Sears

How can a company that was doing what Amazon is doing now, but started doing it in the 1800's only using paper pencil and USPS crash so hard? Were they destroyed on purpose?

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Hubris is the primary reason that legacy companies go down.

because they refused to adapt to the internet

I doubt it. Sears fucked up by not having someone in an officer position capable of seeing where the internet was headed 20 years ago, along with switching to cheap chinkshit for their Craftsman branded tools instead of keeping them quality.

Have you been in a Sears recently? They went down for the same reason they're not coming back up - the prices are fucking insane. Everything there you can get for 25% of the cost almost anywhere fucking else with very rare exceptions but their big money was always in appliances which they still charge crazy prices for so nobody buys them. Even beds there cost over a grand more than for the identical beds (and better service) at somewhere like mattress firm.

Amazon found out that having the store online and shipping centers was the key to selling a lot of shit. Sears and other dying companies tried to keep too many stores open while making clumsy online stores. They bet on the wrong horse.

More of a suicide. They abandoned their "made in America" message for products such as Craftsman and started importing it from China.

There was a time where you could pass down tools to future generations. Now you'll be lucky if a Craftsman belt sander lasts more than a couple years.

Kmart
/thread

because they sell crap that caters to a limited audience and there are also better options available online

The Sears at my mall, which I can't remember the last time I saw a customer in, still has neon signs from the 80s/90s. Very comfy, reminds me of going there as a kid with my parents.

I would think a company that saw a way to fire 1000's of people and still accomplish your objective would jump on it

They were a reputable company with good products and then they went to China for their production.

Sears is kill

Sears killed Kmart, not the other way around. Kmart was doing okay before the takeover and would still be doing generally okay if it wasn't for Sears mismanagement.

They had the shipping centers before amazon was a thought

It's ridiculously rare you can get one of the dinosaur companies to adapt to a rapidly changing landscape.

Also, consider who becomes execs -- it's measured dorks, not bold and brash and unpredictable gamblers. Circumspect dorks aren't going to go against the company grain and risk literally their entire career gambling, they just stick to the course they inherited.

So you have companies with so many God damn employees (really hard to change "culture") and execs that don't see the benefit of risking their ass = kmart, sears, etc.

Yep, this was basically General Motors a decade ago but they happen to produce stuff people still need.

The one in central Phoenix looks like it's straight out of the 80s and on it's last legs. It's also frequented by nothing but Mexicans.

Their logo sucked. It's uninspiring and boring.

Dominant companies rise and fall throughout history -- it's natural. Instead of making fun of SEARS, we could applaud their 125 year run? It's just so fucking rare for a company of this size to "turn it around" -- if a turn around was ever even possible.

HAHAHA, no. How the fuck do you think Sears was able to take them over?
Protip: companies doing well don't get taken over.

99% of the people I've seen in the Sears are just walking through to get to the movie theater

shit management and leadership, everybody who has actually held a job in their adult life knows this

but they did it for a 100 years and all the sudden they fail to adapt. did foreign companies send people in to act like they have there interest in mine only to work against them?

>Now you'll be lucky if a Craftsman belt sander lasts more than a couple years.

the Craftsman brand is now owned by Stanley Black and Decker has been made in their factories for quite some time. these are the same places that also manufacture a lot of other tool brands like Home Depot's Husky line and Stanley hand tools, there is literally zero difference between them all besides how they manage their lifetime warranties (Home Depot is usually best in this regard).

Craftsman power tools are even worse, as they are mostly manufactured by One World Industries, a sibsidiary of TTI, a Hong Kong based conglomerate that also makes Ryobi, Ridgid and Milwaukee power tools.

most Craftsman drills and cordless tools are just Ryobis painted grey and red.

