Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire self destruction through poor management

I see that Sears is getting ready to close another bunch of store. They used to be THE name in tools, etc. Then they discovered China & now their tools are crap. They used to have good prices but now they're priced out of the market.
They need new management, not less stores.

Sears looks to sell more assets, accelerate store closures after weak fourth quarter
Published February 09, 2016 The Wall Street Journal

Sears Holdings Corp. said Tuesday that it would sell more assets, accelerate store closures and find other ways to cut costs after revenue fell short of expectations and cash flow turned negative in the important holiday quarter.

Shares in the department-store operator fell Tuesday to their lowest levels since 2003. The stock, down 54% over the past 12 months, declined 8.8% to $15.25 in 4 p.m. trading Tuesday.

The Hoffman Estates, Ill.-based retailer run by billionaire hedge-fund manager Edward Lampert has been jettisoning assets to fund operating losses and other obligations.

Since 2012, the company has raised $9.5 billion by selling real estate and business units, including the Lands’ End clothing chain and Sears Hometown and Outlet Stores, according to Monica Aggarwal, an analyst with Fitch Ratings.

Last year alone, the company raised $3.1 billion by selling stores into joint ventures with mall owners and spinning off 266 properties into a real-estate investment trust.

As of Jan. 31, 2015, the company operated 1,725 Sears and Kmart stores. Sears used a large chunk of the money it earned from last year’s real-estate deals to reduce debt by about $1 billion.

They will be gone by year end.

Sports Authority is circling the drain as well.

Oh, Sears. Here I thought this was going to be about the fools that administrate our company!

Just another case of the farther away decision-making is removed from the people who actually generate the revenue, the worse the company does. i.e. find me a sears corporate guy who's depended on tools for a living, or directly served the guys who do, or in our case, anyone in administration in our company who knows chit about medicine.

sad about Sears. been shopping there for 5 decades.

i too, thought the OP was talking about the USA. very similar

ked

Hey, at least the man at the top is a billionaire. After all, he's doing a bangup job ruining a decades old company.


I need to get a job where I get rewarded like that for utter failure.

Sears WAS the internet sales of many a rural person for a LONG time. Shame.

Sears was bought for it's massive real estate holdings. The plan was always to cut it up. The real estate in HI was some of the first to go.

They lost the battle when they forgot who brought them to the dance.

A former coworker's previous job had been the general manager of a pretty large Sears store. He started out working part time while still in high school for Sears and over the years worked his way up.

He said it got so unbearably stressful trying to satisfy the new management whims after the Sears/Kmart merger that he had to opt for early retirement. Within a year or two after he left Sears the man who took his position left Sears too and also came to work for our company.

Not the urban mall shoppers??

Years ago I knew the manager of a Sears tire shop. When he was about 2 years from retirement, they moved him to clothing and put him on a full commission. Since the department manager didn't sell much, he was starving. He was just trying to get by until he could retire. They were trying to force him out of his pension.

Yep , by the time Sears went Chinee Walmart/Lowes/Home Depot already OWNED the cheep Chinee tool market. Sears was crazy to think they could go up against them in that market.


Mike

I don't think tool sales was/is the made or break of Sears.

No, it was trying to sell women's clothing and curtains. Remember the "softer side of Sears" campaign?

Core competency is a concept accountants just can't grasp. You can't run a business without numbers, and you can't run a business by the numbers. As long as accountants are in charge, a business will decline.

How can this happen in the Tremendous Obama Recovery?

Women's clothing was in Sears from the beginning. The original catalogs had about everything you could imagine, including clothing. A country person could easily get by if he had to buy everything he owned from Sears.
When this area was settled in the early 1900's, a lot of the houses built were Sears kits. They were quality houses and many are still standing.

I thought it was our country.


Sears and Montgomery Wards were THE two catalog stores for decades..

