Posted on 10/09/2018 8:28:12 PM PDT by yesthatjallen
In 1919 there were fewer trees and lumber than today, especially in places like the great plains.
I cannot understand Sears as they have been purposely steering towards the gutter for years. Their best paying departments being tools and appliances were sold off.
IMO, they should have gotten rid of their losers instead like GM did when they dumped Pontiac and Olds. GM’s best selling being Chevy was kept.
We have a VERY small Sears here... only appliances, tools, and lawnmowers. I went in last week knowing with certainty that I could get a set of Torx screwdrivers. The employee was quite helpful searching for them, but we both came up empty and he referred me to Harbor Freight Tools down the street.
So sad as Sears was once THE PLACE for tools. Now they’ll be joining Montgomery Wards in the memory bin.
They looked down on their customers too...
I think there are three essential paths that Sears took to arrive at this point:
1. When they started attaching themselves to malls...they had real competition sitting within 300 ft of their front door. This meant continual sales and profit issues....added to the fact that mall space ate up profits. I can remember my home-town Sears having their own building for well over 50 years, and then one day...dumping the property and relocating to a local mall where they rented.
2. Simply poor executives...layer after layer...eating up profits.
3. Never pacing themselves into the internet era and having the ‘best’ website for ordering.
I would add....bringing K-Mart into the picture...was probably one of the top ten most stupid decisions of the past forty years.
This was predicted over forty years ago and is being done deliberately.
Eddie Lampert was a pretty good stock portfolio manager. He’s a lousy retail CEO, probably one of the worst ever. Instead of hiring someone who knows retail to run the place, he jumped in with both feet and not only lost his shirt, but the shirts of long-suffering investors who held on to Sears throughout his disastrous tenure. Mercifully, that tenure is almost at an end.
The plans are shown on searshomes.com. “Does not include” plaster, bricks, or cement. Where would plaster have been used, if the interior was all wood? Ceilings? I could see a nostalgia enthusiast building one of these from scratch just for the sake of it.
No HVAC or electric of course.
Old craftsman tools were good. Modern pre stanley decker acquisition tools were very bad. Craftsman not owned by Sears anymore...Sears lost their business by trying to compete against single better product lines...some tools were better than sears and they were being sold at lower prices...same with refrigs...etc...lampert has not helped...just a money leverage guy...IMHO.
surprisingly people buy products unseen on line....without knowing the build quality or heft...or materials used.
That's not why they are failing.
Here’s an interesting link on the Sears Castleton house.
http://www.searshomes.org/index.php/tag/sears-castleton-house/
Not a big house, is it?
Tax write off .....that’s a canard used by business journalists who are pinkos
Tax write offs are nonsensical now for decades since Reagan.
Lampert is no fool....he bought Sears via KMart because he saw it on the cheap
The dirt and buildings....and he spun off the prizes....Sears Canada and Lands End to try to save it
Debt Equity is now 40/1
Sales shrinking and they sold the Kenmore brand another moneymaker for cash they needed
He’s not going to spend his last dime to make debt servicing ...
He’s chapter 11 bound....maybe even 7
It’s just not a viable business model anymore
They outlasted Woolco and Western Auto
it remains to be seen if the hard asset divestiture will cover the nearly 5 billion in debt
That is just it, Sears should have converted into an Amazon or Alibaba
I know that people have been watching this disaster for years. But few of them realize the employment issues associated with bankruptcy. When I last paid attention, they still had about 100 k employees. That’s a lot of folks out on the street.
There is also just as many retirees. Many people made a career out of working for Sears. They may end up like the steel workers.
When Sears and KMart merger was announced, I knew that they would kill each other...and now, no KMarts in Hillsborough County (had 6 in the 1990s)
Almost like he was bleeding it dry and making it fail on purpose: or was he just that f*cking inept?
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