The Real Reason Sears Failed…
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- čas přidán 13. 09. 2024
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An older former employee said in an interview: "we had the Sears catalog, why didn’t we put that on the internet when it first started."
Sears did have a good website when the internet started. They had a good selection too. The website went down hill when Kmart bought Sears, and brought in that crooked hedge fund manager. After the merger the website deteriorated, and product offering online declined substantially. Then product offering declined in the stores as well. People quit shopping Sears when the merchandise offerings declined. They had no choice but to shop somewhere else for the items needed. Sears needs to close the few remaining stores, and find a buyer for their name and intellectual property rights so someone else with retail knowledge and experience can relaunch them, and manage it properly.
@@ericknoblauch9195 Sears website was decent when it launched. Nothing imprressive though. But it was never really updated. And if you went into the stores they had kiosks with computers where it'd connect you to their website. Problem was that even in 2016 those computers were 20 years old and would connect you very slowly to a old outdated website.
@@alec1115 because Sears had crazy high overhead in labor costs, including pensions. It's almost always inevitable. It happened in the airlines. First American disrupted PanAm. Southwest disrupted American. And now Spirit is disrupting Southwest. Best Buy disrupted Circuit City. Toyota disrupted General Motors. Walmart disrupted Sears. Amazon is disrupting Walmart. Labor costs and other overhead will be their downfall as others will come in and save monies and offer lower prices.
They were already set up to deliver merchandise to home. It was foolish for them not to take it online
@@WhittyPics Not when all they wanted was the land cheap.
This guy did not even MENTION Eddie Lampert. The real story of the rapid demise of Sears revolves around that guy looting the company. Sears was in trouble before Lampert, but it was Lampert who cannibalized the company to his own benefit. He is the arch villain in the story. Maybe, just maybe, you should consider making a video analyzing how a sleazy Wall Street banker looted the assets of Sears, stiffing both the creditors and pensioners of their money.
The problem with Lampert is that he wanted to be another Warren Buffet.
But, Buffet is very hands off, when it comes to any company that Berkshire Hathaway owns outright.
Lampert likes to micro-manage.
Further, Buffet talks to the press.
Lampert won't talk to the press. Jim Cramer worked closely with Lampert at Goldman Sachs.
Cramer has said that he begged Lampert to come on "Mad Money" and promised to treat him with kid gloves, but Lampert refused every invitation.
One last thing. Lampert hates flying, even though he can afford First Class or a private jet. So, Sears executives were always flying from Chicago to Lampert's office in Connecticut.
So, Lampert never visited Sears HQ in Hoffman Estates.
@@pupwizard3888 yup ole Eddie is a real pirate.
This is a pretty horrible video. What you described are only symptoms. Massive corrupt and incompetent management is to blame. They need to be mentioned. As one comment says, Eddie Lampert but I’m sure there are many others. And you can also mention how much bonuses the incompetent CEOs got each year.
This is like IBM. The glaring incomprehensible incompetence that the management demonstrated starting before the PC was released until today needs to be pointed out and detailed. That is the real problem.
I don't think Eddie Lambert needed to be mentioned. While I agree he didn't do the company any favors-by the time he came aboard a lot of the damage was done.
Eddie didn’t create the cliff but he did push the victim off.
As a former Sears employee there 2 things that killed Sears. Not putting the catalog on the internet and Eddie Lampert. If management would have put the catalog on the internet, it could have out Amazoned Amazon. And again as a former employee Eddie Lampert. I remember reading that the company was buying old Home Depot and K-Mart sites thinking this may be good. Then I saw that the company was merging with K-Mart and I knew it was gonna be a matter of time.
I never understood Edie Lampert. His goal always seemed to kill the company.
@nickjw88 I believe it always was to kill it. He's a hedge fund manager. He sold off craftsman, die hard and Kenmore because it had value to him. Not to save the company
Yep, I worked for Sears Hardware #5181. Everything was fine until Eddie came along. Taking a rop producing Hardware store and turning it into an appliance outlet never made sense.
Seems to be the usual story of executive management with their own agenda driving a company into the ground.
@@nickjw88that was the goal, the hedge funds don't actually care about the businesses they just want to siphon all the money out of it
How did you not mention Amazon? Sears literally had a catalogue you could order things from and they'd mail it to you. How did they not think to put that on a website and blow Amazon out of the water.
Came to say that. Had they adapted the catalog to the web, Amazon would be a small online bookstore at best.
@@bigstick6332 Sears customer service failed in the late 90s and Eddie Lampert put the death nail in 2010s and if they controlled online website and put effort lets say mid to late 2000s then they would be the Amazon of now .