Sears house kit plans - 1908 throurh 1940.

http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm

Good post - way too many businesses controlled by people interested in how they can wheel and deal rather than run a business based on growth through providing the product(s) the company purports to supply.

That's been a standard tactic of Sears for a long time. I worked for them at the auto center from 1986-89 when I was in college. They'd go after someone when they were about two years from retirement, they'd do everything they could to find a BS reason to fire him or force them to quit so they'd get off the hook for the pension.

It's simple make or sell a good product and people buy it
Appliance that were Kenmore, lawn mowers, craftsman tools etc. all turned to junk it's that simple sell crap and you go out of business

You are right , however their trying to get into the Chinee tool market against established competition did not help them. They would have been better off to drop their line of tools entirely.

Mike

I remember the Sears catalog being thicker than our phone book in a town of 32,000 when I was a little kid. And it was printed on what seemed like tissue paper.

My grandfather, who died in '90 did all his business at Sears.

From tires to tools to suits to appliances.

All his woodworking tools came from there also.


My how the times have changed.

Yes, there was a reason for that.

When the family was done ordering, the catalog went to the outhouse for "re-use".

(reduce, re-use, recycle is NOT a new concept!)

Geno

RC,
I hope you're having a fine day there and that the family and llamas are all happy and well fed.

The "hedge fund manager" is the issue with Sears.

For a similar selling off of assets to cover debt, look into what happened to the Pacific Lumber Company. Hostile takeover of a successful business, then it ended in bankruptcy after pillaging assets (not real estate in this case, but timber)

Profit drives our economy and sometimes takes its toll in ways we don't like.

I liked Sears for the convenience. Sure Snap-On tools are great, but need something on a weekend or break a socket, Head to Sears, as you can't just get the Snap-On truck there on a phone call. And as others have mentioned, their Kenmore stuff was nothing to sneeze at, their "Roadhandler" tires were private labeled Michelins or Bridgestones (as I recall being told), I bought many a pair of quality leather work shoes there, and so on.

Sure will be different without them.

Geno

Now that Playboy is outta the nekkid girls bidniz, mebee Sears could take up the slack. The trip to the outhouse would never be the same.

If they go down, I wonder how long their online parts store will stay open. I have a lot of older Craftsman stuff and I buy parts from them on occasion. They're not the cheapest but I sure can't fault their service.

Five months ago we opened a sears credit card and bought a queen size name brand mattress. It came with a 90 day comfort exchange if we didn't like it. We didn't like it. Called for an exchange. when they came to pick up our mattress we found 7 large staple wires protruding from the side about an inch. It then became a warranty issue but they were going to leave the new mattress and take away the bad one, except they brought a twin not a queen. They wanted to take both back to the warehouse but we told them we were to old to sleep on the floor for the three weeks it would take to get the right mattress. Three weeks later after at least a dozen calls to Sears explaining to different customer service(?) reps who could not transfer us to a manager but promised us they could handle the problem only to find the did not have the authority to do anything, they were to bring the right mattress. Only problem was they dropped it in the mud and it was still a twin not a queen. Another four weeks goes by with no mattress and many hours spent on the phone with customer service (???) reps not being able to connect us with a manager and not being able to help us when a manager calls my wife. She got an earful. We got our money back since we had already paid off the credit card. We went out that day and bought from another store who delivered our mattress in two days.

Sears going under, I wonder why. I know we will never buy there again. Once great line of tools they stood behind is now a bunch of China made crap. Customer service is a joke. They are getting what they deserve.

Yeah, but who needs a catalog nowadays. Even in rural areas cell phone coverage is getting so good and folks are always using their phones in the head, everyone will switch to "video" on the little screen!

Geno

Divested myself of all remaining Sears power tools many years ago. Their practice of making it a hassle for outside repair shops and individuals to buy parts while charging exorbitant prices for their service was a deal killer for me. And that was before other brands surpassed their quality by leaps and bounds.

Retail giants of old travel thin ice when they take customers for granted. How they treat their employees can be an advance indicator. Bad management has many faces. JC Pennys isn't far behind.

