Posted on 07/23/2013 2:09:29 PM PDT by Colonel Kangaroo
This chick has presented no evidence that the evil CEO extracted any less value out of "Sears" than any other business model would have.
The business model of having a huge catalog of item descriptions from which a customer chooses and shipping those items anywhere in the country is exactly what makes Amazon successful today. There is absolutely no good explanation for why Sears allowed Amazon into their markets aside from bad management.
Hitler liked Beethoven, therefore Beethoven murdered millions. See how that works?
The gruff little "Black Spaniard" kills me every time, and I am not alone on this.
Ayn Rand murdered the novella.
Sears started throwing credit cards at people when they realized the interest from those cards could help keep them afloat.
The “Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back” policy became a liability when a growing segment of its clientele began to game the system.
The catalog division, along with other specialty departments, collapsed under the weight of too many incompetent employees brought in to satisfy strict minority hiring requirements. Retirement and profit-sharing took their cuts from a shinking pie.
Apart from appliances, tools, tires and batteries, the company failed for decades to distinguish itself in product development, marketing or customer service. Now, selling brands everyone else carries looks desperate and doomed.
Plenty of parallels between Sears and the federal government...all bad. Pinning the blame on Ayn Rand? Horse$hi+.
I know what you mean, about having a company on your “lifetime sh** list”, where you won’t do business with them even if you get a 90% discount. I have my own lifetime sh** list, for reasons I won’t go into, but one is ALMOST as bad as yours:
Citibank
State Farm Insurance
The only reasons that Sears won’t make my list is that the problem I had with them recently was due to hapless incompetence and not abject evil - and that I STILL like their tools. Too bad they are closing the local store.
Atlas Shrugged is a convenient foil for liberals to employ when reality bites them in the a$$. The hallmark of liberalism is the inability to take responsibility for their actions. Ergo, they need someone to blame.
The jibes tossed her way are similar to their criticisms of Fox News. By reading a couple of chapters (or viewing an hour or two of coverage), liberals lob their ad hominems as if they are frag grenades, instead of water ballooms.
Until recently, it was my opinion that Atlas Shrugged should not be read by anyone under 30, as they do not have the life experiences to truly understand the mindset of looters and moochers.
That opinion recently changed. Thanks to Project Based Learning, my 11 YO son has an excellent understanding of looters and moochers, i.e. his classmates that were content to let him do most of the work!
Still, I'm not going to recommend he read it until he's at least 16, due to the sex scenes in AS.
Nonsense. Beethoven didn't murder millions.
Wagner, on the other hand . . .
Robert Rubin destroyed Sears?
Yeah, so I refuse to buy his paint-sprayers and rollers. Sears sold them.
;{)
The gruff little “Black Spaniard” kills me every time, and I am not alone on this.
Yuk, yuk, Wagner paint sprayers. Thank goodness I bought replacement parts and kept the vibrating actuator oiled so it won’t jam up in storage. Sears did sell them, true.
I always thought Ayn Rand was a complete kook, but everyone else thought she was a goddess
Your handle is most appropriate. Kudos for agreeing with the Über-lobs at Salon, too.
Excellent observation. Sears did not have the moxie to know to look for and hire ground level knowledge workers (as Drucker called them) who could modernize the Sears catalog to the net. Probably too late now. Amazon biz model perplexes all out of proportion to its margins/profits.
Even an atheist must live and work in the universe as God created it. While her objectivism does fail as a philosophy, and her one rule theory of morality (the almighty self) is as bankrupt as it gets, she still comes down on the side of some very pragmatic realities concerning market behaviors, beliefs which she has in common with many who do believe in God, the natural law, and unselfishness as an essential principle of morality.
In fact, that’s really how I understand her effort to paper over the deficiencies of her atheism. It was ingrained in her, due to her communist upbringing. Yet she had a sufficiently honest mind that she could acknowledge soviet style top down control just plain didn’t work. But she couldn’t take that extra step of acknowledging it is the Creator that endows us with our individual rights, and hence our freedom, and the full range of Judeo-Christian morality that entails. Yet she could still see and admit the reality that freedom works economically and tyranny does not. So she created a hybrid world for herself in which she could resolve the conflict with reality without changing her fundamental error concerning God.
As for the article, yes, without even knowing the source, once I started seeing the standard Democrat anti-market talking points, I knew it was just an Alinsky isolation event, where you pick a specific, highly recognizable bogeyman to symbolize the “evil” you’re attacking, and you beat that to death (or try). Like making the NRA the focal point for all gun control animus. It’s just a way to concentrate negative emotional energy. Standard psyops. Linking a free market champion like Rand with the fall of Sears, when there are much better, market-based ways to understand that event, is a tip off you may be dealing with a hostile.
What an asinine premise for an article.
Joe likes Ayn Rand, Joe is a failure, therefore it's Ayn Rand's fault.
This is a new low for Rand-bashing.
How many devout Christians do you know who can't get their acts together? Do you then bash Jesus?
Let's strive to keep a modicum of logic on this board.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.