WTF is their problem?

>Sears reports wider third-quarter loss, as sales continue to suffer

How does one of the last century's greatest retailers fall as far as Sears has? They were doing great right into the 1990s. They had many bustling stores and warehouses. They had an excellent catalog mail order distribution system. They were ripe to be Amazon before Amazon was a thing. The fucking corporation just crashed and burned in a matter of less then 20 years. Why? How? Who is responsible for this?

>Things aren't getting any better at Sears. In fact, they're getting worse.

>The once-venerable department store chain on Thursday reported a wider third-quarter loss than the prior-year period, as sales continued to slide.

>The results were the latest indication that revenue and operating performance at the iconic retailer continue to deteriorate, despite its efforts to get rid of underperforming stores, lessen its dependence on categories that are struggling in its shops, and make money from its real estate footprint.

cnbc.com/2016/12/08/sears-reports-wider-third-quarter-loss-as-sales-continue-to-suffer.html

archive.is/e3iFQ

Other urls found in this thread:

crooksandliars.com/2014/10/how-ayn-rand-loving-ceo-tanked-sears
bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-11/at-sears-eddie-lamperts-warring-divisions-model-adds-to-the-troubles
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

Breddy sure all of their problems started after the Kmart acquisition.

They're still in business because of their valuable real estate. Selling it all immediately would lose them too much money.

I came along

t. The Internet

In my city, sears fired all the white people, hired a bunch of spics that barely speak english, cant figure out why all the cleaning supplies keep disappearing, eventually catch one of the spics stealing a new outfit or tv or washer and dryer and fire them, hire another spic to fill the job, get ripped off by new hire in a week. They do shitty customer service and lose sales that way too.

Plus any mall you go to is a playground for black mob attacks.

>mfw I still have my late grandfathers Sears shotgun

How the mighty have fallen.

Sears among other companies is a sign of the decline of retail and the American middle class. I will never forgive them for turning their nice made in America Craftsman tools into yet another line of crappy made in China tools, rather than just keeping their store brand tools a separate thing.

The new CEO especially has just been looting the company. What Sears has always had going for it is that they owned all their real estate and had lower operating expenses as a result. Now they are just selling everything off in order to squeeze as much money from the dying company as they can.

>Go to Sears Outlet in my shitty college town
>place is run down
>very few customers
>clothing is dumb as hell (I don't wear graphic tees, especially with Duck Dynasty shit or "Be glad I'm not a twin" on it)
>Leave

You should have called now

Sears operated near malls, malls are dying as well. You can say it's the death of the middle class, or just that online shopping has put them out of business.

family member just ordered a refrigerator from a Sears outlet, its been like 2 weeks now and they haven't come to deliver it

just a disaster of a company

>How does one of the last century's greatest retailers fall as far as Sears has?

Easy, Sears didn't embrace the Internet. They just couldn't see it, which is a shame considering that it would have been easily layered onto their existing mail order business. Then Walmart completely ate them, and Walmart is now getting fucked by Amazon.

Then Lambert came along and he's made it clear that he is going to destroy Sears for his own personal gain. Sears' only truly valuable asset, their real estate, is being sold to him at a bottom basement value. He will then make lots of money off leases until the company goes bankrupt and ceases to operate.

That's one of the long term issues caused by Sears' merger with Kmart.

Kmart didn't help but they were going down long before that.

The phrase "adapt or die" comes to mind. They never adopted a significant Internet presence, and it's killing them.

Walmart (and Kmart to a much lesser extent) was smart by selling groceries, and including a pharmacy, in their stores. Groceries and drugs are one of those items that Internet ordering will probably never fully take over.

