Sears Hasn’t Fared Better After Bankruptcy
wsj.com
wsj.com
20 years ago I worked there, selling Packard Bell and Macintosh computers, as well as vaccums. Who decided those departments should be merged, I don't know. Once in a while I'd sub at a smaller store about 45 minutes away, and cameras got thrown into the mix.
I always liked the Sears Auto Center for tires, service, and Diehard batteries. Craftsman hand tools were decent until the mid-2000's when they started changing warranty policies.
The power tools and lawn equipment were never really any good. If you buy a 'Craftsman' mower, you're getting the same Chinese-engined lawnmower that you buy at the same price point at any other store. Just like any other product these days.
They used to have an entire part of the store dedicated to flat-screen TV's. As they cheapened, the area got smaller and smaller, until it was 4-5 sad TV's hanging on a wall. Just this last year they decided to fill that part of the store with mattresses.
I noticed the store filling up with Craftsman, Kenmore, and other Sears-branded junk. Just low end stuff like cheap shoes, plastic utensils, and pots and pans. I figured distributors weren't willing to give Sears enough credit to stock the stores with stuff of any value.
The store itself hasn't been kept up in forever. Most of the ceiling tiles are stained from leaks. the carpets are probably as old as I am, everything is broken, and it doesn't even feel like they turn the heat on in the winter.
I try to pickup old craftsman tools (and matco / Snapon) when I go to garage sales. The older stuff was great.
We had Corelle dishes as a kid and when I dropped a plate and it exploded on hitting the floor, we all stood there just staring at it because nobody in 8 years had broken a single dish from that set. Mine landed perfectly flat upside down, and buckled. The new ones are so thin you can practically see through them.
I had a friend who went to yard sales looking for vintage Corningware dishes because the old ones were more shatter resistant.
IIRC she claimed the old ones were stovetop safe as well, which was a surprise to me because I never knew anyone growing up who used them that way. I think Emile Henry may be the only ceramic cookware you can do that with today, and those are chonky. Light, but chonky.
There are manufacturers selling borosilicate glass cookware; just look for "borosilicate" when searching. There are at least a couple of brands that sell this on Amazon. Though thickness and overall durability is a different matter and perhaps even the modern borosilicate items still pale in comparison to older products.
I was talking about the white casserole dishes also made by Corning. Wikipedia says it's called pyroceram. Also says it was an accidental discovery while trying to invent something else.
I like them a lot. Can't say how they compare to the Corelle of old but they're definitely solid.
Such a shame; Craftsman used to be THE name in home tools. If one broke, you could bring it back for a replacement... forever.
At this point, I tend to get the cheap stuff first. If it survives your usage, great. If not, that's a sign to take the savings and get some quality for that one thing.
The problem with home Depot online is there are way too many options. Sometimes fewer options are better
I like Wayfair much more for many things instead of home Depot. I can dial it in on the web search easily.
If I am buying from home Depot I'm going to the store. And props to them they have excellent customer service with genuinely knowledgeable people. Good luck using their search
Ridiculously cheap, in both price and quality.
Sears had no manufacturing, so they contracted it out. I believe the design was their own, but I'm not positive. Whirlpool was commonly the manufacturer, though it varies by year. Other manufacturers could offer a lower price (attractive for Sears) but had other issues, so the contract commonly went back to Whirlpool.
More recently I purchased a house with a Kenmore Elite range whose only detriment from perfection is that it's an electric rather than gas range.
They do seem to be assembling their tools in America which is a plus for me.
If you're in a market where Amazon does 1-day delivery it's close. Otherwise there's Harbor Freight. For the most part though, the quality was good enough that if you were breaking your Craftsman hand tools you were doing something wrong.
That's what heat and impact are for.
That's how I got an o2 sensor out that was completely locked. I spent four hours on it previously. A torch a cheap wrench and a sledge later I had it replaced
Yes, you could spend the money on (air, electric) powered impact tools. You could even spend the money on a hand driven impact driver (much less expensive than the powered option).
Or you could grab a length of pipe and a hammer, slip the pipe over your tools and bang on it. This works better with things that aren't designed to ratchet and uses bits and ends you're more likely to have around the house (or find secondary uses for) than power tools.
