Sears to linger onwards for the time being

[ultimatebob]

Hopefully they remember to wipe any servers of customer data before they sell them off...

Why would they do that? Those old servers are probably worth more with the customer's credit card data on them

Best of all, they probably fired half of their IT staff a year ago, so you know that those old servers aren't up to date on security patches.

 

[BurnItDwn]

Sears is the old Amazon. They should have internetized their catalog and they would be on top.
Apparently, internetized is a word, my browser spell check doesn't complain.

 

[nakedfrog]

Sears helped bring us blues music.

 

[FeuerFrei]

Sears tried to copy Amazon with a "marketplace" website.



Looking at car batteries yields over 500 listings ... but only 93 are from Sears.

 

[Fritzo]

This is sad, but the result of hanging on to management that is set in their ways. Sears should have been Amazon. They even had one of the first electronic store fronts on their own online service- Prodigy (I was a subscriber!). This lasted through the 80's and 90's, and did well at first, but they refused to update their cartoonish graphics and soon AOL took them down. Sears ended up selling the company for 50% of their investment.


After that, they started trying to diversify into unrelated fields, and they all flopped. Then instead of making "sears.com" to buy goods, they made "wishbook.com" to sell items and retained "sears.com" for corporate use. We didn't have decent search engines in the 90's to find websites, so people going to sears.com to shop ended up confused on where to go.

So many missteps it's almost comical- purchasing KMart...an outdated version of Target...sunk them even further. By the end, the Sears brand was associated with dirty, outdated stores and sadness. This Family Guy clips sums it up:

 

[Gunbuster]

Bought a fridge from the Sears web site probably 6 years ago when they were busy trying to rip off Amazon. Turned out their version of "in stock" was that the components were in stock at their Chinese warehouses where they eventually would go to assembly and then put the fridge on a container ship to see me 4 months in the future.

Got a good discount out of the ordeal but it sure didn't help their brand image.

 

[snoopy7548]

The number one thing that turns me off from all of these stores (Sears and Wal-Mart, mainly) is when shopping online, it seems like 90% of the items are from 3rd-party sellers. I don't want that crap. It's expected with Amazon, and actually kept to a minimum there for the majority of items, but for stores that have a physical presence, I want only items that the store directly sells.

 

[nakedfrog]

The number one thing that turns me off from all of these stores (Sears and Wal-Mart, mainly) is when shopping online, it seems like 90% of the items are from 3rd-party sellers. I don't want that crap. It's expected with Amazon, and actually kept to a minimum there for the majority of items, but for stores that have a physical presence, I want only items that the store directly sells.

Most of them usually make it fairly easy to limit it to items actually sold by them. I'm with you, though, that's the first thing I do when searching them. Obviously I'm not on their website because I want to know if someone somewhere on the internet is selling widgets, I want to see if they have the widget.

 

[Greenman]

Hopefully they remember to wipe any servers of customer data before they sell them off...

Aren't they worth a lot more with all of the data intact?

 

[Sgt. York]

Why yes, yes they are.

 

[ultimatebob]

Most of them usually make it fairly easy to limit it to items actually sold by them. I'm with you, though, that's the first thing I do when searching them. Obviously I'm not on their website because I want to know if someone somewhere on the internet is selling widgets, I want to see if they have the widget.

The last time I bought something from Sears.com (I had a gift card), it was drop shipped to me from Amazon.

The retail war was over a long time ago... and they lost.

 

[RPD]

Good, screw Sears, last fridge I purchased from them covered by their warranty had the WORST customer service I've ever experienced.
14 days for a new compressor that was less than 300miles away. Then had to wait months for them to have someone come out to shit can the fridge before they would reimburse us for the cost. Because fuck my family for wanting to keep anything cold for the next month huh? (Fridge was covered by a full warranty and this was how we were treated)

 

[Mike64]

Sears was THE store when I was a kid, and it is amazing how management ran it into the ground.

It wasn't just (mis)management, it was the massive changes in the US/world economy starting in the late 70s. (Many of which were "bad" imo, but many of which were also not avoidable in the greater schemes of things...) Being a born and mostly-bred NYer, I always felt that way about Macy's, which Federated turned into a mockery of its former self when they bought it out, albeit a mockery that has managed to more or less survive, if at the cost of being a totally different store than its "namesake" was...

The number one thing that turns me off from all of these stores (Sears and Wal-Mart, mainly) is when shopping online, it seems like 90% of the items are from 3rd-party sellers. I don't want that crap. It's expected with Amazon, and actually kept to a minimum there for the majority of items, but for stores that have a physical presence, I want only items that the store directly sells.