100 years from now people will be asking why amazon didn't adapt to universal nanoconstructors while they fabricate new graphics modules for their android waifus using the latest MercurioDeSilva in-home chip fabricators


oh who am I kidding, 100 years from now glowing niggers will be picking through the rubble of our cities for edible human bones

The last full Sears catalog was in 1993, just before the concept of web retail broke with the Amazon startup etc. Their distribution network was there, but not the timing, and lack of foresight would have doomed them anyway.

they don't have 1000's to fire. sears and kmart are both staffed by skeleton crews open to close.
there are some good people on the retail level, but not enough to make up for the budget constraints and shit PR that comes with constant bankruptcies.
t. store management for a spell

Nice, another comfy Sears thread. I remember one we had a year ago and it was such a nice thread.


Problem is they started selling chink shit and lost all their credibility. Their american made tools were amazing and lasted forever, but then they cheaped out and sold Chinese versions that would break in a month. Then they didn't get on the internet train in the 90s, their CEOs said it was just a shitty fad that would never take off, and they fell apart.

I'm talking about the 90's when this shit started moving in.

The execs are not "shit" , they're just doing everything in their power to not ruffle feathers. Coming into meetings with 100 ideas, trying to fire deadweight execs, going against the grain = YOU will be fired

Nobody goes to college, works their way up the corporate ladder for 30-40 years and then throws it all away to try to superman the fucking company. It's not YOUR company, you're just an employee collecting a check

Your motivated to keep that check coming in, NOT to "save" the company

I worked at Sears a few years back.

The place is so incompetently run that it's astonishing that they are even hanging on today. Lambert destroyed what chance the company ever had of coming back. How do you manage to buy up a shit ton of K-Mart locations, then end up getting bought out by K-Mart with the money you just gave them other than being in some kind of insider trading deal.

You mean last week?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Sears makes money or really exists as a retailer anymore. I think most of their assets are prime commercial real estate

yeah, he's playing the long game to pick the carcass. same shit Mitt Romney got filthy rich doing. don't care about the company, just how much you can extract before bankrupting the joint

So what the fuck happened amazon has no prime real estate. Sears could have sold it off and and used the money to update thier mail catalog to internet sails

Hey me too! I worked in the electronics section, and it was one of the ones that had a game case.

In the era of PS2 being out for almost a year, they were still selling PS1 games for $30-$60. Movies were all more expensive than anywhere else. They only sold the gold plated HDMI cables that nobody buys that cost $20 for a 5 foot cable.

They're just fucking retarded. They couldn't catch up with the times.

They even had the fucking Sears Tower at one point. It's easy to piss it all away when hemorrhaging money.

This, a thousand times this. Quality of their products went all to shit (not just tools) and they failed to adapt to the internet age when they more than easily enough had the infastructure, or even the means to downsize the brick and mortar while increasing the warehouses that they owned

Amazon took over shipping and basically did what sears did.

Biggest reason Sears went to brick and mortar because unlike the small shit they could ship thru catalog. They could sell alot more of the heavy high end shit like Lawnmowers, fridges, and washing machines in brick & mortar joints since shipping them would be fucktons more expensive.

Its a matter of things coming full circle

Management from all the way to corporate to the stores themselves are mind numbingly incompetent.

They constantly talked about why they weren't getting as much traffic as places like Walmart. How many times did you have to stand through a 3-4 minute spiel about getting a credit card or signing up for a rewards card when you went to Walmart? And then having to do it every single time. They complain that cashiers have a high turnover rate, but they make them do that shit AND fire them if they don't hit their quota each day of credit card sign ups.

I worked at the most successful store in the region/district and I regularly saw the store just throwing away money. They'd refuse to hire more help so things wouldn't get done. Literal tons of merchandise never saw the floor because they sat in the the back rooms for a full year. During that time, they'd be marked down repeatedly by corporate, losing value every few weeks until the price was $5 and then they'd be shipped back to corporate for them to try and pay another company to get rid of them. All because there were too few people and the floor managers were insanely incompetent.