Heat is also fire, which means more care needs to be taken.
Which also depends on your budget. They're fantastically expensive but inductive heaters are great for helping break things loose in a safe manner.
Sears has no identity anymore. It used to be the-place for appliances, automotive tools, and lawn equipment. Now it's like a Macy's with tools and lawn equipment.
I'm planning on picking up some scratch and dent applicances at the Sears outlet soon. That's really all I interact with Sears anymore.
Departments stores seem almost entirely doomed to fail because of the combo of more specialty retail (buying clothes at a clothing store as opposed to department store), Amazon/ecommerce, discount retail (TJX family), and, of course, giants like Walmart being able to operate better.
Stores like Target and Meijer are able to fill the void of shopper wishing to avoid Walmart so I don't see a ton of space for anyone else.
Certainly Sears could have positioned itself better to evolve into something closer to Target but that ship sailed at least 20 years ago and Sears being mostly anchored to shopping malls didn't help its cause much.
The Sears attached to my hometown's mall was shut down 2 or 3 years ago. The space is currently being destroyed so they can develop an outdoor entertainment space.
Ironically, Sears shut down its century-old catalog just as ecommerce was becoming viable.
They had the infrastructure to be Amazon but they threw it away and Amazon had to build it all up from scratch.
Not really. A mail order catalog has very little in common with a modern eCommerce operation like Amazon's. It's a bit like saying that because Kodak was a photography giant they should have been able to win digital photography when, in fact, other than brand it's not clear what real assets and expertise they had to bring. (And brand can be a hindrance as well as a help if you're shifting businesses.)
Sears had the order fulfillment and distribution know how.
It uses AA batteries
The resolution is low enough you don't need to post-process stuff to put in on a web page.
You just plug in USB to transfer files. No nonsense like trying to get photos off an iPhone.
Likewise, I saw an actual, functioning prototype digital camera, which connected to a computer via serial...at the Kodak lab in Rochester where it was developed in the late 80s. It was never developed into a product, not because it was beyond them technically but because it didn't use film, which was what the company was all about selling.
Fujifilm had (somewhat) fewer issues with transitioning to digital mostly because they applied their technical expertise in emulsions to areas that had nothing to do with photography. (Though of course they stayed in the photo business as well.)
Fuji did make pivot to mirrorless at the right time.
That's like saying Elon Musk invented the electric car and rocket. More like he hired people to do it, probably from the companies Amazon is competing with.
But to do so would have required a lot of forethought and vision. They would have needed to recognize the significance of online retail, free shipping, trustworthy customer service, and their fulfillment way back in the early or mid 90s.
I remember startups back then that didn't really recognize that, and I'm certain that old retail didn't.
I'd really like a refresher on what the retail climate was like at that time that lead Sears into thinking getting rid of their catalog was a good idea.
And why didn't Penny's jump into that vacuum?
Although I expect I already know that answer. I was warned by the oldest worker at my first tech job never to work as a software developer for a manufacturer. They don't understand where the uncertainty and the QA effort lives in the dev process and they keep trying to force it to look like what they know. Probably working for a retailer, even one with supply chain chops, would have been awful in that era.
Every article I see about Service Merchandise's decline blames the catalog business (despite doing well in internet sales) as being "too old fashioned" and the root cause, and certainly that's what people seemed to be thinking in the 90s (again, wow how they ignored those internet sales looking at the quoted figures). I'd love to see a better retrospective on the company's 1990's management given we saw Amazon succeed.
Maybe more so than Sears, the fact that Service Merchandise didn't compete better with Amazon is fascinating. Service Merchandise and Sears thought they were competing with Circuit City (dead), Wal-Mart, K-Mart (bought by Sears, dead), Target, rather than each other in the 1990s, and Amazon was left almost entirely uncontested to eat Sears and Service Merchandise's original core competencies.
This isn't exactly the best example seeing as how Kodak is the poster child for ignoring technology shifts and going bankrupt as a result. Their executives largely ignored digital for the longest time and put minimal resources into R&D even after it was clear digital was taking over. It's sad really, because Kodak was positioned to be a pioneer in digital but they failed to embrace change and that costed them immensely in the end.