I would say they're on a downslope because they used to sell electronics practically at cost, keep cutting benefits for their full-time employees and cutting the commission structure for the salesmen that they do have, foot traffic is low as hell because of the net and those who do go in bring their phones to price-compare on Amazon. CEO is gutting the company and not investing anything into improving,

Also doesn't help that they were one of the few appliance stores still charging like 70 bucks for delivery and then using lowest bid delivery personnel that would frequently fuck up orders by delivering damaged goods or not showing up at all.

t. Former Sears salesman.

they were trying to complete with walmart with the whole china crap shit.
you used to be able to order a whole house from sears, with everything init and they would come set it up.
.
the history goes a little like this: everyone copies sears busniss model, can't really compete anymore on costs, zerosum game, still around because established.
walmart comes around with new business model (no back of house, the warehouse is the show room and china made crap and other stupid business stuff, Walmart becomes the worlds biggest retailer, sears on last legs, now everyone copies walmarts business model, can't really compete on costs, just a zero-sum game, walmart stops growing, then amazon comes along...

this thread is better suited for /biz/

i work in one of the sears outlets that only sells used appliances and most of the shit we sell will break in 3 months and you're fucked unless you shell out for a 500$ protection plan thing

What the fuck happened to Kmart? Every Kmart I see is like a third world country now. Everything is scratched, broken, dirty. The check out registers are scratched to shit and falling apart. Half the merchandise in the store doesn't even have price labels. I don't really mind if everything looks like shit, but it's just jarring.

Also, they have so many obnoxious coupon and discount offers that it takes forever to check out. If one guy in front of you wants to sign up for their email list it's an extra 10 minutes to check out.

i didn't even know there were k-marts still in business

it's been years since i've seen one

>I will never forgive them for turning their nice made in America Craftsman tools into yet another line of crappy made in China tools

This. I can't believe they did that. Craftsman tools were an industry standard for decades.

>can't afford SnapOn
>no problem buy Craftsmen
>same quality with less finish and half the cost

You could tell something was up in the late 1990s when Craftsman started releasing trashy do everything wonder pliers and other weird tools no one but rank amateurs could find a use for. Then Kmart started selling the brand and it went straight into the toilet.

I used to buy Craftsman almost exclusively. Now it doesn't fucking matter as its all from the same factory in China. I have only bought one craftsmen tool in the past 15 years. It was tool that only a hand full of companies made with Sears being one of them. I bought it last year. It was creepy walking through the Sears store to get the tool. The place reeked of desperation.

They should be what Amazon is today. The catalog and mail in order infrastructure just needed to updated to use the Internet.
BAKA.

Kmarts still exist. They're basically the personification of Western decline. It's depressing.

>Sears didn't embrace the Internet.

I just don't get this. How dumb fuck retarded were the CEOs in the 90s? The writing was on the wall.

>How does one of the last century's greatest retailers fall as far as Sears has? They were doing great right into the 1990s. They had many bustling stores and warehouses. They had an excellent catalog mail order distribution system. They were ripe to be Amazon before Amazon was a thing. The fucking corporation just crashed and burned in a matter of less then 20 years. Why? How? Who is responsible for this?
They let a fucking Rand worshipping idiot libertarian run their company into the ground.

crooksandliars.com/2014/10/how-ayn-rand-loving-ceo-tanked-sears

everything they do is done better at other stores

There were people who didn't accept electricity in the early 20th century because they thought it would be a fad.

they lost to walmart, HARD. went bankrupt. never got out of it.
Now if you want the cheapest shit you go to walmart, if you want slightly better stuff and stores, you go to target. Between Walmart and target there really isn't any room for kmart

"it will devalue our retail stores"

>This. I can't believe they did that. Craftsman tools were an industry standard for decades.
A few years ago, I stopped into a Sears because I wanted a Craftsman small screwdriver set. I picked up a 10 piece or something like that, and when I got home I stated working on whatever it was that i needed the tool for. The handle broke off of it. I thought "WTF is this?" I've never had a Craftsman tool fail me, especially on 1st use. I looked over the sticker on the case to see what the warranty was on it, and there it was "Made in China" I couldn't fucking believe it. I promptly returned that piece of shit and went down to Lowes and got the cheapest shittiest made in China they had and called it a day. Fuck Sears.

sears sold lifetime replacement usa made tools. guns and drew men to store and catalog where they bought clothes appliances tires, batteries and pooltables ect. sears moves tool production to overseas. drops warranty since they fall apart quick. sears shuns firearms except few 3rd party sales online. hurr durr what went wrong. If sears had embraced the last decades gun sales boom in store they would be at least in the black now

I worked for Sears and they fucked me out of like a month's wage.
They cannot burn in fucking hell painfully enough.