My employer isn't in retail, but it suffers from the same disease. Retirement is looking better every day.

I still have all my old sears craftsman woodworking tools.

Planer joiner.
Belt disk sander.
Router table.
400 pound table saw.
Radial arm saw.

Plus a bunch of old power and hand tools.

They lost any new business with me long ago. If it ain't cast iron precision equipment or quality to match the old stuff I'm outta there.

Going down the tubes?
Good!
They deserve it.

I think I've visited our local Sears at best a handful of times in the past decade. Every time I left with the sense their staff was painfully incompetent.

Despite everyone's glee at watching a fine old store go down the tubes, it will be a shame to see it go.

I still have the Craftsman dial calipers my father bought me for Christmas in 1981, it's still going strong and is the only caliper I've ever needed. Same same with some older Crafstman socket sets and hand tools.

Always liked their straight forward grading system - Our "good" something, our "better" something and our "best" whatever. Made it pretty easy to do a comparison of quality/price for whatever level of stuff one needed.


Guessing that management needs to close those stores and cheapen their products to make sure their salaries, perks and bennies remain undisturbed. Someone at the C level will get a very big year end bonus for this as well.

I ain't happy seeing it go down.
But after what they've done I won't lament it either.

I will miss it, however.

Yeah.. used to be able to buy anything through Sears catalogs.

They must have sold bathrooms on a different page.

Kmart was a failed company with access to credit. They used that credit to buy a successful company, Sears.

Kmart was tone deaf to their customer's desires and clueless about technologies like point-of-sale/bar codes.

The colossal incompetence and hubris of Kmart management tanked Sears as well.

Kmart should have been allowed to die, just like the TBTF banks should have been parted out in a rational, controlled way.

Prob still had out houses in those days.

Free-standing structures.

I recall an old joke about a cowboy wanting to order TP for out on the trail. He mailed Sears asking for it. Sears mailed back requesting the catalog number. He then mailed back if he had the catalog he wouldn't need the TP.

When I was overseas in the Navy in the mid 1960s,the Sears and Monkey Wards catalogs were our best friends. Our PX was small, and the local markets were very limited. We had to order almost everything and wait about 3 months for the stuff to arrive. It was all shipped by surface vessel in those days.

I had an aunt that lived in one of those Sears houses. Pretty decent structure for the money. A lot of that depended on who assembled it on site. They weren't panelized or pre-assembled parts but just a load of pre-cut lumber and a set of plans to put it together.

Myron

If you look at many of those houses, you will find a bathroom in a room between 2 bedrooms. They were designed with a closet between the bedrooms and no bathroom. Outhouses were still the rule. Later, people converted the closets into bathrooms. I've seen quite a few that way, in fact I once owned one.

Rock Chuck,

My aunt's house had a bathroom, but darned if I can remember where it was located.

Do you remember what was underneath the stairway to the second floor ? Was it a closet or was there a stairway to the cellar under it ?

I don't know how much leeway there was to re-arrange the floor plan in those things.

Myron

The space under a stairway was often storage, either drawers or cupboards.

I owned one in Twin Falls, and the bathroom was indeed between the kitchen and a bedroom on the first floor, and in what was pretty obviously a converted closet upstairs.

The plumbing "conversion" in the basement to accommodate the upgrade would have made Medusa rage with jealousy.......

Mom and dad moved us four kids back to the US from England in 1970. Coming from England as we did with few means money was tight, they rented a two-bedroom house, the one we would live in until I was away in college years later.

My father, who worked construction, became disabled two years later after we arrived here and could not work. Having spent most of his working life since 1947 in England (where he moved out of love for my mother, finally prevailing upon her to return here) he was eligible for very little social security.

Fortunately my mother had got a job selling auto parts at Sears, full time with benefits. That job kept the roof over our heads and gave her a modest but steady retirement 25 years later.

