Posted on 03/22/2017 6:47:54 AM PDT by Red Badger
When we went shopping, mom always let me and my sister get a bag of cheese popcorn at Murphy’s.
We always asked, but she never ever let us have the caramel popcorn.
WalMart, Sam’s, Costco, Goodwill, Salvation Army.......................
They used to have quality items. Now most of it is just junk like everyone else sells.
Retailers come and go. Whatever Sears has to sell can be obtained from many other retailers.
Bad for your teeth.................
Add to your list Kresge & Woolworths. You either learn how to eat lunch or you are lunch.
Yawn should have gone out years ago!!
Do it already!
“another business a victim of Obamanomics.”
I disagree having been a supplier to Sears and KMart for several decades. Both companies were mismanaged for decades. Since the early 2000’s they’ve been owned by Eddie Lampert, a Wall Street “investor” who has effectively milked the real estate and cash out of the company through successive downsizing and restructurings.
Sears is the story of a once great company plundered by financial manipulators who lined their pockets at the expense of suppliers, employees and loyal customers. Consider with visionary leadership and investment the once dominant Sears catalog and mail order business could leveraged emerging technologies and millions of loyal middle class customers to become what we know today as Amazon.com. Instead the catalog business was shut down by the beancounters and the executives earned multimillion dollar bonuses by shedding the assets.
The industrialists and capitalists who built the US economy into the world’s greatest were independent visionaries and creators. The MBA’s, lawyers, and financiers who have destroyed the US economy over the past 30 years are self centered plunderers, financial manipulators, and destroyers allied with big government. Sears will be just another gravestone recording what was once great about America.
“Sears sold its Craftsman brand of tools to Stanley Black & Decker. It is looking to sell Kenmore appliances and Diehard auto parts.”
Those are abstractions, aren’t they? Sears has never designed or manufactured anything.
I’m not criticizing Sears’s strategy of putting their brand on certain things, but they can’t depend on an abstraction to survive in the long run.
I used to stop at the hot nuts kiosk entering Sears and get a 1/4 lb. of cashews to munch on while we window shopped.
So I’ve heard.
Eddie Lampert is clueless.
He made KMart briefly profitable by selling off high priced real estate that KMart owned. After the high priced real estate ran out, he drove them into the dirt.
I knew the wonderboy wasn’t such a wonderboy from day one. It was all about manipulation of the financials.
Wonder how much higher minimum wages contributed to this....
This week Payless Shoes said they will declare bankruptcy. I don’t have the complete list, but they are among a substantial and growing number of bankrupt retailers. Fact is that online shopping is gradually killing physical retail stores, just as online news is gradually killing newspapers and broadcast news. In fact, the Internet is changing pretty much every form of business, work, and entertainment. We are slowly returning to the time when most people worked and studied at home, only this time it won’t be farming, but online work, education,and shopping. I think on balance this is a good thing.
Sears tools used to be the best. If it broke they would replace it. Craftsman was superlative. But that is a thing of “the good old days”. Sorry to see another “ain’t dare no mo”
Sears, like Montgomery Ward is an outdated model.
Bravo! Well said, the takers are killing the makers.
Nice post.
There is an evolution of companies like you describe.
Sears did a lot for this country.
Sears was insolvent two years ago. But two years ago, they could have sold their building to make the pensioners whole. Instead, they sold the buildings to an affiliated company, just to burn through another $2.5 billion, and leave the pensioners with 50 cents on the dollar, some of which will be picked up by the taxpayers, while many Sears retirees will live in poverty.
Still, it’s better than Illinois, with some state pension plans at 13 cents on the dollar. But that’s the legislative pension fund, so I’m sure the legislators will legislate to shovel more bucks at their problem.
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