Posted on 07/23/2013 2:09:29 PM PDT by Colonel Kangaroo
A pretty nice little aphorism you got there...
He didn’t do this pall mall on his own.
He had a willing board and a buffet of fund managers who never felt there was anything wrong with his strategy.
This article is drivel.
Sears, like KMart and JC Penneys, are victims of changing consumer buying preferences.
Walmart, Target, Kohls, Amazon.com, etc. killed those chains.
Nonsense.......witness the rise of competition: Target, WalMart, Best Buy, Lowes, Home Depot, Menards..........feel free to add to the list.
Rent to own???
Like Aarons?
I hardly see how that could have kept a multi-billion dollar corporation profitable.
Not to mention the number that H.G. Wells did on Circuit City...
Nonsense.......witness the rise of competition: Target, WalMart, Best Buy, Lowes, Home Depot, Menards..........feel free to add to the list.
Catalog Sales >> Urban Department Stores >> Suburban Malls >> Big Box Stores and Internet Sales.
Come on FRiend.......Salon ?
Those presstitutes are left of Saul Alinsky IMO.
Hope yer well Colonel !
Why Sears, with its catalog network, didn’t mimic Amazon and the other online sellers is beyond me. Their traditional strengths were in appliances and tools. American consumers still buy these, just not at Sears. It just seems that they lost their niche and wandered around for the past 40 years without a decent strategic focus on what they are and the customer segment that they serve.
Has this guy been in Sears in the last five years? Sears failed because Sears is a crappy store.
(Interesting about the kidnapping, though. What’s with that??)
I don't like Rand. I don't like Salon either, which is making a wrong headed attack on Reagan.
The downfall of Sears started when Martinez tried to run it like a socialist state. Lampert was the reaction. What Martinez failed to understand is that he couldn’t pay his employees next to nothing, and then share their commissions with all the other underpaid workers to create a big, happy family.
Sears was a slow suicide. Kenmore used to be a great brand in the 60’s. When you bought one it lasted forever. Now in an effort to cut costs they charge more for an inferior product. I was a Sears buyer until one time I bought a dehumidifyer it didn’t work right out of the box. they made me take it to the repair center and told me it would take three months to fix. I live in the. East so summer would be over and I wouldn’t need it then. I made them fix it sooner but never again would I buy from s Sears.
Could we please not post raging communist bull from Salon?
Seriously, if I wanted to read a piece of Trotskyist fantasy fiction set in modern day America I’d be browsing MSNBC.
You have posted a thought provoking piece. Good work.
Ayn Rand, whatever her philosophy, seems to have influenced this CEO.
The dangers of Ayn Rand have always been its atheism.
Any ethical system divorced from God and obligations to God, and focused on either pure self-interest or altruism, are ultimately unfruitful.
Only God blesses dignity and growth.
Like most liberal clap-trap, the author confuses "cause" with "effect".
Getting bigger is the reward for doing things correctly. You continue to take business away from competitors who make mistakes until you dominate the markets that you are in. If you try to get bigger by buying weak competitors and then continue their weak practices, then you will lose your shirt.
Also from the article: "Myth: Self-interest is the greatest virtue"
In this section the author faults Lampert for dividing the business into smaller business units. I worked decades for a company which organized itself in that manner from the get-go and was incredibly successful. It's not wrong to manage parts of your business as smaller businesses with the ability to succeed despite the failure of other business units. The object, however, is NOT to have them competing for the same customers or resources. They must all be able to be successful at the same time or else you have mis-organized them.
Finally, the article proposes: "Myth: Greed always wins".
Liberals love the word "greed" because in invokes images of one person denying wealth to another person. The opposite presumably is "generosity", implying that one succeeds in business by giving things away. Liberals never seem to understand that business is NOT a zero-sum game. In a capitalist system, the seller and the buyer both benefit from the transaction. If they don't both benefit then one of them is a fool or the game has been rigged by the government.
You didn’t read my post.
The “house of cards” is objectivism and atheism.
I didn’t say anything about economics.
Thanks, I didn't know that. That's the last time I listen to a Hitler symphony!!!
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