One by one the icons fall
 

Went by one of the few remaining Sears stores yesterday. Everything was on sale. One of my first jobs was at Sears, selling small appliances and electrical when I was in high school. Many of my tools are Craftsman, bought with my employees discount.

According to this article, the company may liquidate at any moment, going the way of Toys R Us.

I understand change is inevitable, but I'm sad to see some of these icons fall.

Woolrich just closed it’s doors after 200 years. Yes, kind of sad.

Just wore my Woolrich shirt I've had since 1972 this morning. I've got a few more Woolrich items including a really beautiful wool hunting jacket. I used to buy lots of things from Sears also & it's sad to see them going. In some cases I'm mystified long established businesses couldn't adapt to the current market.

Between Amazon, Walmart and Home Depot...they didn’t have a chance.

[QUOTE=Evans, Marv;10297270]Just wore my Woolrich shirt I've had since 1972 this morning. I've got a few more Woolrich items including a really beautiful wool hunting jacket. I used to buy lots of things from Sears also & it's sad to see them going. In some cases I'm mystified long established businesses couldn't adapt to the current market.[/QUOTE]
More like Wouldn't. Very sad indeed.

Interesting fact about SEARS...

Sears was knocked out by Amazon and Online Shopping.

Sears invented catalog shopping which is analogous to online shopping.

I used to look forward to the Sears Christmas Catalog showing up to look at all the cool new toys.

Sad, but the last time I was in a Sears store was about 1.5 years ago to pick up my new 54" Craftsman tool cabinet base unit. What an excersise in futility from the absent knowledgible workers, to the archaic ordering system, to the long delivery time, to the absolutely inept loading personell (I had to tell her how to operate the tow motor properly).

Evolve or die, that is the lesson here. Sears ended up selling overpriced crap via an outdated business model. Such is life.

Sad but true. Sears was once really popular out here in the sticks. You could go into town and order a new snath at the hardware store and wait, and then go see if it came in a couple of times, or just mail an order to sears and it would be on the train in about a week. They’d send a card letting you know it was in.

Indeed they did. Sears sold mail order houses in kit form and they were pretty solid.

The Sears store in this area closed down about six months ago. The last time I was in there some time before, half the shelves were empty. I asked a sales lady when they were going to close the store. She said she didn't know. I felt bad because it was just a shell of days gone bye. There is a Sears parts outlet also where they sell parts and merchandise like mowers, generators, edgers, etc., and I asked the guy there if the possible closing was going to affect them. He said, "We're a part of Sears Holding, and they're never going out of business." I think I'll call tomorrow out of curiosity to see if they're still there.

A good buddy, fellow Pelican and R Gruppe-er, quit his pretty damn decent position at Microsoft a couple of years ago to go to work for Sears. They were just then (talk about a day late and a dollar short) starting to try to gear up some semblance of an on-line presence. Oh, granted, there was obviously already a Sears website from which one could order, but they were looking to challenge Amazon and resume their rightful place in American retail. I think he quit in less than a year, pronouncing the whole thing worse than hopeless. What a shame.

They were mismanaged and dysfunctional over 15 years ago. I would only buy tools there, and even that was a challenge. More than one store I'd frequent would be out of items on the shelf regularly. Nothing worse than staring at the price tag for your item and an empty shelf above it, when you have a car up on jackstands ...

Good riddance in my book.

G

Out here we have a beautiful neighborhood called Magnolia, where I swear about half the houses look like this. Nice price, too.


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Haven’t been to one in years and it was to buy tools.

The nearest one to our house closed some time in the past 3 years. It’s been that long since I’ve driven by.

I've ended up on the Sears website a couple of times via google when trying to find something, and it was less than useless.

There was a Sears just a block away from the high school where I graduated. I often went in there before or after school and hung out for a while in the tool department. Way better than any toy store around for me. The had an intercom system that was likely a tube based amp, and it had a horrid very high frequency squeal. I had to walk around with my fingers in my ears (literally) to stand to be in the there. Various employees and the manager came over and asked me why I was walking around with my fingers in my ears, as it likely looked stupid. I told him there was a horrible squeal from the intercom. They were all older men, and could not hear anything. One manager mention several high school kids had mentioned it before., but since he could not hear it, we must be imagining it.

Sears is a huge anchor presence in our local mall. I can't imagine what can fill that space. Home Depot is already there along with WalMart, Penneys and Macys.

Youngest daughter,owns a 1904 Sears home now.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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..

America has become Sears..

Sears an Kmart are reflections of ourselves.

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.

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.

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.