> Sears could easily have been Target or Wal-Mart I don't believe this at all. Wal-Mart was already Wal-Mart, and while I have no love for them as a retail ou

> Sears could easily have been Target or Wal-Mart I don't believe this at all. Wal-Mart was already Wal-Mart, and while I have no love for them as a retail outlet, their execution is meticulous and aggressive. Sears was never, in my lifetime, that intense. Target had, and mostly continues to have, something that Sears could not touch: taste. Sears was busy being a default option for everyone, but never an exciting choice for anyone. No way could Sears have become Target. They'd need a new brand. Now of course, if you take $X billion dollars of assets, dump the backward-looking real estate and locations, go through massive layoffs and an amazing rebrand, reorient toward online, unwind decades of dilution in house brands, open new smaller stores in the new correct locations, and masterfully pivot the entire corporate culture to be something new by hiring the buyers and marketing people from, say, Target. Then yeah, you might be able to pull something off. But that'd be easier to do with just the $X billion from some other source. But Sears was what it was, and it's an open question whether the market would have supported a whole new Target, or if the existing Target (etc) would have been able to quickly shift into whatever small gaps the amazing team at NeoSears had identified for them. ... Total agreement and sympathy for you on the PE cannibalization process and the inevitable negative result for everyone except the private investors.