Reading an article about Sears decay and how their pension plan is one of the thing killing the company when I run into this:
Many other analysts have blamed Lampert himself for Sears’ misfortunes. They say he made bad decisions about marketing, didn’t invest enough in stores and didn’t commit to selling online.
Americans’ increasing preference to buy online, and at big-box stores rather than malls, is a major problem for the company. Sears has lost $11.7 billion since its last profitable year in 2012
Selling online is just a very modern and very efficient version of the old mail order catalog sales: You chose what you wanted/needed at home, send payment and get your stuff delivered. The irony is that Sears was, for many years, the biggest catalog seller in the world. Many young ones won’t even know about it, but the Sears catalog started in 1,888 and was integral part of the American Household for decades (and outhouses too) till the 1980s and finally quit in 1993.
Many old school companies are blaming Amazon for their own reduction in sales, but that Sears is taking it in the chin when Bezo’s baby is nothing more than a very modern version of the Sears catalog is very ironic when you are supposed to have over a century’s worth of experience. And they even sold guns and houses!
Economic Darwinism is as ruthless as the regular one.
What Miguel said. Also, who even remembers “Monkey Ward” (AKA Montgomery-Ward).
Couple other things to throw in there. The quality of their products, especially their Kenmore and Craftsman brands, went to crap. I heard, no hard evidence though, that they bought some cheap overseas appliance company and rebranded it ‘Kenmore’. They let their repair service flounder and wouldn’t even honor their own warranties. Had a fridge go out w/ one week left on the warranty, and they told me it would be 2 weeks before someone could get to us and it would be min. $200 service charge. Had a local guy come out the next day and he charged me $80.
The name of the game is quarterly profits BAMN (usually cutting customer service and product quality) and damn the long run.
Agree. Their fall from grace is not due to a single issue, but a bunch of little stupid decisions
… Each of which seemed to make sense and was justifiable (enough) at the time.
Road to hell etc.
We actually checked our house for Sears branding. It was actually made before Sears started shipping them, but the floorplan was very close.
Miguel, I wrote this about Sears on my personal blog over ten years ago:
https://themightythunderer.wordpress.com/2007/06/26/an-open-letter-to-sears-roebuck-and-co/
Damn…. what Dave P said “Sears is working hard to kill itself off.” seems to be the corporate plan of action
I had to spend three days trying to cancel a product order from Sears… that had actually been shipped to the nearest store, but nobody bothered to tell me.
Sears is working hard to kill itself off. Best not to stop it.
Sears and J.C.Penney both started downhill about the same time I think. I believe it was about the same time they stopped selling guns. Coincidence?
Oh I can’t hear this “the internet is killing small business”-trope anymore.
We opened not 4 years ago and we’ve been planning to expand for over 2 years now because business is good. (We still haven’t expanded because we are still waiting for the building permits… )
And we do not sell online.
True, guns and ammo are items some people don’t like to order online but a well stocked business with knowlegdable and helpful folks WILL thrive.
As others pointed out the issues mostly are with the quality of the products and the quality of the service.