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The CEO of Sears is why Sears is going out of business, near as I can tell - he's purposefully running the company into the ground.
by Aloha 8y ago
The CEO of Sears is why Sears is going out of business, near as I can tell - he's purposefully running the company into the ground.
- aczerepinski 8y agoI doubt it's purposeful - more just that retail in the Amazon era is difficult and he has demonstrated no particular talent or qualifications for running such a business. He used to get talked up as the next Warren Buffett, but I don't really think his skills as an investor have held up to scrutiny either.
- goshab 8y agoI thought it was widely known he was doing some longterm liquidation of Sears’ assets, specifically their real estate and top brands.
- aczerepinski 8y agoI think the original plan was to use Sears to acquire more top brands, not sell them off. He made a failed bid for Restoration Hardware early on, and talked about building a portfolio of strong all-American brands. The liquidation strategy was a reaction to his plan failing as far as I'm aware. In the early years all the talk was on building a bigger conglomerate, possibly using Sears "super valuable" real estate to fuel it. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2004-11-21/the-next-warren-buffett https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2004-11-21/the-next-...
- fhood 8y ago1. Invest in online retail services 2. Invest in nostalgia brands like Craftsman, that can't be purchased on amazon, and come with a built in consumer base. 3. Use previously considerable resources to position yourself as the best place to shop for X product, and make sure that several brands of X product are only available through you. 4. Still probably fail, but at least it looks like you tried.
- harryh 8y agore #2: Craftsman 450-Piece Mechanic's Tool Set https://www.amazon.com/Craftsman-450-Piece-Mechanics-Tool-Set/dp/B077BW8S66/ https://www.amazon.com/Craftsman-450-Piece-Mechanics-Tool-Se...
- ericd 8y agoIIRC they sold the Craftsman brand off for some short term cash.
- fhood 8y agoOwned by renowned bastions of quality black and decker now.
- emodendroket 8y agoTo be fair, so is Dewalt, and that doesn't seem to have hurt their reputation.
- FireBeyond 8y agoOut of curiosity, as someone who is looking to have on hand some quality tools, who would you recommend?
- mywittyname 8y agoBosch is good quality and they go on sale on Amazon occasionally. I have an 18v drill, impact wrench, circular saw, sawsall, and jig saw from them and they are all top-notch. The only one I don't love is the circular saw, but that's mainly because battery powered ones are just not as good as corded.
- emodendroket 8y agoI've always looked at Dewalt if I wanted something nice, but I usually buy the cheap Ryobi tool and only think about replacing it if it's not meeting my needs. Easy to spend more than you need to on tools as a home owner.
- FLUX-YOU 8y ago>more just that retail in the Amazon era is difficult and he has demonstrated no particular talent or qualifications for running such a business "Right, I'm smart enough to realize that Amazon will crush us, and I can't outsmart Bezos, so why not enrich myself, say fuck the world, and go retire with a cool billion?"
- jonnycomputer 8y agoI would have no problem with this if so many people didn't get hurt along the way, losing jobs, pensions, and so on.
- acct1771 8y agoWhere do you think the billions come from?
- nradov 8y agoThe irony is that Sears could have been Amazon themselves. They already had all the necessary pieces. But they didn't even bother to try.
- lacker 8y agoIn a sense Sears was the Amazon of 100 years ago. They started life in the 1800's as a mail-order catalog, when the communication and distribution technology of the time had just become advanced enough to make mail-order a possibility. Like Amazon, they only opened physical stores decades after they started as a company. It's pretty hard to ride all the business trends correctly for over 100 years so I forgive Sears for missing out on the internet.
- fhbdukfrh 8y agoIndeed it's hard to stay on top, but missing the internet killed them, so i wouldn't go so far as forgiving them. They had the better part of 20 years to adjust to the new reality but just kept plugging along with dirty, inefficient retail stores poorly stocked and staffed. How could the same company that sold mail order houses a 100 years ago look at selling over the internet in the late 1990's and say "nah, it will never work - it's just too crazy"?
- ericd 8y agoIs any company the "same company" after 100 years? That's like 4-5 generations of people.
- phlakaton 8y agoIt still blows my mind that you could buy an entire house from Sears through their catalog, and many people did. And not just a mobile home or shed either – we're talking full-on bungalows and multi-story residences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Catalog_Home https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Catalog_Home
- mywittyname 8y ago
- hef19898 8y agoThat's what I wonder, so. Is it really that difficult? Amazon is opening brick and mortar stores, invested in whole foods and is constantly increasing its logistics food print with all the clst zhat comes along. All traditional retailers need to do is getting some kind of e-commerce unit up and running and we are looking at mich more level playing field. After all, every single exiating store can, by all means, be considered a fulfillment center as well. And from that perspective traditional retails geographic coverage is not bad at all. No idea why most fail to do so. Walmart being the exception having bought jet.com (?). After all Amazon is making the majority of its profits from AWS.
- SilasX 8y agoMore charitably, I'd phrase it as "extracting what valuable assets it still has as dividends, in the (perhaps mistaken) belief that those assets no longer create as much value when being used by Sears".
- howard941 8y agoFinancial engineers like this one need only to keep the thing out of bankruptcy for two years after the last asset extraction and the extraction's in the clear.
- blairanderson 8y agoyeah but what funds/banks in their right mind would finance the new debt?
- criddell 8y agoOnes that think they will be able to either sell the debt to somebody else or buy insurance on the debt.
- grizzles 8y agoIt sure looks that way. I'd argue he wants it to succeed but this is what happened. 1/ A few years back he looked at all the strategies available to him to run the business. 2/ He found the one that screwed the most people and looked greediest. 3/ He chose that one.
- appleflaxen 8y agoyou seem to be exactly right, and it seems to be an open secret. so why is the stock price not closer to zero? why isn't everybody shorting it?