Wow. I never really knew or considered that angle on the birth of modern technology. With hindsight everything seems obvious.

>>Sears didn't embrace the Internet.
>I just don't get this. How dumb fuck retarded were the CEOs in the 90s? The writing was on the wall.
Kind of, but not really. This would've taken some forward thinking visionary shit in the early mid 90s. The internet was fucking slow as shit, filled with blinking text and shitty flash animations. It would take me at least 20 minutes on dialup to load enough porn (jpeg only, forget video) to have a good beat off session. Late 90s early 2000s was the time that they should've really dug into the internet. But, their flagship stores are in rundown shopping malls that no one goes to anymore, and that writing was on the wall in the early 90s. They should've invested in stand alone stores and got out of the malls. The American mall is what killed them more than lack of vision I think.

Good luck convincing anyone to pay for it. What's better is when the plan isn't pro-rated for clearance merch so you're selling a 200 dollar dryer and trying to get them to buy a 180 dollar 3 year plan on top of that. Then you earn 0.5% commission on the dryer.

Want to know how I became an appliance salesman there? Started in electronics and then one month they were like 'Alright we're combining the electronics and appliance department, switching all electronics personnel to full commission instead of base plus commission, and none of you are getting training time. Good luck!' This was a month after they had just switched electronics from commission to hourly for some reason.

That was a fun month.

I honestly think guns and ammo are a part of why Walmart is on top of retail these days. I can't think of any other store that openly sells firearms. And yet in America there are more guns than people. They have to be getting these guns from somewhere, why not a retail chain? There's nothing wrong with buying some ammo at Walmart or Sears, except that now Sears doesn't sell guns and ammo anymore.

I like Sears. It's the nearest store that sells shop tools, they sell jeans in my weird-ass long leg size, and they've never given me shit on returns.

Shame about Craftsman, but Sears is a decent hardware store with a decent work clothes selection.

Sears had an internet shop long before Amazon was around. It was clunky as fuck and Lampert made sure it was basically unusable by cheating out to the contractors, but they definitely did have it.

Good point on the gun sales.

>3rd party sales online

Their whole online presence is a disaster. That model of selling some products on a site and letting other vendors sell on the site too sucks. When Newegg and Best Buy went this route I pretty much stopped using them. Walmart does the same and their site is shit. I hate sorting out the other vendors on every search. Amazon is similar but somehow does it better and so do there vendors. Maybe because Amazon's model always did it that way it seems proper.

sounds like you're the one who fucked up, user

WalMart stopped selling ARs and all AR related equipment after Sandy Hook. I haven't been to WalMart in a couple of years, but I don't think they sell AR stuff at all anymore. I usually do my shopping at Academy. They have a shit ton of stuff.no cold queens

this makes me glad i'm a warehouse puke and all i do is wander around with a cart all day and sometimes move a fridge for 8 hours

Any sporting goods store has at least a basic hunting rifle and shotgun selection, and they tend to have better ammunition stock than wal-mart.

Paul krugman wrote that by 2005 the Internet would be shown to have had about as
Much impact on the economy as the typewriter.

