Posted on 04/12/2018 4:03:08 PM PDT by foreverfree
At its peak, it was a truly great store to shop at for middle-class Americans. Up until the late 1980s, it still had a chance to thrive, but bad management sunk them. My parents used them for everything back in the day. Tools, car batteries, clothes, stoves & fridges, taxes, investment with in-store Dean Whitter kiosks & on & on.
They still do. Some of the Sears stores that were closed down became flea markets.
You’re right. I can remember when many Sears stores still had their diner/snack counters too. Sears sold just about everything a middle class family needed back in the 1960s and 70s.
The Last few times I was in a Sears store I was shocked at how empty they all were. When I was young - and I worked in one when I was a teenager - they were always busy.
Ah, store number 1380. Lots of good memories from that store.
Must have been made on Wednesday.
I've had good luck with some of their stuff, too - and their large (44") rolling tool chests are popular as bases for garage workbenches. The build quality is actually better than the current crop of Craftsman-branded chests.
Failure to recognize your business model doesn’t fit the future.
Sears existed long before Amazon.com. Why didn’t Sears jump into the market right away? Because the 500 million being spent on executive leadership at Sears didn’t take the time or even had the expertise to recognize change.
In a way, you can say Sears was the first Amazon with it’s direct mail order.
Interesting.
They should have been what Amazon is today.
Before internet ordering, there was mail ordering.
—
It is interesting. They invented mail order. In a way, they were Amazon in the pre-internet era. They published a catalog that was available to everyone in every town. You could order anything and everything from that catalog and have it delivered. It all moved at the speed of mail, but it was much the same concept as Amazon.
Sears built a new store here (a Sears Grand) maybe 10 years or so ago. Yesterday, it was announced that the store was up for sale, but Sears would lease the store after the sale. Thing is, the parking lot is always empty.
K-Mart, owned by Sears (or vice versa) is practically discouraging customers. I was looking for garden plants next to their garden center today. But to buy some plants I was told to take them into the store—the garden center door was “blocked off”.
Dead store walking.
I’ve been looking at that item some.
Sears used to sell homes for cripes sake.
The venture into the online world was a disaster. Even today their website sucks and their discounts are indecipherable.
I still get my car battery at Sears (Die Hard Gold) every 4 years. Best car battery I’ve ever used.
Well I have and MBA and I worked for Wally in Bentonville, Arkansas for 5 years several years ago. Sears’ business model just doesn’t work. They are a mall store and have to pay those expensive mall rents at a time when malls - at least mid market malls have been dying. Customers instead more often go to big box stores which are a lot more convenient with easy parking and since they’re not paying mall rents, they can undercut Sears on price.
Sears tried several times to get their customers to buy higher margin textiles (remember the “softer side of Sears” campaign that failed?) but they just couldn’t pull it off. Their tire centers sell well and their Craftsman line of tools has always sold well but that stuff is low margin. The trend that has developed is customers will either pay a lot of quality.....Nordstrom and Nieman Marcus and Saks are doing just fine....or they don’t care about the name brand and just want something cheap - Target and Wally and even dollar stores are doing well. Many times its the same customer who will splash out the cash for a pair of gucci shoes but will take whatever toothpaste is cheapest that gets the job done. Those in the middle like Sears and JC Penney are screwed.
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.
Kmart and Sears were both bought up by Eddie Lampert. He had the brilliant idea that if he slapped two sick companies together he could make one healthy company. No. Wrong. Fail. He really should have just wound up both. K-mart was worth a lot of money since they owned their real estate which was in urban locations. The actual retail operation was worthless. Sears too has long been broken.
Eddie has lost a lot of money by letting these two zombies limp along for the past 15 years.
They also introduced high fees. I was very busy in those days. So I got burned one month. Well, I hope they enjoyed the money.
Still, I’ll miss them (what they once were) much more than Target. When Target finally goes the way it should.
One K-Mart up the road just closed. he area was mostly middle-class and not too bad, 20-25 years ago.
I was in there about 15 months ago. It was almost like a small riot in there. Suffice to say, things changed.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the theft was 15% of what the daily sales were.
They had one car item I wanted. Might should have made one more trip to see if it was on sale, LOL.
In riot gear, of course.
Her is one for you... Sears is still open here in Benderville but Kmart closed last year and Kmart owns Sears...
“There was mail ordering.”
Yes, Sears was the equivalent of Amazon or eBay. They built a massive building / distribution center just east of downtown LA which was in operation from 1926 to 1992. Considering how large it is, was built in 1926 and serviced a sparsely populated west and Rocky Mountain region only, demonstrates their dominance over the mail order business for almost 70 years.
The building has been vacant since 1992 which is about the same time they started into a tailspin. The internet didn’t exist and eBay or Amazon didn’t either.
I remember the time when we would send our order in with a check and then wait the required "4 to 6 weeks" for delivery, and that was for every mail order catalogue. When something arrived in just four weeks we thought ourselves lucky.
I’m making more trips to Sears, trying in my own way to stave off the seemingly inevitable. I actually worked there for a few months 12 years ago, left to go back in mechanical maintenance. But I priced some appliance parts today and they’re 25% higher than stores on eBay, which has also made some questionable decisions lately.
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