Inventory replenishment is a key factor. Martinez and every Sears leader since him has had the right inventory vision. Workers at the bottom have brilliant ideas on how to implement the vision in practical ways.
But middle management, the VPs, assistant VPs, directors, etc sabotage all good ideas. From Sears to Radio Shack middle management rejects good ideas. Middle management is paid based on the amount of money in their budget, and their head count. Good ideas inevitably involve flattening the organization, empowering low level employees to make obvious decisions, and eliminating many levels of middle management. That means making middle managers less numerous, less important and less well paid.
But not all middle management is as bad as Sears, or both top and middle management as bad as Radio Shack.
KMart committed suicide over replacing a gun-toting swell spoken beauty with an angry, ugly anti-gun slob.
JCPenny’s Ackman drove away all the pro-family customers, especially the boomers, by trying to turn Penney’s into Abercrummy and Filth.
Target repeated history because it did not learn from history.
Walmart is an interesting case. In the old Walmart employees had personal responsibility. If they saw something that needed to be done, they did it. They took pride in making a difference in their store. The promotion ladder was based on employees taking personal responsibility to make their store better.
But that has changed. Now, an employee is reprimanded for doing something not in his job description. And his job description is to do what the computer tells him to do; not what his own eyes and ears tell him; and certainly not what the customer wants.
Some FReepers here talk about ads. Well done ads are still effective. Kroger is the best example. Bloombergs idiots went after Kroger on guns. Kroger avoided the KMart mistake and took customers away from Walmart and other competition. But at the same time, Kroger gives money to LBGTQ groups and gets their loyalty. To counteract that, Kroger runs pro-family ads that are very convincing.
Kroger’s prices are far higher than Walmart. Here in Atlanta far higher than the small Fresh Market chain and far higher than the Hispanic stores my wife shops. But their PR/Ad strategy is fooling everybody and showing on a positive bottom line.
Anyone in the Colorado Springs area probably knows of one of the largest gun shops in the world: Specialty Sports & Supply. Jeff knows that to sell a product he must have the product to sell. So, Jeff has one of everything and many items he may never sell. He now has one of the largest gun shops because it is a destination retailer. People know they can get what they want there. He even lowered his prices to Internet levels pricing. He make profit on volume of sales. One Christmas season he had over 200 NICS checks to complete by 11:00am.