One by one the icons fall

[herr_oberst]

I'm not going to miss Sears at all. The only thing I ever bought there was hand tools; they used to be high quality and they had some interesting innovations from time to time, but one day I was working on my car and I realized that the quality of the 3/8 ratchet I'd recently put a repair kit into was less than the harbor freight tool that I bought to put in my road trip tool roll. That was years and years ago. Since then, the few times I went back, I knew that it was going to be a crapshoot to try and get a few screwdrivers replaced on the lifetime guarantee, or if a socket or something that I needed for a project would be in stock.

Sears had a few good brands, they could have capitalized on them and tried harder to set up an online presence, but they failed and others have filled the vacuum.

I feel really bad for the people who will lose their jobs. I'm not nostalgic at all for the loss of the institution.

[widebody911]

https://prospect.org/article/how-sears-was-gutted-its-own-ceo

[Seahawk]

And this generations icons will fall as well.

My partner and I talk about this all the time: How do we manage success, grow gracefully, avoid becoming Sears and K Mart? We see so much isolation between engineering, contract and program management we wonder how anything gets done.

Sounds haughty, but even at out level, management mistakes for large and small companies are eerily the same...there are any number of books on the subject.

We meet the second week in January with the owner of a failed high end grocery store in our medium-sized town. The space is perfect for us and we'll get it for essentially nothing since he made all the classic financial mistakes.

We have no debt, own everything outright and are able to manage our overhead and cost structure to reflect that.

That and we know what we do well as a business and find partners that match our ethos in areas we do not want to be in.

Amazon will goon it...nothing changes in business other than change.

[GH85Carrera]

One of the local tech guys I know is working on a business kinda like ours in another state a long way off. He jokes his goal is to get big enough that Google, Microsoft, or Amazon or the like will want to buy him out. Just take the money and run into retirement.

[Gretch]

Sears has been in a death spiral for 20 years give or take. Anyone with a sense of business visiting a story knew that viscerally.

PE MBA whiz kids make some of the dumbest business decisions I have observed. Book smarts does not take the place of experience and street smarts, and it never will.

[scottmandue]

Originally Posted by widebody911

https://prospect.org/article/how-sears-was-gutted-its-own-ceo

^^^THIS! Greedy A-hole ran the company onto the ground.

[lendaddy]

Originally Posted by Seahawk

And this generations icons will fall as well.

My partner and I talk about this all the time: How do we manage success, grow gracefully, avoid becoming Sears and K Mart? We see so much isolation between engineering, contract and program management we wonder how anything gets done.

Sounds haughty, but even at out level, management mistakes for large and small companies are eerily the same...there are any number of books on the subject.

We meet the second week in January with the owner of a failed high end grocery store in our medium-sized town. The space is perfect for us and we'll get it for essentially nothing since he made all the classic financial mistakes.

We have no debt, own everything outright and are able to manage our overhead and cost structure to reflect that.

That and we know what we do well as a business and find partners that match our ethos in areas we do not want to be in.

Amazon will goon it...nothing changes in business other than change.

The trick comes when you and your partner(s) are ready to check out, how do you set your company up to survive/thrive with less emotionally attached management. You would die for your vision, they won't. Not insurmountable but a reality many business owners simply don't comprehend.

[rockfan4]

They just announced the closing of another 82 stores.
https://searsholdings.com/docs/122818_store_closing_list.pdf
I'm kind of surprised the Mall of America Sears is closing.

My local mall is in rough shape. First Macy's left, then Herbergers, the Sears just closed a couple weeks ago, the only anchor store left is J.C. Penney, and they're on shaky ground. The Gap moved across the street to a strip mall.

I'd like to buy a bigger roll around tool chest, but I think I'll keep watching Craigslist for a used one. Probably better quality and the new ones don't have as many drawers as the old ones, they just make fewer, bigger drawers in the same size cabinet.

[wdfifteen]

Originally Posted by Seahawk

We have no debt, own everything outright and are able to manage our overhead and cost structure to reflect that.

Hire a business consultant. He'll take care of that for you.

[Por_sha911]

Unfortunately, at this point, a Sears lifetime warranty is defined as the lifetime of the company.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Brick and mortar retail is dying as a model. This is just another example.

Sears had no identity for a long time. They were trying to be everything to everyone instead of being good at a couple of key things (like DIY tools). In what, they were pretty lackluster and uninspiring across the board - just another blah store pushing made-in-China schyte that they expected to charge big money for.

I won’t really miss them much. They’re another Montgomery Ward or Ames or Venture or K-Mart. We don’t need more places selling the same junk from the same Chinese sweatshops.

I would not be surprised to see one of the Big Three go under, due to their move to trucks, especially if we have any kind of real or imagined oil shortage. Ford and Chevy are pretty much ending as car manufacturers who build trucks, and becoming truck manufacturers who build cars.

[tabs]

Originally Posted by Gretch

PE MBA whiz kids make some of the dumbest business decisions I have observed. Book smarts does not take the place of experience and street smarts, and it never will.

That is what my Dad the Aerospace engineer said in 1980 about Aerospace engineers.

[tabs]

Long ago I surmised about generational corporate leadership. The further away from the founder the less vision and increasingly bureaucratic ossification. The 4th gen and on is where it becomes bureaucratic for bureaucracies sake. Corporate culture..

[tabs]

America has become Sears..

Sears an Kmart are reflections of ourselves.

[wdfifteen]

Originally Posted by Gretch

Sears has been in a death spiral for 20 years give or take. Anyone with a sense of business visiting a story knew that viscerally.

PE MBA whiz kids make some of the dumbest business decisions I have observed. Book smarts does not take the place of experience and street smarts, and it never will.

I don’t think the latest management’s goal was to make the company successful. They wanted to tear it down for the purpose of transfering as many of the company’s assets to their own pockets as possible. Sears didn’t die because of management’s incompetence, it was killed for the benefit of its owners. It’s a get rich scheme that’s been going on for many years. One example is well documented in a book entitled “Glass Houses.”

[tabs]

Originally Posted by wdfifteen

I don’t think the latest management’s goal was to make the company successful. They wanted to tear it down for the purpose of transfering as many of the company’s assets to their own pockets as possible. Sears didn’t die because of management’s incompetence, it was killed for the benefit of its owners. It’s a get rich scheme that’s been going on for many years. One example is well documented in a book entitled “Glass Houses.”

It is called looting a company and if you look honestly it is the looting of America by the cynically amoral politicians and vampiric corporates.They sucker you in with platitudes like "change we can believe in" or MAGA. Chose your Kool Aid.

[flatbutt]

If brick and mortar businesses are domed then Americans, at least a huge number of Americans need a serious reassessment of how they will earn a wage.

[onewhippedpuppy]

Sears will make a very interesting MBA case study for future students. Evolve or die is a constant in business, somewhere along the way Sears lost track of that mindset.

[Seahawk]

Originally Posted by onewhippedpuppy

Sears will make a very interesting MBA case study for future students. Evolve or die is a constant in business, somewhere along the way Sears lost track of that mindset.

Concur.

In my part of the world there is a move away from the big box stores to smaller, more locally focused inventory businesses: True Value, for instance, knows their customer base extremely well, is 1/10th the size of a Lowes and is always packed.

Just a better shopping experience with very helpful floor folks.

The Dollar General model seems to flourish here as well...small, well stocked stores that are convenient to the customer base.

WAWA is another example. I did my undergraduate economics thesis on convenience stores - circa 1980!

WAWA has simply destroyed the 7-11's of this area.