Sears aims to close up to 150 stores in bankruptcy, sources say

Sears is planning to close up to 150 of its department and discount stores and keep at least 300 open as part of a plan to restructure under U.S. bankruptcy protection, people familiar with the matter said Friday.

The plans, which remained in flux Friday afternoon, would leave the fate of Sears' remaining roughly 250 stores uncertain, the sources said. The future of the stores could hinge on Sears' negotiations with landlords over their leases.

Sears is a textbook example of what happens when MBAs take over a business.

The same people that destroyed the RNC under Bush I, the Brennan Bros, damaged a healthy Sears during the same time frame. It took a long time for the Sears board to act. But they finally put in a good man, Martinez.

Martinez had the right plan to re-build Sears in the early 90s. We workers in the trenches at the bottom were with Martinez. I was in inventory replenishment. My team lead and our team wanted to implement Martinez plan.

Middle management from assistant VP down to Director and Manager were united in opposition to Martinez, and profitability. Sears was over-bloated with middle management ... many dozens of layers of managers working off of Quarterly Reports.

Both Martinez, we workers at the bottom and suppliers like Lee and Levi wanted to ship direct from the supplier to each retail store, omitting the warehouse system that was a 1950s expensive overhead. Middle mangagement, all several dozen layers were unanimously opposed to a real time system. They insisted the real time system be used to produce the quarterly reports which their middle management team would then peruse to reorder.

Working in IT across the aisle from me was a team that wanted to turn Sears Catalog into Amazon before there was an Amazon. They had the right idea. But the Sears Catalog department and middle management were opposed. They argued that pictures in the Catalog sold the product and Computers just could not present pictures. They were only good for character based processing.

Sears and IBM bought prodigy and did not follow the advice of the young guys with no seniority. The VPs did not know what to do with Prodigy.

Sears and IBM built the first cloud in the late 80's, Advantis. I was on that cloud consulting from 5 different big client companies. It was great. But the VPs had no concept of where IT was going.

Virtually all of these VPs and middle management were older guys with BAs who would have been rock stars in the 1950s. They were not MBAs.

A good many of the Executives do not have MBAs. They have your Humanities degree, law degrees, gender study degrees, psychology degrees, etc...

Also, (I will get flamed for this but data says the flamers are wrong) too many females that believe in relying on "the human element" rather than, concentrating on producing the best service and or product to the consumer, is more beneficial to a firm's future outlook.

Also the fact that Sears had an online presence since the 1990's but was attached to the concrete jungle called the mall they had prospered with for decades made there strategy a Catch 22. Guess what, rent/storage costs (Vast amount of Malls/shelf space in the form of a third party) that takes resources to keep up with. Amazon did not have those anchors and in terms of Internet exposure, had first the first mover advantage (Took the Best Buy model in terms of the Internet).

“For all intents and purposes, the Allstate scooter was a re-badged Vespa...the motorcycle was a re-badged Puch.”

Well,with a few exceptions virtually everything Sears sold was rebadged. The scooter I had in mind was more primitive than the Vespa. It may have been manufactured by Cushman but not sure. Btw, my dream scooter was the Cushman Eagle, sort of a hybrid between a scooter and motorcycle.

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