Bad customer service.
SJW-like Affirmative Action hiring policies.

>Personal anecdote when when I shopped at Sears, Minnesota, Mall of America back in 2001.
Shopping for clothes
Two niggers at the clerk station
I found all the stuff I wanted to buy
Nigger#1 kept talking to Nigger#2 while he was processing through what I was purchasing
He was folding 4 pieces of clothes really, really fucking slow, as if h folded my clothes in slow motion just to piss me off.
It took 3-4 minutes for me just standing there before I was finally able to pay and leave.
The two Niggers just looked at each other, and then at me when it was all done, they had the
>R-really... is he okay with how we just treated him
look in their face.

Those two shitskins should have never even had the job to begin with.

>How can a company that was doing what Amazon is doing now, but started doing it in the 1800's only using paper pencil and USPS crash so hard?
they discontinued their catalogue in 1993
if they had waited 4 years the idea of going online would have been obvious

I was at the Sears in Columbia. MD today. They closed down the entire top floor and moved everything into the basement. That place looks so fucking sad now like a seriously shitty discount dive.

BS I've got a 1982 catalog in front of me now they were shipping whole buildings

Who the fuck buys failing businesses unless planning to flip them?

Kodak /thread

Dewalt is Black and Decker

Insider user here.

You have to look at the structure of the company. Sears is basically a giant holding company for real estate ("Sears stores") that the company has accumulated over the years.

They missed their chance with Amazon taking over the retail space and the CEO sold the company assets to China for his own personal gain.
And then he sold the real estate to another holding company owned by himself and other board members.

Sears is going to crash and burn in the next couple years.
It was planned this way ever since they realized they couldn't recover and take over the areas that Amazon took over.

Discontinuing blue light, kissing Rosie ODonell's ass, getting rid of Little Caesars, getting rid of the repair garage, and getting rid of the gun department spelled death for Kmart.

Not only that, just going to a SEARS makes me think I went back in time 30 years.

It's easy when you think about it

When was the last time you went to Sears? lol

Most of their products fucking suck nowadays.

Fucking cool, ain't it.

Had something to do with the charge card.

Oh no, a store selling Chinese trash was beaten by a store more efficient at selling Chinese trash. Truly a loss for everyone.

Sears brand of jeans was surprisingly decent when on sale, though.

too expensive
no really exciting sales events
the clerks suck
they screwed up KMart which was a weird fun store where you could find things no one else had

HP, Gateway, soon to be Subway

Radio Shack is another one thats crashing and burning

>I walk in sears see cheaply made shit.

>Cost $500 walk out.

You see the big red letters that say 'BAIL BONDS" and the neon clock in the window?

Why HP?

Sears employee here. I install microwave ovens, do custom kitchen delivery, I deliver refrigerators and install tv's. AMA

I haven't seen a radio shack in years, the one in my town just up and vanished.

Ours just did....No idea how it lasted as long it did

Sears was acquired by eddy Lambert to take their real estate. he had no intention of ever turning it around.

Would this work better as a logo?

Look up Eddie Lampert. Then look at how much debt he saddled the company with and how little he reinvested. There is no conspiracy just inept management and hedge fund managers who thought they were smarter then the world's by using subprime debt

color tvs?

This guy knows whats up.
The CEO never intended for it to turn around.

Ex Sears Corporate Employee here.


It's because of the CEO Eddie Lampert. Dude is a fucking moron. He's an ex hedge fund manager turned Retail CEO after he bought the company in 2003 when it was near bankrupt and merged with Kmart.

Here he is registering his own account to troll people on Sears' internal social media account.
businessinsider.com/sears-ceo-internal-facebook-2013-7

Retard. He is to blame.

>shit management and leadership

I read this under 100% of companies reviews at glassdoor. Like all bosses are lasy and dumb and all gonna crush and burn soon.

How true is this? Have you ever had a job at well managed firm with a good leadership?