The decline of Craftsman distresses me greatly

>growing up, dad always used the same old craftsman mower for like 15 years
>buy Craftsman mower from Sears in 12' thinking it'll be quality
>every year mower engine seems to have an issue with cycling that requires maintenance I can't do on my own after trying everything i can think of that wont void warranty
>year two, for example, left front-drive wheel stops being self-propelled.
>"You wouldn't have these problems if you just bought a new one" everytime I brought it in, even when it basically was new.
>past year, brought mower in three times because the engine would just sputter-out and die ater running for a few minutes, last time don't even bother showering or washing off grass and shit before going in because I'm pissed
>same issue still happens after, call up Sears, they shrug and give me run-around
>no
>go to home depot
>buy Honda mower
>no issues

Dude on the phone seriously tried to offer me an "extension" on the warranty for $100 that didn't cover engine repair.
I didn't know they could do that.
>mfw

>Paul krugman wrote that by 2005 the Internet would be shown to have had about as
>Much impact on the economy as the typewriter.
In 1995, maybe. In 2005, you'd have to be an idiot not to see that writing on the wall.

Is that man ever correct?

>let's get these alt-right millennials talking about sears
>i know, i'll use a "meme"
>how do you do fellow Sup Forumsacks, let's talk about sears

Americans in the 40's couldn't imagine the auto industry without Packard.

Americans in the 70's couldn't imagine retail without Sears.

People today can't imagine the internet without Facebook.

Large companies and empires fall over time, that's what they do. America too will eventually fall, because literally every other fucking empire in the history of mankind has. It's how things work my g

Sears actually should have gone out of business years ago. There is only one thing that has kept them afloat to this point: the Sears Charge Card. Thanks to that card, Sears is still collecting interest to this day on fridges they sold in the 80's. The obligations on those cards are the only valuable assets the company still owns. The physical stores are worthless since the only sensible thing to do is bulldoze them to repurpose the land.

There was a time when the Sears Charge Card was how middle class people furnished their homes. Whether it was a sofa, a TV, or a set of power tools, that little piece of plastic in your wallet made it all possible. And paying it down to zero meant you had earned the special privilege to go back to Sears and use it again for your next major purchase.

This was before everyone and their dog had half a dozen credit cards on hand, and five more already pre-approved. Most store credit cards (like Kohls, for example) are underwritten by a major bank, like Citi. So Citi owns all the interest payments. To the store, the card is simply a vehicle for spending. Citi pays them for the product, so Kohls has no exposure, but also gains nothing further than enabling you to buy more than what your cash on hand permits. But Sears is different. They own their own card, so they're the ones who own your soul, and that means they get to double dip: they get the margin on the item, and the margin on the money (a.k.a. the interest). This also permits them to sell products at or below cost and still turn a profit in the long run. It's okay to lose $100 on a fridge if they make $500 on the interest.

But here's where the system breaks down. Selling that fridge for a $100 loss doesn't help them if the consumer buys it with one of the half dozen credit cards du jour in their pocket, each offering 0.00% APR for the intro year (which they will balance transfer to another 0.00% introductory offer at the last second).

prob but also sears had a huge reputation with their tools and power equip they threw away in the 90's they really fucked up i don't the internet as bigger mistake since most things they sold are brick and morter preferred items like lawnmowers tires etc.

Thanks for the dank corporate financial memery, frogbro.

I think a lot of this fails to place blame on what Eddie Lampert did though

Seriously, read this shit

bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-11/at-sears-eddie-lamperts-warring-divisions-model-adds-to-the-troubles

>Instead, the divisions turned against each other—and Sears and Kmart, the overarching brands, suffered. Interviews with more than 40 former executives, many of whom sat at the highest levels of the company, paint a picture of a business that’s ravaged by infighting as its divisions battle over fewer resources. (Many declined to go on the record for a variety of reasons, including fear of angering Lampert.) Shaunak Dave, a former executive who left in 2012 and is now at sports marketing agency Revolution, says the model created a “warring tribes” culture. “If you were in a different business unit, we were in two competing companies,” he says. “Cooperation and collaboration aren’t there.”

It's pro-click

>People today can't imagine the internet without Facebook.

