He’s probably been paid out for his shares, so he’s good.
Wow, 15 years too late and several billion dollars short.
The year after the catalog was shuttered Amazon started selling.
115 years of selling direct to consumers homes gone like the wind.....
The biggest case study of dumb management that will ever be written.
Used to shop at the local Sears in the 1980s. It was located in the Mall.
Loved the camping/outdoors section, tools, appliances and cloths.
Each year they had less and less of the good stuff.
Now it’s pretty much a clothing store not much different from the other ones.
Sears assets are real estate and a few brands. Nothing else has value.
This is the company that invented mail order retail sales. If they had gone to internet sales earlier they might have made it.
Sears has been dying for near 30 years. Just let go already.
BTW my most prolific firearm is a Sears model 200 12 gauge (Made by winchester). At least 25 deer and uncounted small game. I still have the receipt from 1976.
You used to be able to buy anything, absolutely anything through the Sears catalog. That even included complete stone houses kits.
If they had kept it and taken advantage of it on the internet, it most likely would be dominant, and Amazon would still be just a river.
Sad day, growing up in the ‘sticks’, Sears, JCP & Monkey Wards wish books were an essential part of the Christmas hype season. Probably won’t be long before Sears joins MW on the ash heap of failed retailers. If so, it’ll be surprising if JCP lasts the longest. Go fig.
(Although, to be honest, if I do go to the mall for the first time in ages, I’ll probably look for shirts, etc. at JCP before Sears, go fig.)
I still have 2 boxes of Ted Williams 30-30, headstamped Sears.
When I bought my house in 1991, I went to Sear, and bought a washer, dryer, and microwave, and sold all 3 in perfect working condition with the house in 2010.
Mark
Eddie robbed Sears blind, if I recall correctly. He transferred all their real estate holdings to his own company.
Lambert drove Sears into the ground, and only after they file BK does he finally step down, something that he should have done years ago.
Our Sears is usually empty, as is the Mall it’s located in.......................
Guess I better hurry and finish out my Craftsman socket set collection.
05/31/2018 6:23:04 PM PDT · 64 of 79It doesn't bode well for swamp draining.
spintreebob to null and voidThen some MBA decided that could cut expenses and raise prices. Not at all the Sears story. The Brenn and Brothers ran Monky Wards and Sears into the ground in the 80s.(The same boys who drove the GOP into the ground post Reagan as they controlled all RNC money.) They nutured a hierarchical structure of many dozens of layers of bureaucracy. The mid-level bureaucracy of men in their 40s and 50s and 60s were paid based on how inefficient they were.
The bigger their staff in Sears Tower, and then Hoffman Estates, the more important they were and the bigger their salary and perks. The stock holders finally got rid of Brennan and brought in Martinez.
Martinez brought in good people at the top. They had good ideas. But the Asst VPs, Directos, Managers.. 50+ levels of bureaucracy in Hoffman Estates actively and blatantly obstructed everything that the Matinez team tried to do.
The middle management also blocked every good idea from the bottom. I was on various IT teams as a consultant. My IT team lead had extremely good ideas on how to implement The Softer Side of Sears . His ideas involved checking what was selling in real time with my online programs. Lee, Levi and other suppliers were begging us to re-order in real time. In the back to school season, Sears most profitable season, we had no clue what styles would be hot... and if hot would vary by store location.
Online tracking of sales and re-order in real time was so obvious. But to do so would eliminate the entire buyer department of hundreds of self-important lazy buffoons and their managers.
Middle management insisted that they would run inventory re-plenishment off the quarterly report, meaning Back-to-school replenishment would be ordered about October 15, way too late to compete with Walmart and others.
A sister team to mine had a great plan on how to turn the Sears Catalog into an online catalog. It was a vision ... an Amazon. But Middle Management shot it down. All they saw were character based 3270s. They did not understand how people could shop on a computer because a computer had no pictures of the item like a catalog did. That is how much in the 1950s middle management was living in the 1990s.
Sears and IBM partnered to buy Prodigy and to create the first Cloud. Neither Sears nor IBM management had a clue what to do with what they bought. Middle management of both companies shot down every good idea, most of which came from the bottom in this case.
Lands End bought Sears and had good ideas. Sears middle management refused to implement them. Lampert bought Sears and Kmart for the real estate, not the retail business. Sears was one of the largest owners of real estate in the world.
Sears was not done in by some young MBA. It was done in by the Sears Swamp, the Sears establishment of middle aged and older men who wanted to protect their bureaucracy because their bureaucracy protected them.
Adapt, or die.
I was told that back in the 70s the Sears CEO was asked how they would respond to Walmart....his answer.”We’re Sears Roebuck...we don’t have to respond to anyone”!!!!
Lampert should have stepped down right after the failure of the Sears-K-Mart merger. He has continually sold off Sears assets, to himself, leaving a highly leveraged shell. All while he NEVER had any true vision of how to reboot Sears into the current century. When he joined, Sears had the assets and the revenue to alter course and not be left in the dust by Amazon and Walmart. Lampert NEVER saw or knew how do to that.
CEO Eddie Lampert’s networth $1 Billion. Guess he got his and everyone else got the shaft.
His B.A. in economics from Yale certainly failed for Sears.