Can you imagine if Amzon bout sears and sears became amazon stores?

It sucks because it was the only place i could buy cb equipment without driving 45 mins to a truck stop or shopping online

So people.can watch the yo yos on the MTV

K-mart bought sears fyi, despite it being called Sears Holdings Corporation currently.

Not to mention he spent millions developing an entire social media site for only SHC employees to use.

I think he is killing the company on purpose so he can rape all of it's assets and somehow become richer by declaring bankruptcy.

...

What do they want the real estate for? What they are doing is obvious, but the why is not.

Aren't malls dying?

Because it was taken over by some guy who takes seriously the philosophy of Ayn Rand.

HP and Subway aren't going away.

Malls can be repurposed and even if you are going to tear it down malls are generally placed in strategic well connected locations.

You're not a Sears employee, at least not in Massachusetts. When I was a salesman for the company a few years ago, most of the delivery personnel were hired by a low-bid middleman service out of Winter Park, FL and the installers were all local contractors as far as I could tell. The installers were mostly alright, but the delivery people were always delivering damaged merchandise or not delivering what we sold or doing some other pig-headed shit that caused the salesmen to be on the phone most of the day trying to fix the delivery end of the sale so we could keep our commissions and not lose them to the call center or an irate customer justifiably saying fuck it and cancelling.

Craftsman tape measurer warranty. Replaced too many tape measurers.

...

They also own Gigantic shipping and manufacturing centers, and have a kingly corporate headquarters. When they lost the sears tower they basically rebuilt the whole thing laying on it's side.

It's not the buildings. It's the land.

Some of the long-term profit to be made from the real estate Sears holds is unbelievable. The company has been around for nearly 120 years and has some of the most valuable retail land available.

Say Menards buys one of their malls. They have no interest in repurposing... they simply knock it down and build a new Menards.

Location, Location, Location.

Land is land, and it'll always be valuable even if the stuff on it isn't. Also, malls tend to be in pretty prime locations as a general rule.

>How

Management

As someone who has worked in that building (Hoffman Estates, IL), It was once a beautiful jewel of the Western suburbs of Chicago. Now it is an absolute shit-show in complete disarray.

Doesnt everything follow a bell curve given enough time?

last 2 things i got at a sears was a pokemon game and a shirt for my dads birthday. years ago

Sears should have rebranded 2 decades ago when people stopped going to the mall.

Makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.

Makes me wonder what will happen to Kenmore, Diehard, and Craftsman brands.

details?

I have a Pilot and a Petro around here for some adapters to buy quickly.

Radio Shack of course was over priced but was good for those things you wanted in no time.

Agreed, or you know, taken the opportunity to become fucking Amazon. They had the delivery network, they had the customers, they had the ability to cut deals. They failed because they became far too complacent.

Sears from an IT perspective is horrendous. Have you tried using their website (I bet not). It's fucking *horrible*. Their IT group has almost always been run by a group of retards.

See
This so fucking much. Sears used to be Quality. Their stuff was backed by lifelong warranties, now it is cheap overpriced shit. You might as well go to walmart

I knew 20 years ago when I broke a 3/8 ratchet something was amiss
When I tried to return it they gave me a rebuild kit

It's basically been divided up into a large office space shared by quite a few companies that rent. Way back the landscaping was well manicured and groomed, they had multiple community events per month for "community outreach", and employed a shitload of people around the area.

Since then, it's taken a massive hit. Maintenance and repair budget has clearly taken a major hit. It's really sad, because it used to be a wonderful looking place.

They've already been sold. Go check out an Ace hardware -- they snapped up the rights to redistribute craftsman tools quite a while ago.

Kenmore and Diehard are well on their way... this is another piece Lampert will eventually monetize.

because it's idolized by boomers and that's shown by the selection of shit they sell. Plus, why the fuck would I go to Sears to subsidize some braindead nigger sales staff they have in all of their brick and mortar locations?