@@bigstick6332 Because the people running Sears had built a career out of catalog and store sales. "Inner-net?? Whas DAT?!?!"
So, sears could basically be Amazon today if they thought of this. Interesting
Amazon was not a direct competitor when the store started declining.
The retail landscape was changing rapidly in the 90s and early 00s and places like Sears simply did not adapt quick enough to the changes.
Lousy Management but employees paid the consequences
SAD! I remember going to my local Sears all the time as a kid. My dad loved that store.
You missed the effect of Sears management in the last 20 years which has purposly sold off parts of the company to enrich themselves, bankrupted it once, sold the remains to the board at fire sale prices and now has repeated the process a second time, destroying a once-great company to pad their pockets with no thought to its future viability. American vulture capitalism at its worst! So while Sears was slowly dying from 2000+ rather than restructuring and hopefully saving it the company was outright murdered by the people entrusted to keep it going. Despicable if you ask me...
For me, Sears was: where I’d get portraits of my boys as babies in the ‘80’s, and for appliances. The portrait thing didn’t last for long as better came along. It’s still sad though. Don’t remember any issues with the appliances that taken care of by Sears in an admirable amount of time.
I bought 2 refrigerators from Lowes since 2013 that FAILED in 4 years each. It cost more to fix them then they were worth. My current one will be 3 years old. At least Sears would stand behind what they sold. Lowes and Home Depot will not.They will just sell you another one
@@WhittyPics Yes.Would add that service is very importent.Craftsmen tool warranty was the best in the industry
@@WhittyPics Bought a dishwasher from Home Depot and it took them 3 weeks to deliver it and it was not delivered and setup by HD employees. They contracted that out. Contractor just does not care as much as an owned business' employees. This was maybe 10 yrs ago and have not bought another appliance from HD. I go to a local business The Energy Center who has their own employees deliver and setup the appliances and a lot of the time they will deliver the same day.
Another thing that contributed to the downfall actually happened in the late 80s/early 90s, with Wal-Mart using the latest technology which let them see their total sales of each individual product in mere hours letting them know what’s hot and what’s not. Compare that to Sears taking weeks if not a full month to know their sales numbers.
Compare that to now, Walmart's technology is garbage. I always have trouble with their credit card machines reading my card, but I have this problem nowhere else.
@@schalitz1 I also don't like that Walmart still refuses to accept Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay as they want you to use their app
Quicker. Walmart sales were transmitted to HQ instantly.
After being treated like garbage one too many times, my father walked away from the store and said "they will one day fall"..
That's strange that some stores allow their employees to treat customers that way. The customer pays all the store employees' salaries. A lot of Wal Mart employees are some of the worst in any business but this is a small town and next WM is 15 miles away.
When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, my dad had a basement workshop FILLED with dependable Craftsman power and hand tools. He still has many of the power tools and seemingly all of the hand tools! Kmart’s failure to compete with Walmart and Sears’ failure to put their catalog on line to match Amazon (plus Home Depot and Lowe’s tool selection) must be 2 of the biggest business blunders in American retail history.
Some of the roots of decline started in the 1970's.
By the early to mid-1970's, many retailers started to accept Master Card and Visa (originally BankAmerica Card). No longer were you fixed to a certain you didn't need a separate store issued (like Sears) credit card for each store you wanted to shop at. That meant you didn't have to go only to Sears, you could go to other stores.
Another was the end in the 1970's of 'fair trade' pricing laws. In many states, name brand product manufacturers could make you sell a product at a set retail price, with only limited discounts. Sears (and some other stores like Montgomery Ward, JC Penney's,) offered the same name brand products but under their brands like Kenmore appliances, Silvertone TV's made by the big companies often at a slightly lower price. Sears even owed a small percentage of RCA-Whrilpool who made many of their TV's and major appliances into the 1980's.
The bad timing in about 1993, of shutting down the catalog business, including local stores for ordering, pick up and delivery, displays of appliances, TV's. Had they kept it going for another decade, they could have survived.
I finally got rid of my 1978 Sears console TV (they had dropped the Silvertone name in the mid-1970s) in 2015 when the flyback failed. During the last 2 years I owned it, when it was just starting to act up, I read some interesting things about the history of Sears, Silvertone and Warwick, who built Silvertone TVs during their peak years. Apparently, Sears roped them in, then demanded discounts that squeezed them toward bankruptcy, so they simply scrimped on everything, leaving Sears selling outdated, badly-built sets. By the mid 1970s, Silvertone TVs had developed such a bad reputation that they were not selling well and Sears, in desperation, got Sanyo , which had become their other big supplier into a partnership with Warwick. Warwick did the final assembly (which was crucial for large console sets) and Sanyo built the sub-assemblies, while lending their technology and quality control guidance. That actually worked pretty well, with Sears TVs keeping their market share until CRTs went out of production in the 2000s. But it took a crisis to make that happen.