I don't like it any better on Amazon, where it's no more "expected" to me than anywhere else, though that's probably a generational thing. I felt like a totally unhip latecomer to Amazon when I finally found books worth buying there rather than locally or on Half.com (before Ebay bought, then gutted that), and registered there in 2000... The only thing about Amazon's "marketplace" that's superior to anyone else's is that they impose a reasonably consumer-friendly return policy on their third-party sellers (and actually enforce/guarantee it without making you jump through hoops) , but since that only comes into play when a purchase goes "wrong", even that's a kind of backhanded compliment...

 

[IndyColtsFan]

It wasn't just (mis)management, it was the massive changes in the US/world economy starting in the late 70s. (Many of which were "bad" imo, but many of which were also not avoidable in the greater schemes of things...)

I’d argue that change is constant and it is management’s job to adapt to those changes and to position the company for success despite change. Walmart and others adapted and were successful; Sears was complacent for far too long.

 

[Mike64]

Well, sort of, but Walmart "grew" into the company it is now over basically the same time period that Sears declined. And grew not so much by "superior strategy" as brute force, unless you call being quicker and more willing to take advantage of changing economic circumstances to undercut Sears (and similar stores') pricing via business practices that would've been viewed with even less favor earlier on than they were by the time Walmart really came into its own, "strategizing". Isn't it almost a "natural law" of business management that it's a lot easier to "adapt" to new circumstances when you're building infrastructure rather than trying to adapt existing infrastructure to radically new conditions? (Unless you're cable companies that can lobby your way into legal or functional monopolies, "new circumstances" be damned...)

Sears' heyday as a brick & mortar business was the Mall Era (late 1950s through the 80s), and at a time when Walmart-like business practices would not have been viewed as kindly by the general public as they've become since the 90s (a vocal but ineffectual minority notwithstanding), and when, to a large extent, significantly "cheaper sourcing" (i.e., mainland China, Vietnam, etc) simply wasn't available yet for such a large percentage of their inventory... It's pretty hard to compete with the likes of Walmart (much less Amazon) when you're carting around that sort of baggage and you can't leverage a "new" social phenomenon like the Interwebz to your advantage like Amazon did. Even if Sears had managed to get online much more quickly, and effectively, than it did, it would never been "cool" like Amazon was for a long time before it became the New Normal, for little reason other than that it had a weird name and was On The Internet...

Federated Department stores is probably a better comparison to Sears, but even there there were a lot of differences between the two including their existing brand images, their target markets, and their preexisting infrastructures...

 

[Puffnstuff]

From many investors viewpoint it appears that the company was deliberately run into the ground so Lampert could scoop it up on the cheap. Since they missed the courts' deadline its really up to the judge now as to what happens next.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/02/business/sears-decision/index.html

 

[Sonikku]

The guy is an asshole. He will reap from the company he personally ran into the ground what everyone else will lose.

 

[shortylickens]

Sears could have gone online back in the mid 90's and been way ahead of the curve. They should have pushed for a top of the line internet presence in the mid 2000's and been slightly competitive.

In fact, aside from Walmart just about everybody is playing catch up with Amazon and eBay. Its like NOBODY saw the writing on the walls.
Thats what happens when you put 90 year old men in charge of corporations. They dont even wanna HEAR new ideas from young people, much less implement them.

 

[Sonikku]

Yep, but we still get these gawker articles laughing at the millenials that get fired for voicing their opinion. What do they know about technology or emerging trends? "Brats should just keep their mouths shut!"

 

[bfun_x1]

I miss waking through Sears and passing Radio Shack on my way to eat Sbarro in the mall food court.

 

[Sgt. York]

The floodgates are open. Let the hatred flow!

 

[DAPUNISHER]

The floodgates are open. Let the hatred flow!

First, Sgt. York is a great film, I have it on DVD. The real life guy, was a serious badass. And it is probably one of the few movies where a remake could be worthwhile.

On topic: Just as with BlockBuster, the hate is well earned. You F people over and they will prove to have long memories/hold a grudge.

 

[snoopy7548]

I miss waking through Sears and passing Radio Shack on my way to eat Sbarro in the mall food court.

And EB Games. I bought the original X-Box from them on the day it was released.

 

[UsandThem]

And EB Games. I bought the original X-Box from them on the day it was released.

I used to love going to malls back when there were some cool stores to browse around in while my wife and kids did their thing like clothes shopping. There was EB Games (which always had 3dfx GPUs), CompUSA, Circuit City, KB Toys, and even Sears. Plenty of cool stuff to look at (I even bought my first Voodoo card at EB Games).

Now when I am forced to go, my choices are the food court or the Apple Store.

That said, even the average person who paid no attention to financials knew exactly what Eddie Lampert's end game was going to be as he purposely sabotage any chance Sears had. It's still odd to see Craftsman tools in Lowes.

 

[ultimatebob]

I miss waking through Sears and passing Radio Shack on my way to eat Sbarro in the mall food court.

Come on... at least Sears and Radio Shack were decent in the 90's. Sbarro was NEVER good.

Auntie Anne's Pretzels on the other hand... yum.