Posted on 09/16/2021 4:05:17 PM PDT by American Number 181269513
They were fun. Our local store, when it existed, had a Viewmaster display with literally DOZENS of 3-disk packs of different subjects. I had others, but they disappeared over the years. I think I had the Seven Wonders, too.
I was wondering the same thing. Whirl pool made some of the products that carried the Sears Brand Name. They had said some time ago that they would continue to make some of those.
Had one of those also! I was nerdy as a kid.
My wife got me a huge rolling toolbox before they closed.
That buyout was financial move more than anything.
Sears had a defined pension plan and had a lot of money invested for the purpose of paying those defined pensions. It may not have been funded at 100% but it was still a substantial amount. By selling themselves to Kmart (which was internally treated as a Sears takeover of Kmart) they could terminate the pension plan and recover the money for themselves. They took the cash and left the employees without the pension money then set up a 401K plan.
Older employees who had been working at Sears for decades had to start from scratch to try to make a retirement for themselves. I have a relative who was one of them and after another sellout the older employees were given a choice of a small amount to leave or face being sent hundreds of miles to another store/location. My relative walked out after 30 years with only $50K. When she started working for Sears her defined pension benefit was for around $2K/month.
During Blockbuster's heyday, a construction worker of new Blockbuster stores foretold their future perfectly. Even the hard hats saw that one coming. But a pivot is the same as starting a new business from the ground up, and like all startups, that normally has a 90% failure rate. Blockbuster's failure was pretty much as expected.
"Amazon is selling entire houses for less than $20,000 — with free shipping"
Sad to see. My grandfather bought my
first .22 rifle at a Sears store when I
was 12. Back then, you could purchase
just about anything in one location.
Wal-Mart wiped them out
Sears/Roebuck was an American institution.
But they had a very strong brand name, which would’ve given them a huge advantage. They could’ve just stopped the VHS and moved there operations to large regional warehouses and use the web as their storefront to mail CDs out. They could’ve eventually had their own movie app. They just didn’t seem to have visionaries on their board with enough voice to see the methods of their business were changing. Sometimes, the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” rule comes back to bite us.
Ace Hardware sells them now.
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