I can and hope I live long enough to see the days when it falls. I remember when that shit site took off and I couldn't believe how many people wanted to burn their retinas out looking at a mostly white screen. I thought the next thing would come along fairly soon. Fuck no we are still stuck in a facebook world. How will it ever die I wonder? Everyone is on it now.

This happened to me with a washer... when i called a week later they had no idea of my transaction so i demanded a refund and ordered from home depot. They were out the next day.

>The physical stores are worthless since the only sensible thing to do is bulldoze them to repurpose the land.
Aside from the dead malls, a lot of their property is still worth a ton of money

This.

I worked at Sears in the mid-90s then again in the late 2010s before ours shut down. Prices were too high, minimal Internet presence and they stopped sending out the catalog to every human in the US in the 90s. that was truly the end. I LOVED that catalog as a kid and would spend hours circling shit I wanted for Xmas.

Even if it dies, it'll just decentralize more into a dozen competing websites. You already have a half dozen shitty little app buttons next to news stories, for Twitter and Tumblr and Digg and whatever the fuck else. Imagine having to manage ten of those fuckers just so your boss can let you know when the office is closed on Friday.

I deleted my FB account for a month and I had people asking if I was dead. We're fucked.

They used to but Sears cards are drawn on Citibank now too, even the ones you can only use in-store. The only exception is that sometimes for whatever reason the Sears Mastercard will sometimes be drawn from Barclay's.

Don't get me wrong, they still push like hell for those credit card apps (To the point where we got 2-4 dollars just for getting someone to sign up) but even that is no longer wholly Sears-owned anymore.

>Sears credit card
I totally forgot Sears was in the credit card business. I haven't seen a Sears credit card since the 1980s. Other credit cards coming and sucking up the purchases was a blow to Sears I hadn't thought of.

Every goddamn time

Image. Unless they're workclothes, who wants to say they got their outfit at Sears? Craftsman tools are shit. They take forever to change tires if you buy them there.

All you can happily say you bought at Sears are appliances and, rarely, contracted work (exterminators, siding, etc.)... and, for those things, where Sears used to be the go to, there's now a tremendous selection available at your fingertips on that internet thing.

I worked there four years ago, good riddance.

Sears has made more money financing purchases than selling goods, and has for a long time.

I always had good luck using the Sears Auto Center in my town anyway. It closed years ago though. Unfortunate.

Nope. Even uses the Men's Room and obviously doesnt belong there.

>Sears work clothes
Are they still any good? I remember a pair of Sears Die Hard workbooks I had in the 1990s that were comfy asf. They were probably the last clothing item I ever bought at Sears. Do labour/mechanic ect. still buy work clothes at Sears? Are the Sears work clothing still any good?

Too big to fail.

sears a virtual store through catalog, turns into brick and mortar
gets put out of business by virtual stores. kek

>Are they still any good? I remember a pair of Sears Die Hard workbooks I had in the 1990s that were comfy asf. They were probably the last clothing item I ever bought at Sears. Do labour/mechanic ect. still buy work clothes at Sears? Are the Sears work clothing still any good?
Honestly bro, you can't beat Wrangler shirts and jeans for quality and price. They hold up forever and usually cheap as shit because they don't have a Levis log on them. Levis are complete shit by the way. Inevetiably the pockets start fraying, then the cuffs turn to shit. Wrangler hold up for me.

>68 replies
>nobody has posted the Trump boycott tweet
shameful

I doubt malls are coming back anytime soon. I mean, it would be great if they would, but rent and property has turned them into shitholes riddled with big box stores that sell ripoff goods.

I worked there.

All my bosses were bitter women.

Sorry, I should've been more clear.
>(((Krugman)))

And Dickies. Too much juvenile humor lost without Dickies.

>they stopped sending out the catalog

Women bosses are nearly always bitter.

Honestly it isn't even just the fact that you can buy everything online these days, it's also that we have so much to do on the internet. Before the internet most people went out to do stuff, including watching movies (movie theatre perhaps attached to a mall, browsing stores, and just in general hanging out. People don't do that to the degree they used to.

