They used to have it all, basically.
Then made tons of bonehead decisions. Like outsourcing their credit operations to some credit-card outfit.
That’s pretty much when I stopped shopping there. I doubt I’ve spent $100 there in 15 years.
Yep. Absolutely no one was as well set up to conquer online sales as was the already existing operation at Sears. Amazon was a cyber bookshop when Sears was selling entire houses and everything within them: appliances, clothing, furniture. What is truly amazing is that they watched the entire thing happen and couldn't seem to do anything to keep up.
Maybe it was too much of an investment in brick-and-mortar stores. Borders, Barnes and Noble, Waldenbooks, Crown, all appear to have taken that false trail, but for Sears to do so and not be able to recover is astonishing. If anyone does know of a study on this rise-and-fall I'd love to read it.
Have you ever tried to buy something at the Sears website? It’s the slowest, most convoluted website I’ve ever used. How a company could have one of the greatest mail-order businesses in the world (they sold HOUSES mail order!), and then completely miss the boat on the internet, is beyond me.
If it wasn’t for Craftsman tools (which they sold off I think), I wouldn’t walk in their store.
Funny you mention that....The problem is its very hard to run both a retail operation AND a credit card outfit at the same time. What often happens and what happened in Sears’ case is there is an economic downturn or the company starts not doing as well. The retail operation is obviously the most important part of the company so they start leaning on the credit card side of the business to loosen their credit standards in order to boost sales.
That works and it does boost sales but it does so at the cost of extending credit to people who should not be extended credit.....remember the housing bubble? That is the heroin needle. It feels great...at first. Then one day all those people who were extended credit who should not have been default. Then the company is stuck with those bad debts it has to write off.
That is exactly what happened at Sears. Wally brought over the Executive VP who was running the operation at Sears to run their new financial services division. I worked for her for 2 years. She was a Harvard MBA and former consultant for a real white shoe consulting firm. She was brilliant at making presentations and speaking to executives. She was clueless about the nuts and bolts of running a business or even how to build a financial model.