And she's not only merely dead: She's really, most sincerely dead!...............
Posted on 03/22/2017 6:47:54 AM PDT by Red Badger
After years of huge losses and store closings, the future is officially in doubt for Sears and Kmart.
Sears Holdings, the holding company for the two iconic retail brands, warned investors late Tuesday that it can’t promise it will stay in business.
It included the language in its annual report while insisting it might still turn things around.
“Our historical operating results indicate substantial doubt exists related to the company’s ability to continue as a going concern,” said the statement.
Sears Holdings said it can’t be sure it can raise the cash it needs through loans and debt financing. The company owes $4.2 billion, up from about $3 billion a year ago.
The company lost $2.2 billion in the fiscal year ending in January and has not turned an annual profit since 2010. Its losses since then total $10.4 billion.
Sears Holdings said its ability to sell assets, such as stores and store leases, could be limited because it needs those assets to pay for pension plans. In January, Sears sold its Craftsman brand of tools to Stanley Black & Decker. It is looking to sell Kenmore appliances and Diehard auto parts.
Sears Holdings has been in trouble almost since the 2005 merger that joined the two department store brands.
At the start of 2006, it had 3,400 U.S. stores and 370 more in Canada that it has since sold. By the end of this January, it had only 1,400 stores left, all in the United States. The company still has 140,000 employees, but that too is down sharply from the 355,000 it had in 2006.
Even that doesn’t tell the full picture of the decline.
Sears was once the nation’s largest retailer and business employer, both the Walmart and Amazon of its time. Its groundbreaking catalog business was how many Americans learned to shop from home for a large variety of items they wanted.
And it developed an extensive store network that helped furnish homes as Americans moved to the suburbs after World War II. It also caused trouble for small, locally owned shops.
The company at one time grew to include not just the retail business but a bank, a brokerage, a real estate company and what was then the world’s tallest building, the Sears Tower, for its Chicago headquarters.
But Sears began to suffer from competition from low-price competitors such as Walmart, and big-box stores such as Home Depot. It lost its place in the Dow Jones index of the nation’s most important companies in 1999.
Then came growing competition from Amazon and other online retailers. Analysts said Sears Holdings did little to invest in either the Sears or Kmart brand, instead trying to cut its way back to profitability by trimming advertising and closing stores.
It announced plans to close 150 more stores in January, and its stock hit a post-merger low in February. Then the stock rebounded when the company announced a deal with creditors to borrow $140 million more and cut at least $1 billion in operating costs a year, along with reducing its debt and pension obligations by $1.5 billion.
The “going concern” warning sent shares down 5% in pre-market trading Wednesday.
It died a long time ago.
They had a partnership but only for convenience................
Go and stock up when they have their going out of business deals.
Oh, not any more. Kenmore is crap as is the case with most US appliance companies. Cheap, poorly designed crap... and expensive too. Lousy value.
I remember my parents would buy my sister and I a 1/4 lb of chocolate stars from the candy counter whenever we went to Sears. And I remember spending hours pouring through the Christmas catalog.
Our local sears was turned into a Whole Foods two years ago.
I worked for them a about a year selling appliances in one of their new appliance stores. Worst job of my life due to the 80’s Atari like computer system, poor delivery and installers causing orders to cancel and no employee support. They just wanted numbers. Kenmore was more than whirlpool. Some were Kitchen aid, Maytag etc. They had the companies just add a different feature to the machine and named it a Kemore and inflated the price by a few hundred dollars. Then they would put them on ‘sale’ at about the same list price as the comparable competitor item and told you it was a great deal. Oh and better sell them that service plan or get your balls busted by the manager... Full commission and if the customer cancelled because the illegal alien delivery team pissed them offf, it came back out of your pocket, but delivery guys still got paid!
“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.
Nailed it
I’d add Duluth Trading, Orvis, Jos A. Banks, and L.L. Bean. There are others. Carhartt is solid for jeans and work shirts. Among my favorite brands is Filson, but it’s pricey.
And I still have Craftsman tools (socket set and wrenches) from the 70s and 80s. Solid as ever and I have rebuilt many engines with them. My son used them on a science project for High School. Sad. :(
And she's not only merely dead: She's really, most sincerely dead!...............
Forgot Woolworth's, which was near all those other stores I mentioned. I thought Kresge's became K-Mart, so technically they're still around.
Not good news.
They could have copied Walmart’s model but they didn’t.
I thought that after the KMart-Sears merger they would, and could have very easily, but they didn’t.
They could have dominated the online business with their catalog business from the beginnings of the Internet, but they didn’t.
They have chosen poorly for 3 decades..............
Indeed. In years past, I've seen these outfits seek out companies that had a fully funded pension plan and suck every dollar out of it that they could. Business Week lauded one guy as "CEO of the Year". His biggest accomplishment? Dumping the company's retirement plan on the government Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.
That, and selling off real estate holdings seem to be the main tactic. Then those CEOs bail with their Golden Parachute while the employees get the pink slip. Many times they join the Executive Ballet and become board members of some other company and then vote those parachutes for the next CEO in a one-hand-washes-the-other routine.
My mother had a credit card at Wards and I loved going to the “big wards” in Oakland when I was little. I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t just buy me everything since she didn’t have to pay money, LOL. She shopped at Wards until she died. I was sad when it closed just for memories sake.
embrace the gay culture and alienate them oral majority- that always help a business stay solvent- just ask J.C Penny
oral majority?.....................
Lambert’s slow motion destruction of this brand is a case lesson in the “market uber alles” mentality doesn’t work in the micro. If you believe pitting your companies departments against each other, with no one steering the boat to a common goal thinking it will create greatness, you are a fool.
Lambert will walk away fine, Billionaires always do, but his leadership has been pigheaded, ineffective and wrong for the last 12 years... any chance Sear’s had or surviving died a long time ago under this guys hubris.
He’s a trader... wall street hedge fund guy.. he knows nothing about retail and refused to listen to, and drove away anyone who did.
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