I think there's a lot of real physical value in going to malls when you start including stuff like arcades or independent vinyl stores

I remember those in America as a kid

There's no substitute for those on the internet really

>they stopped sending out the catalog to every human in the US in the 90s

Jesus wept.

Agreed. All I wear for pants is Wranglers. I didn't know Sears sold them. I get muh Wranglers from successful businesses like Farm and Fleet and Murdochs.

>grow up with the internet
>They were telling us in 1994-2006 to not use your real name on the internet, not give out your information.

>Circa 2011-2012 Google tried to force you under threat of ban to use your real name for your google/youtube account.

I fear facebook will be around forever though. It feels like it's become essentially a standard medium that is like having a cellphone or a TV now.

I hope I will be proven wrong.

My home town has a really outdoor mall.
they're always building and renovating store spaces.

*really nice outdoor mall

Malls might well experience a resurgence with the whole urban yuppie millennial gentrification other buzz words I am forgetting going on. It won't be a mass market consumer mall but rather a more hipster affluent middle-upper middle class (or bohemian poor rather than working class poor) mall. I mean I'm shocked nobody has tried to capitalize on it already. Stock it full of that stereotypical millennial (I am a millennial and most of us are but you know what I mean by that term) stuff - avant-garde cafes and art-studios and vynl stores and fashion boutiques and all that shit.

Definitely. There's a mall near me that I liked going to even ten years ago. Now there's only a few stores still operating it, and the only time I've walked through it I feel like I'm going to be shot. Sucks, I really used to enjoy hanging out at malls and stores.

Two words:

Chinese garbage.

Why pay $7.99 for the exact same thing you can find at Walmart in a different color for $4.99?

Interestingly enough if you research into the history of the internet when it first became something that people used, EVERYONE used their real name on the internet. That's mostly because it was a tool that was being used by professors and students at universities, but this practice persisted into the 80s. It was around the early 90s with the rise of Mutli-User Dungeons, basically the precursors to MMORPGs, and other gamer culture that the screen name became popularized on the commercial internet. Before social media privacy concerns kept that concept alive in the broader internet, but I don't think people who used the internet for business or communication really minded. My dad still has his early 2000's e-mail domain that uses his real name.

I thought it WAS out of business. But I always confused it with JC Penney and Montgomery Ward, anyway.

And to think I used to somewhat respect this kike.

>they stopped sending out the catalog

or buy it direct from China for $.99 plus free shipping

>have an old sears and robuck catalog with a $300 AR-15

those were the fucking days

>They were ripe to be Amazon before Amazon was a thing.
they didnt care about the digital world, so we left them behind

its been like 10 years since i've been to a sears, everything was too expensive.

its pathetic when best buy is selling tvs for cheaper

>Sears Hometown Stores

Does anybody remember these Sears outlets? Those things are still around it turns out. They have a few items and can order whatever. Many small towns had them in the 1980s. Saw one this weekend on a road trip. Pic related. Its out in bumfuck Colorado west of Poncho Springs. I couldn't believe the store was still in business.

Here in Niagara Falls there's the old Summit Park mall that went to shit a long time ago. All that's left is a Save-A-Lot shitfood grocery store that moved into half of the husk of an old Toys-r-Us and a Sears. Forgot that fucker was still there until I saw this thread.

>Plus any mall you go to is a playground for black mob attacks.
This. Shits spooky

I've bought a lawn mower, weed wacker and leaf blower from sears. All broke within 2 years. Sears used to be a brand you could depend on, then they dropped the ball on quality and started making shit products.

Fuck em. This is what happens when you cut corners at the expense of your customers.

>gf works at yankee candle at mall as manager
>they need to clear a minimum of $5,000 a day to meet payroll and rent requirements

its fucking crazy, rent is like 10K a month for a super small shop in a mall.

Thanks, Amazon!

You gotta give sears props for providing jobs and paying people during a plunge but they do need to stop selling garbage.