PS: Sears was not the first or last retailer to squeeze its suppliers dry. I've hear that Wall Mart does that so aggressively that some brands have special models for sale at Wall Mart built with lower standards than their other products. I've also heard that some power tools sold through Home Depot have cheaper internals than similar-looking ones sold through more expensive channels. I know that apparently identical Kitchenaid stand mixers are shipped with a wide range of internal parts; high-quality outlets pay for metal gears, while there is more plastic in the bargain outlet versions.
Lowes and Home Depot are better described as home centers, not hardware stores.
They had a long run, but it's sad they didn't adapt more quickly in the 80s and 90s. Perhaps if they focused on tools and appliances and gave up everything else they may have made it with fewer store closings, but they would have had to get rid of their super large store locations.
Appliances fridges were their most profitable. they killed it by out sourcing deliveries to companie that could care less. Stupid management didnt wann hear about it either.
None of those reasons would have mattered if Sears had had the kind of management that they had in the past. Sears made two transitions that were just as dramatic as what they faced in the 90s and 2000s. They started as a catalog, the were Amazon a century before Amazon. After WW I they made the transition to department stores. After WW II they successfully transitioned to suburban malls. But after that they missed everything. They shutdown their catalog at exactly the sametime that Amazon was founded. Amazon's business plan is almost exactly Sears original business plan. Sell everything by catalog and deliver it quickly. Sears even sold houses at one time. But instead of pivoting their catalog to the Internet they shut it down. They could have adapted to the big box format but they barely tried. K Mart was once bigger than Walmart. Target manage to compete against Walmart but K Mart didn't. What Sears and K Mart had in common was that they were owned by a corporate raider who didn't have a clue as to how to run those businesses. All he knew how to do was to strip assets. If Sears had been run by someone like their post WW I or post WW 2 leaders they would still be here
I should add that KMart had pulled off a successful pivot once before. SS Kresge was a five and dime that became KMart which was very successful for several decades. In KMarts case all they needed to do was to be well managed, that format still works, Walmart and Target are doing fine. Even the old five and dime concept is still with us under the inflation adjusted name Dollar stores.
For me Sears died when they started sourcing their hand tools from the cheapest bidder.
What good is a no questions asked replacement policy if you are constantly replacing broken tools?
For the same money or many times cheaper you can get a combination wrench from stores such as Harbor Tools, no replacement warranty, but they don't break unless seriously abused.
I agree I noticed they began selling cheaper quality goods you could find some of the same items at the local Flea Market.
Imagine a company with management so blind to the future, that they were one of the 3 founders of Prodigy internet service, had a popular Sears catalog, and a network of stores with distribution logistics across the country...They never thought to put the catalog on their own internet service, and using the network of stores for pick up, delivery distribution, service and returns. They could have been Amazon in the late 80's. Instead they ceased the catalog in 1993, when about 1 million Americans per month were getting online for the first time.
One thing that killed Sears was the outdated merchandise it carried. The other department stores, such as JCPenny, Macy's, and others carried updated merchandise that kept up with the times.
I can still see people are living in a fantasy world when it comes to the closing of brick and mortar buildings The real reason all of the stores are closing is because of theft do I have to deep dive into that I don’t think so. I think we all know about the theft that goes on in the retail businesses especially in blue states it’s just that simple I saw they opened, a Whole Foods around 63rd and Halsted in Chicago but the people that live there decided that the intelligent thing to do instead of buy the food just go graze the food and eat the food when you are in the store so you don’t have to pay, but shortly after it opened it closed and now there’s I believe it’s a Fairplay I’m not really sure but it’s in lower end grocery store and the people in the neighborhood were complaining and I thought to myself they are the reason all these stores are closing. That is why nobody wants to do business in those areas because of theft and stealing it’s disgusting and it’s high time we stood up and realized what’s actually going on.
Stop lying with you gop bs....i live in a so called red state and theft wasnt the problem...speak on what you know about...instead of the conservative garbage.
A 65,000 soft Whole Foods in downtown San Francisco closed after being open less than one year over concerns of worker and customer safety after employees found syringes and pipes in the bathrooms, drug-related retail theft, adjacent drug markets, and the many safety issues related to them. Heralded as a "flagship store” it was one of the largest supermarkets in downtown San Francisco.