I don't recall we ever took public assistance, but if we had come to this country in 1990 instead of 1970 my mom would have been working two or three part-time jobs, and we would have been on food stamps.

So I too have a high regard for the Sears, Roebuck and Co. of a bygone era. Pretty much all my clothes came from there too

Birdwatcher

I have 2 bolt action .22 rifles. They're identical in all respects except one: one's stamped Marlin and the other Sears. The parts are all interchangeable. You can find many makes of stuff with the Sears, Kenmore, or Craftsman names. They never made anything but contracted to have their name on everything.

Or bedrooms for orphan nephews with magical powers.

Not true. Sears actually bought a gun company in 1905 and from then until 1918 they made their own guns.

Remember Teddy Ballgame's name on their firearms?

Dad had a Ted Williams shotgun. I don't know who made it.

When I was about 4 in the early 50's, Dad bought a Craftsman carpenters level when he added on to our house. 40 years later, he gave it to me. I was using it to build a fence and nothing came out right. I discovered that one of the vials wasn't level any more. I took it to Sears to see if they could get a new vial for it. They couldn't but they gave me a new level. The department manager apologized because the replacement wasn't as good as my original but it was the best they carried.

My grandfather worked for Sears for 45 years (1941-1986). Lived a good middle-class life, had a lake house, retired well.

It's sad to see what Sears has become. They got rid of the catalog business at just the wrong time. If they had held on to it just a few more years, it would have been an easy transition into an internet model in the late 90's/early 2000's, and they would have beat lots of other retailers to the punch.

For anyone that thinks Sears is gonna make a comeback or might be a good investment, you need to Google "Sears Re-Insurance". That's the company ol' Fast Eddie Laempert set up to shift all the good real estate holdings into. He also owns the Kenmore/Craftsman/Die Hard names, so he gets a " royalty" on all the merch sold, even if Sears itself doesn't make much of a profit on it.

He has also loaned Sears his own money on occasion. My guess is, that he has made himself a "secured" creditor, so that he will receive whatever money/value Sears has left in a bankruptcy, while the stockholders and others are left with nothing.

Didn't the fishing reels have a ball players name on it?

Sears sells online but I don't know who's crazy enough to order from them. Their prices are 10 to 20% higher than anyone else out there.

A lot of the sporting goods stuff was branded as "Ted Williams". The shotgun my uncle had was made by Hi-Standard. Of course, JC Higgins was the other brand name commonly used on sporting goods. Craftsman lathes were made by Atlas. I re-built engines using kits from both Sears and Montgomery Wards.
In Canada, Simpson-Sears, Woodwards, Eatons, and Hudsons Bay stores have all gone the same way; source from China and try to compete with Walmart. All failed or are failing. Of course, the sad thing is that nobody wants to sell quality because nobody wants to buy quality. The market place and infrastructure have changed drastically over the last fifty years and this is what we have. I struggle to find air and oil filters for my vehicles which are not made in China. To me, the companies which have exported those jobs are treasonous and don't deserve my business. It is one thing to deliberately buy something made in China and quite another to buy and pay for a good American brand only to find "Made in China" stamped on it. As I pointed out to the guy in the Snap On van, I can buy all sorts of Chinese tools with lifetime warranties but when I pay a premium for Snap-On or Blue Point, I expect to not be buying Chinese. When I buy Echlin electronics, it burns my butt to see that they are sourced from China. GD

We're in a throwaway society. My cell phone has a broken lens, held together only by the plastic anti-scratch film. I only paid about $75 for it but a replacement lens costs $100. When it falls apart, I'll buy a new phone.

sears used to be a life-time job. they paid excellent wages and had great bennies. my buddy worked there and made something like $6/hr when everyone else was making $2.75. well run, orderly stores with great merchandise. fuggen chinese killed them though.

on a side note, i have a craftsman 18HP briggs 2 cyl tractor with a 6 speed hi/lo diff from the early 80's. what a beast. it sounds like a harley when it idles and will haul a serious load of firewood. i am stockpiling spare parts and will keep it as long as i'm alive. compare it to the schit they sell now.

