final straw with Sears and I happened a few years back. We had a lawn mower that came from them and wanted to just get it serviced and I think it had a starting issue. They said they didn’t have a service center there; a city of over 600,000 people! Years ago every Sears store in a town of any size could service their appliances. What they wanted to do was ship the lawn mower over 200 miles to another city for service. We were to pay in advance, for what we thought it needed and an additional cost of I think $100 deposit in case it needed more work...with no contact with actual service people to decide how much we were willing to spend we were to agree to pay it. We would have been at least 2 weeks without a mower, and no idea if it would even get fixed after all that or any idea about cost of repair- it was crazy! To top off the craziness the man telling us all of this had no knowledge of mowers or anything else that we could tell.
That did it for me, might as well buy washers and mowers at Home Depot or wherever, no advantage to buying at Sears. I was amazed they could tear down what was a great company but they sure did.
What I see where I work is constant downsizing even when business grows. Every year there is a new plan to grow business and improve customer service, and then corporate cuts floor hours, making it harder to provide the customer service necessary to keep business growing. Billions are spent on mergers and acquisitions, or rolling out new sales initiatives, but little on the people who make things happen. The latest plan has us cutting merchandise and replacing it with blank spaces. Nothing says “we are in trouble” like holes where you would expect to find the stuff you came to buy. The only way this will work is to clone people like me to fill every position.
Illegals want higher discounts, working families could rarely find school and boy scout uniforms, much less actual work clothes, and what was a staple for mechanics and homeowners became a useless paltry selection.
So then they went through a very expensive re-imaging campaign where they ripped apart half their stores for months at a time only to re-open with even worse merchandise selections.
All along they took a very successful mail order company and basically shut it down, only later to start it up again at much more cost as a website. Simultaneous to that they went to on time shipping for stores, meaning that most stores were always out of popular products with customers being told to ‘shop for it online.’
All that said, I think some stores are back on track. The only question is if there's still enough of a company to survive, and I sincerely doubt that.
1. merchanise mix is horrible.....
far too many clothes, none particularly stylish or tendy, and none cheap either
2. quality of famous tools has been sliding down down down
3. almost no customer assistance in the store
4. website operates at a rudimentary level with search engine almost worthless in finding what you want to purchase
5. mail-order (or website) sent us a garden tool with a visibly BENT cutting blade, it was patently defective and inoprerable
6. it has taken about three months to NOT receive a promised refund for the returned tool
7. in the last month or so, SearsHelp and Customer Care email offices have NOT EVEN REPLIED to repeated requests that they send us the promised refund
8. Sending out obviously-broken goods and then keeping the customers’ money.......are not good, positive customer relations strategies designed to assure customer satisfaction or loyalty
9. we are on the verge of having to sue Sears to get our money back as Sears promised to do
10. oh yeah, did I mention that at one point Sears claimed it was sending us a gift card to make up for our unhappy shoppint experience...........and when we tried to use it, Sears website and staff confirmed it has Zero Balance!
conclusion...
Sears has fallen under terrible, incompetent management...
which has destroyed what was once the “World’s Largest Store” and America’s favorite, trusted merchandiser.
It is so very very sad to see (and we are still out our $56, too!)
We will never shop at Sears ever again (and apparently almost everyone else agrees, because you could roll a bowling ball down the aisle at the Sears store and not hit anyone it is so empty)
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