I worked for Sears in the 90’s at one of their auto centres in Calgary, Canada. Even back then you could see problems with the company. I was told the auto Centres were the only department making money and a few years after I left they sold them to a company called Kal Tire. It’s pretty says when a 20 year old kid can see problems with the company and ways to fix them but well educated CEO’s can’t.
I worked at a Sears auto center in Maryland around 1982. And, like you say, I remember being told by a fellow employee that the auto center was the only part of the store making money.
Sears basically invented catalog shopping - not much different than modern online shopping. At different times you could buy everything from houses to cars thru their catalogs. They could've beaten Amazon instead of letting Amazon beat them.
I always liked shopping at Sears growing up. All my tools and lawn equipment came from Sears, as well as a lot of my clothes. I used to think that when I retired I would work there, but they are all closed around here now
My hometown of Kankakee Illinois produced the appliances and furniture sold exclusively at Sears. 3 huge factories 3 shifts through generations If you sold appliances and furniture at Sears you did well. Those plants are long gone now
I used to work for Sears as a store manager and I agree with this video. Competition, buying Kmart, and the decline of malls was a what ended Sears.
There still one in the mall near me in pleasant hill California. Store pretty much down to its last leg
I lived in that area for years. Even in 2000, you could walk through all of that store and see no shoppers.
So goes much of the state
Sears had a flagship store on State Street in downtown Chicago, that it let go to seed. Its decline was visible and palpable. But for a tiny Lands End corner near the entrance, the rest of the store looked as though it hadn't been detailed or upgraded in at least a decade. The symbolic death blow came when Target moved in across the street, occupying the former location of Carson Pirie Scott, another fabled, departed department store. The contrast between Sears' shabbiness and Target's bright, clean new location, in a historic Louis Sullivan-designed building, was impossible to miss. Target was the vibrant future. Sears, the decayed and dying past.
As a kid, going to SEARS in downtown L.A. was an event! I miss the idea of SEARS more than the store.......my 1972 era Craftsman tools still work perfect. Thx
I remember it was a one stop shop for things and services. I miss the old Sears.
one thing not mentioned was the introduction of Harbor Freight and their cheap tools. people would rather buy cheaper tools and just replace them when and if they break.
I worked there from 93-06. They just couldn't keep up with newer stores at the time: walmart, best buy, lowes, home depot. Even when I was there in the 90's, systems and processes were out of date and clunky; it was "old timey" for me then, even before the internet got big. They just didn't keep up, and update things.
A company that started out in 1893 with store opening in 1925 and survived for many decades only to disappear in 2023, bad business decisions had to be a factor. I own a copy of their 1897 catalogue full of everything known to mankind. Sears could have used the internet as a lifeline, but instead they ignored it and it became their death nail.
Interesting bit of history is that Sears Catalog made it the "Amazon" of it's day when the company first started and lots of companies and towns hated Sears for it.
This happens when you have a board of directors who refuse to see the writing on the wall. Sears could have been Amazon.
This happened to Porsche. Their board of directors were stoic elderly men whose leadership drove the price of the company in the wrong direction. The board of directors was replaced by a younger more knowledgeable team of which knew what to do and Porsche made a come back.
This happened in WW1. It was noticed that war tactics had changed from fifty years prior. In WW 1 older Generals made serious mistakes that cost lives. So when it was recognized in the thirties that the country should prepare for war, in 1939 all officers over the age of 55 were thanked for their service and forced into retirement. There were exceptions to the rule. George Patton, Douglas MacArthur and Chester Nimitz are examples among others. All three of these men did outstanding and saved lives. George Patton knew what he was doing, (just as the other three.) When Patton was relieved of command in Italy, the Italian offense lost it's momentum completely and many lives were lost. There were however mistakes made in choosing certain officers of the age 55 to remain. Lloyd Fredendall is an example.
Things have changed drastically when the new modern age of Computers came about. When it started happening, it was difficult for people over the age of fifty to keep up with it.
An example of this is in chess. Up until chess programs were able to beat top class chess player, at that time, the top ranking chess players, there was 2 or 3 players over the age of 60.
This all changed when chess programs could beat grand masters. An example is, now in the top 100 chess players the oldest player who is 51. There are now grandmasters in their 20s. Before one had to be about 30 years in order to have a shot at the Championship. This is because the young are good at learning information much faster than their older counter parts and computer programs can not teach the Information.