Dvdegeorge and Scott F both nail it. At one tine Sears did sell quality items and service. Note also the comments on career people with pensions. They then decided on a markets strategy of trying to offer Walmart prices and still a bit of service but now use minimum wage part time staff that just don't have any skin in the game. They could have become Walmart and you haul your own mattress home or you become smaller and cater to the customer that cares for quality and service, though that's a much smaller market these days. Sorry I see it more of a marketing issue is than an accounting issue.

It's no longer a loss for Sears to close, just like K-Mart closing here is no loss - if they were serving a purpose they would be crowded with shoppers spending money - but they ain't, other stores are. Your business can always be replaced by another willing to do it better.

A local K-Mart store seems to still be holding it's own fairly well and has been for several years even with a much larger and generally cheaper Super Walmart in the same town.

The Dollar General and Family Dollar stores all appear to be not only thriving but opening up new stores everywhere in spite of Walmart competition.

Times change. I'm sure Sears was great back in the day, but competition got a little fierce.

I know this thread has been dead for a while, but I am going to add a post, because I worked for Sears when they made the changes that sent them downhill. I was in the 'eye of the storm', so to speak. I started in Jan. 1969, and worked there until New years 1980.

The full-time sales people were almost all on a commission basis, but in about 1974 or 1975, Sears decided to replace us with register punchers on little more than minimum wage. They had installed a "computerized" register that was supposed to track sales and automatically re-order merchandise to replenish stocks. Well, that never worked as planned, because the computer system back then was so primitive that it didn't do the job, and a lot of the time we had to use a generic entry number of some kind to even get a transaction into the system. the people who were supposed to review the reports never caught the slip-ups, so the re-order system was useless.

Those of us who had been in those sales jobs were re-assigned to the few other jobs that were still on a commission basis. I got re-imagined as a "Kitchen Planner".
Yeah, right - like that is really gonna work !

After a couple of years of starving and bitching, I got re-assigned to be an automotive "service writer" in what was a rockin auto service center. I had always done my own wrenching, so that was great, and I made the best money I ever made at Sears.

Well, maybe too good, because when I went back from the New Year holiday 1979/1980, I was summoned to a managers office and fired. It couldn't have come at a worse time, because the general economy was on the skids, and I had to cash out my profit sharing account for pennies on the dollar to pay the bills. Sears stock came back over several years, but the damage had long been done.

No, the Chinee didn't kill Sears, Sears killed Sears.

Myron

My uncle, my dad's brother, worked for Sears from right after WWII until the late '60's or early '70's when he went to work for Montgomery Ward. He probably got an employee discount or something because almost everything his family or ours had was JC Higgins or Ted Williams, everything from my first bicycle to my uncle's .270 (yeah, even in the best of families.)

I still have the Craftsman tools I bought with my income tax refund in 1975....good, USA made stuff. My first ex-wife's father was a mechanic, had his own shop, preferred Craftsman tools over Snap-on. Of course, vehicles have changed so much I can't even remember what some of those tools are for, anymore.

Growing up over the years as a kid we bought everything from Sears and I held on to that loyalty as a young adult - at least with Tools, yard equipment and appliances.

I don't necessarily think their stuff is junk

I've just opted for different brands over the years.

With Kenmore and Craftsman, you just didn't know if you were getting the cheap version or the higher end - they outsourced those brands to so many different companies.

I actually like the Dollar General model. Open a 2000 square foot store in an intersection of a rural area - kinda like a general store in a old western town

I know I drop in a dollar general that down the road more often than not when I need a couple of items - I'll do that every time over having to go to a Wal-Mart

DG is becoming pretty common in rural MS.

pretty handy, especially the stores that carry a few groceries

Family Dollars are opening all over the place around here. I've never been in one, though.