Not much good will left for Kenmore. They are or were good appliances, but the reason my mother and so many others would buy them was the service available. If mom’s washer needed work the local Sears had their own repair people and it would be fixed quickly and done right. If it was under warranty of course that was taken care of but even after warranty my mother got them to fix the Kenmore stuff and happily paid them. That is why she bought no appliances that were not Kenmore.
Sears began to close their service centers years ago. We were shocked when we took a Kenmore lawn mower barely out of warranty to a large Sears store in El Paso for work. They informed us they no longer did service at most of their stores- the mower would be sent to Albuquerque, we would have to decide how much money we were willing to spend on it ahead of time and put up a $100 deposit before they would send it out. It would be gone around 2 weeks. That is not the service that convinced people to buy Kenmore over other brands.
Sears has been sliding downhill for many years. They seemed to forget why people shopped with them so began to run customers off. I bought a kitchen stove like 10 years ago and went right to Sears as my mother always had. The guy selling appliances did not know as much about them as I did! He also did not seem that interested in whether or not I bought one either. I knew from the lawn mower experience they no longer serviced them there either so I went to Home Depot to buy my stove.
Sears started phasing out the majority of their catalog sales, discouraging not encouraging people to order from the catalog. When they did that they should have been transitioning to online shopping but they didn’t see that coming as far as I could tell. They did themselves in by not following their own success or looking forward either.
Exactly. Sears didn't just have their catalog. They had the entire infrastructure set up from warehouses, to taking customer orders, to shipping. It would have been far easier for Sears to shift to an Internet based business than it was for Amazon to start one from scratch.
OTOH, I'm not one to talk. I remember about 7 years ago when a failing computer company came out with a new tablet computer that sounded like a women's sanitary product. I was sure it would fail. You may have heard of it. The iPad.