There are exceptions to the rule with all this. For instance there are lawyers over 65 who are still on the top of their game. As well as people in real estate, sales, entrepreneurs, or people who have their own business. I believe a lot has to with proper diet and a healthy life style. Also people who older and still successful, a lot has to do with their reputation.
we should have the option of paying full price to help keep sears open.
my town has BOTH a lowes and home depot. one other PVTA 43 customer hates that.
When I was a kid, we had some neighbors who bought everything at Sears out of habit; there were people who just grew up with it. But even then, any clothes with a Sears-related label were assumed to be uncool, and the home electronics sold under the Silvertone badge were of middling quality and somewhat overpriced. By 1981, I was working at both Sears and the Service Merchandise across the street, and they were from different worlds. Sears did an inventory every year and usually ran a shrinkage rate of about 20%, while Service Merchandise kept their inventory on-line and tracked down any apparent discrepancies daily. Though Sears was not a bad place to work, and both Craftsman and Kenmore were both still respected, reliable brands, the writing was on the wall. I didn't expect it to last.
When I was little, a long time ago, Sears was where we bought everything except groceries. I could have never imagined Sears not being around.
My best hand tools are/were Craftsman (at least while they were still American made). My go-to power tools were Craftsman. i still use a Kenmore vacuum cleaner. I chose it over an Electrolux. I worked for ADT as a security system Sales Rep. Sears was a prime customer of ours and I stayed loyal to their products. The catalog was a great shopping tool. A printed "wish list". I don't know and could not catalog all the mistakes they made, but they were the place to shop and window shop when I was younger.
The top didn’t care , the board of directors didn’t care they just kept taking the money. 💰
my uncle worked at sears as a model for the catalogue
In the late 70's they took their focus off of retail to insurance, financial and credit card businesses. With good management they would be a combination of Walmart and Amazon today.
Now, those 'victors' are facing similar problems. They are closing "unprofitable, declining sales, or underperforming" locations. All chains featured are doing such. "What comes around, goes around."
The only asset left for Sears is the real estate holdings of the former stores, which they aren't selling or ask too high for market prices. Yes, a percentage of closed store sites have been sold but not enough.
I hear that Trotwood, Ohio, would like to get the former Sears store on the Registry of Historic Places. The hope is, if approved, would allow the city to renovate the former store as a new, mixed-use center, with other new construction, built on the former site of the long demolished Salem Mall.
The real reason sears failed is why every (with rare exceptions) fail. The dreamers that build them are removed or die from the helm and are replaced by statisticians.. so the trajectory changes. And invariably makes calculated decisions based on data, and data is statistically yesterday’s knowledge. So they end up looking back, not foreword..
I remember being a kid in the early 90s and going to pickup a catalog order at our local store. Then my dad took me to buy tools for a shop class. Then in the early 00's, I was getting married and Sears was one of our registration options. I figured since I had family on both coasts, it would make it easier to shop. They so botched it, I got 7 George Forman grills (How am I THIS old) That's when I first really grasped that they weren't who they used to be.
The fact that the original mail order business was overtaken by other mail order businesses still blows my mind.
My first job out of college was working at Sears in their management training program. It's was a complete waste of time. One of best decisions of my life was quitting. I could tell even at 23 years old it the company was heading towards failure.
it died in Canada back in 2014. it was sad. It was a great place to shop at.
Sears did have a good run. They were the Amazon of their day. You could buy practically anything for your home at Sears. You could even buy a house from Sears from 1908-1942. Sears could not go on forever. New retailers came along and Sears was finally not able to make it anymore. They were successful for many decades.
I worked for Sears in the early 80s and saw corporate force employees to retire or quit, they no longer hired full time so less benefits and part time don't care about service. The way they treated their long term employees was despicable?
Sears also never figured out the internet.
Just like one of the largest co. KODAK who found out too late that digital & not film would be the future 🤔🤯😕
Like my Grandpa
DUDEZILLA!!! Thanks for the IN DEPTH video!!! YOU ARE THE MAAAAAN Bernie Kosar!!! Moral of the story, EVERYBODY has a day of reckoning!!!!!!!! The one picture you had in your video showing the wall of Craftsman tools brought back some GREAT memories!!! In the early 90s, my friends and I would walk through all the rows of tools DREAMING that one day we would have all the Craftsman tools!!!! DARE TO DREAM!!
Whatever you're smoking, pls share
I’ll always think fondly of Sears. When I was a youngster Sears had the powerful radio station out of Chicago WLS which stood for World’s Largest Store. They broadcast The National Barn Dance on Saturday nights. My brother and I would fall asleep to Bob Atcher, LuLu Belle & Scotty, Captain Stubby & The Buccaneers, and many others. I vaguely remember you could even order a mule, health guaranteed, from the Sears catalogue. Of course this was before shysters thrived off mega size workers compensation settlements for “stress” and before slimeball politicians were giving away our childrens’ country to illegal aliens.
I’m surprised they lasted as long as they did. I worked at their call center for their website in Round Rock Tx back in 2002/2003. They were a complete joke top to bottom and their customers were just as goofy. Both of which were stuck in the past.
I remember going there in the 90’s to buy an artificial Christmas tree, and they didn’t have ANY. This is what the company who put out the Christmas Catalog we drooled over as kids had become.
Sears here in Canada went from being the place MOST people bought their clothes in the 1980's in most of Canada outside the big cities to a place you forgot existed once Walmart opened and most of the lower-priced traffic migrated there... By the end it really was the joke Family Guy made it out to be...
I stopped shopping at Sears when they continually pestered me to get a Sears credit card. That dates from the 1980s.
They never listened to their frontline workers. Cashiers during the early to mid 80s saw the stores decline. They turned away increasingly sales from customers who used Visa/Mastercard/Amex; that was wild for a retailer. Management and corporate heads took pride in the company being the largest issuer of consumer credit in the world. They wouldn't let that go and by the time the Discover card was introduced customer didnt bite as they'd started moving onwars. Ironic considering they had great brands with product guarantees that drew you to such lines. Not expending to include other brands and the internet was the end of a downward spiral.
Of course sears could have slowed the decay, by putting their automated SKU system online. Only a few steps were needed for Web shopping. But the Internet grew as predicted, and sears didn't. Even six years ago, their Web site was still a joke.
My uncle was a senior Vice President of Sears for decades. He was also interim Chairman of the Board several times. In the early eighties Uncle Bud told me that the new crop of Sears executives were going to bankrupt the company by the nineties. It broke his heart to see what these young men were doing to this once grand company. He was right, if not accurate to the timeline. It amazed me when the company announced the end to the Catalogue. What with the rise of the internet, that seemed to me a completely moronic move. But, sadly, the stupid had become strong with the leadership in the company. When Men like Edgerton V Wilson died out of the management or retired and made room for younger, less experienced or more entitled leadership, the company hit the skids and is now largely dead. The stores that remain are likely the property of the Senior Executive staff. Uncle Bud once said that this was how Sears handled their retirement. The company would give the executive a store and the profit from that store became their pension. Until these people are bought out or settled with, those few stores will remain.
6:31 - I believe that's Sunrise Mall in Citrus Heights, CA. Another mall that has REALLY gone downhill.
They were trendsetters at first (you could order a freakin’ house on the catalog and have all the pieces delivered to you). Then they got complacent and selling off the Craftsman brand was a sign of the end.
Sears did not buy Kmart, Kmart bought Sears
@@davinp 5:48 “Sears would sell to Kmart” as in Kmart bought them, same meaning
Sears was the victim of changing pop culture, which in turn destroyed its home delivery infrastructure.
The 1980s mall craze decimated its catalog business roughly 10 years prior to the internet craze, having already shed its home delivery infrastructure Sears lacked the cash and desire to revive it.
The cost of progress in technology... I am 61 and was raised with Sears, sad to see it go. The managers should have adapted WAYYYYYYYYYYYYY earlier by embracing online commerce.
About 20 yrs ago, Sears lowered my credit limit for no reason, this got me so mad I went to Sears at Irving Pk and Cicero in Chicago and paid off the entire balance and closed my account. I Never went back.
I have a sears credit card I use a lot to buy building supplies for my business. One month they jumped my credit limit up $4k without me requesting anything. I didn't say anything since I typically come close to maxing it out before paying the balance in full every month so the added credit was welcomed. Well one month i got a alert from credit karma that my credit dropped 50 points! I went to see why and the credit increase that I never asked for was rescinded after more than a year for no reason! I have never been late or missed a payment and I've never even carried a balance! Which I know they don't like as those companies count on you defaulting. I was furious because I was in the process of restoring my credit! I'm currently shopping for a better card!
i worked for them and they cut my hours to not pay for vacation time.Well i had the highest sales average of any salesperson period. Any other worker was much lower on average sales I asked why? Got a circle jerk answer. So they gave more hours to lazy employees. They also became a lousy place to be, I miss them not. i sold refrigerators was months higher in sales. Later did in home sales for another competiter for kitchens, I loved taking sales from that company did it a lot. Customer gladly cancelled sears contract. i even sold sears employees that was a blast. On sales the store manager only cared his sales were good from last year???? wth you close sell every customer you can at every opportunity. One lazy screwed up company micro managed sales force. My next company did a lot of training and looked after sales people. They knew properly trained and motivated sales force creates more sales duh. And treated salepeole as valuable assets... Sears never figured that one out.
Most people don't know this, but Sears once sold prefabricated houses in kit form. You got a kit which contained all of the framing pieces cut to fit, plus plumbing, electrical, millwork, etc. All you had to provide was the foundation and the real estate to build it on. You put it together, or got your contractor to put it together, and you had a nice 2- or 3bdrm house.
They sold cars too.
Here in Brazil, we had two Sears stores in 2 states, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo, but in the mid-90s it was gone
I think it was salvageable into the 2000's, but there was zero effort put into improving the existing stores. Ours hadn't been touched since the 1980s. It was cramped, rundown and dark. Outside was similarly bleak. Brown brick and no windows. The customer service also wasn't great. In one store, the employee I talked to didn't know where the batteries were, and it took like 10 minutes and 2 other employees just to find them. Lampert selling off well-known Sears brands like Kenmore and Craftsman didn't help either. Decades of complacency. Coming from a person who always liked Sears, and shopped there until its dying days.
Sears tended to promote older individuals to the CEO spot. These people were nearing retirement, hence didn't want to rock the boat and risk that. Should have promoted someone in their 40's who weren't risk adverse.
Used to buy all my washing machines, dryers, clothes, etc. from Sears. I bought a washing machine from Sears maybe 10 yrs ago and it made so much noise I took it back after a few days and Sears charged me an $80 restocking fee. Have not been back to the small store since.
improper management at the top of the chain,should have been mentioned as well. it seems Sears Hardware and Sears appliance stores could have managed well, even without the big anchor stores.
I remember getting the Sears catalog in the mail. I may be wrong, but it seems like they still had strong sales from that catalog up until the early to mid 90s. What if instead of getting into insurance, real estate, and other unrelated business, they'd have spent that money on an online catalog. You know, an online catalog similar to Amazon. What if they had done this before upstart Amazon did? They already had a distribution network that Amazon had to build. They had local stores where you could drop off returns. I wonder if they'd be where Amazon is today.
amazon..no retails can keep up ,sears Has been in trouble for a LONG time.
Sears used to be the go to store
Sears was the Amazon of it's day 100 years ago. Sears failed to keep with technology and e-commerce which started their downfall by the time we arrived in the 2000s. Also instead of investing in updating their stores, they use the money to by other retailers
Being malls, the merger with Kmart, and hired the wrong CEO who focus was making money vs saving the company.
My childhood was dominated by Sears locations which I loved going to, the slow and steady decline of a once mighty brand was really sad to see, but times changed and more competitors came in and Sears didn't adapt just like many others that fell before them.
Sadly the Craftsman tools are now junk. 😔😔
'Made in China'.
The tools and equipment declined in the 90s.
And made in China too!
Sears thought it could make money with no middle management and no commissioned salespeople. Those employees were the life of the company and upper management was too stupid to realize it. Big ticket sales require extensive customer service to cover mistakes. Middle management supervised commissioned sales people closely and commissioned salespeople made selling their livelihood. A part time employee is not interested in helping because they aren’t paid commission and keeping the sale intact is not a priority. Sears got what it deserved.
To be honest I think the Walmart Supercenter had much more of an impact of malls than the internet did. Shoppers could pretty much get anything at Walmart so why go to a mall? Plus I think Lambert pretty much just cared about making money on the real estate they owned
It's all about leadership. Bad leadership is the cause for most every organization's failure.
The irony is Sears started as a mail order business, and then was done in by another mail order business: Amazon.
Sears is closing because management refuses to reduce their million dollar management salaries. Clearly their income should be based on sales not salaried. Many of the retail giants are struggling with the same concepts due to college business degrees and min wage laws that demand hourly wage rather than a "sales based" income to determine their checks. This means, no sales... no checks... just like flea market sellers and small businesses.... the high profit margin that these "business degree" managers believe should determine the prices of their goods are putting many large companies and restaurants out of business... just have to read between the lines... the management of most of these companies take out business loans against the company to pay their own over priced salaries.... then declare bankruptcy claiming there is no business... hahahahaaaa...
A problematic chairman of the board and dealing with a hedge fund sapped the company dry of cash and assets.
Sears after seeing a decline in the 80's and early 90's , Made some decisions that saw a short term positive impact. Like the come see the softer side of Sears ad campaign. But also made some puzzling one's. Like ditching their Catalog book and department prematurely. Especially without having a good website up and running.
I loved shopping at sears & roebuck and can’t imagine a world without it
They dropped Craftsman tools. Stop taking Discover credit card payments. Used to be, if you bought a lawn mower at Sears, the had a Repair Department you could get it fixed
I bought a few "refurbished" Craftsman power tools at their local repair center. Still have them and they still work. My workhorse table saw is a 1962 Craftsman 10 inch contractor model. I got it from my dad in 1974 and used it just last weekend.
They should have never killed off the catalog ordering.
When they turned Craftsman, Kenmore, and Die Hard into junk, and their Auto Service Centers into rip offs, that was all she wrote.
My mother would bring us into Sears holding our hands even though we were 16 years old. We were acne ridden teenagers having our mother buying some garbage SNES video game which she paid on a Sears credit card. 😣 💳
This store used to sell everything, including houses! When I was a kid always looking forward to the Sears toy catalog. Used to buy my tools appliances and jeans from there. It shouldn't have happened, it's just a shame that it closed.
You didnt even mention Craftsman going to China. At least they held their standards.
They really didn't care about their employees. I worked as a call center manager for them in 2005 during the SearsMart merger. They gave everyone who had a stock purchase plan a buyout, then got rid of the program as well as tuition reimbursement. Also, supposedly at corporate the first morning they had a big pep rally, and afterward there were a series of guards with boxes labeled with peoples' names waiting for them right outside the auditorium. I suppose it was an easy way for them to gather up all the people they fired. I left a few weeks later. Sears never really cared about their employees to begin with, but everything went downhill after that.
We mourned the demise of Sears, K-mart, even Fedco
these are are usual shopping places.
Poor customer service did a lot to bring down Sears. It used to pride itself on satisfying the customer, but in its later years, it began refusing to honor warranties on its products, blaming customers for defective merchandise, and giving customers a hard time when they tried to return things they had bought there, even for legitimate reasons. Sears forgot that customers had choices, and could go somewhere else if businesses they dealt with mistreated them. My own father had a couple of issues like that, as did I. And my family had shopped at Sears for decades. Management simply developed the wrong attitude, and drove customers away. In the end, it's always customer service that counts if a company wishes to remain successful.
I really miss Sears. It was a great store!!
SEARS here ibn Canada FAILED due to BAD SENIOR MANAGEMENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I quite often shopped Sears for tools and such.........................and what they sold was pretty good quality........................
Behind the scenes - SEARS was a MESS - my neighbours wife worked in the Returns Dept and she was routinely pressured to accept "returns" on stuff that had NOT EVE BEEN BOUGHT AT SEARS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yes- Sears would just SWALLOW THE LOSS from scam artists in order to "retain" customer good will"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
In related news - Sears DOOMED ITSELF with sales!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
WHY would a customer buy a Sears product at regular price when they KNEW the item would be offered much CHEAPER IN a week or two????????????????
SEARS OUGHT TO HAVE SIMPLY REDUCED THE REGULAR PRICE AND FORGOTTEN about such regular and predictable sales promotions!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sear5s quite literally TRAINED its customers to NEVER PAY FULL PRICE at Sears!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Craftsman brand a whole 'nother story. Craftsman as a Sears owned brand name wasn't only a reasonably priced line of tools but also outdoor power equipment and lawn mowers/riders. There was no such thing as a Craftsman factory or company making all of those things. There were various factories and businesses that Sears contracted with to make the Craftsman branded products.
I think Sears squeezed the companies making the tools as to price a little bit too hard. Then someone with some money/credit got the bright idea to buy up most or all of these tool makers and bring them under one owner so that there was much more ability to demand a price for the tools - when Armstrong and Moore Drop Forge and Western Forge were all under one umbrella Sears could no longer play them against each other for a lower price.
Then seemingly came the outsourcing of some of the tools to China which may have been primarily done not by Sears but by the new owners of such as Armstrong and Moore Drop Forge. When the early Chinese made "Craftsman" tools disappointed customers blamed Sears which as I remember used to advertise "Made in America"
Consumers like me found better ways to shop. I found that the prices from Sears was at above the competition. Their service was lackluster. Buying online proved to be more convenient, while saving money, time and gas.
I always felt that Sears store in malls were boring and dreary compared to other department stores. Whenever I found myself looking for something at Sears, I always felt like getting out as soon as possible.