I think a lot of people get caught up in the idea that a company is a living breathing organism that should fight for its life to the very end. In reality, its a collection of investors and employees all with their own interest, and sometimes it's best for everyone to part their separate ways. It's not like the same people were at Kodak when the digital sensor was invented, as there was when they finally gave up on film.
The change to digital was a very slow one, and film remained a very profitable business for Kodak for a long time. IMHO, it would have been insane for Kodak to invest in semiconductor fabrication facilities from the start. Meanwhile existing semiconductor companies could leverage existing tools, employees, and facilities to produce image sensors with relatively low cost and low risk. By the time it made sense to invest in semiconductor tech, they were already too far behind, and it just made more sense for the company to milk the Kodak brand for all they could.
I see it as more like Edison promoting DC over AC. He certainly knew AC was the way to go, but he could only gain financially from DC, so that's what he promoted.
I don't think Edison knew AC was better. Don't forget Tesla worked for Edison and showed him AC current, and Edison told him not to waste his time on it which is why Tesla went off to do his own thing. And anybody that knew Tesla (based on what I've read, I've obviously never met him) knew he didn't care about making money at all, so he would've happily let Edison have all the profits. Most people don't know Tesla voluntarily tore up his contract with Westinghouse that would have made him the richest man in history. I think it would have been very easy for Edison to profit from AC had he not been so stubborn.
I've often wondered what could have happened had they became partners or even friends. What Tesla would have made of, say, the Edison Effect - perhaps the vacuum tube (diode, triode, etc) would have been invented much earlier? How that would have affected history (good and bad)? Would electronic digital computers have been developed earlier? Who knows...
And I'm not suggesting Kodak should have just went for digital in 1975, as that wasn't cost effective, or practical. But they should have, arguably, understood it was the future and at least pretended that it was a possible revenue stream. Instead they actively avoided it, and doubled-down on the "we're a chemical company" for decades. Then they went bankrupt.
Kodak's problem is that they always bottom fed the market with their film cameras and retained the same position in digicams. The former strategy is great when you want to drive demand for consumables. It doesn't work when there is nothing to consume in the picture taking process.
There was a long time there where everyone thought the startups and the consumer electronics companies were going to win. Wasn't there a time when Sony had the best digital cameras? Digital cameras were one of the big 'disruptions' in the early information age.
Clearly, they'll still be the go tos for pros and advanced amateurs for a long time but that's barely a mass market.
Sony did successfully use digital to become a respected camera maker--and they still have some of the best cameras in their category today. But, by and large, the traditional consumer electronics companies focused on point and shoots, which have been almost totally erased by phones.
There was supposed to be a format standard for lenses to solve this problem, but one of my camera-snob friends pointed out that while you can physically thread the lens on another body, things like autofocus probably won't work. So in the end it got people to buy new lenses but still not be able to pick best of breed from each generation.
Sony is the other currently successful camera maker. They bought Konica-Minolta, and made the switch to mirrorless early. Most importantly, they manufacture the best sensors that everyone else except for Canon uses.
Most of the current digital camera brands were analog camera makers. Panasonic is the exception and they partnered with Leica.
Kodak was not a camera company as much as they were a chemical company. They made film, they made developing agents, glass, etc. Eastman Chemical was formerly a subsidary of Kodak, and they had even broader chemical expertise -- fibers, explosives, involved in the Manhattan Project, etc.
So transitioning to digital photography would have meant giving up almost all of their expertise and present business interests. It would have meant slashing their revenue and completely reinventing the company.
Of course, all of that happened anyway. But one can imagine how difficult it would be to pull that trigger yourself. Doing the long-term responsible thing might have even led to shareholder lawsuits...
That doesn't preclude lawsuits. American business law is fucking stupid.
Also, people complain too much about lawsuits versus corporations. Wells Fargo just took a $1.6 billion charge for legal expenses. That's something like 700 person-years at $400/hr, 16 hrs/day. The stupidity isn't the system that allows the lawsuits, it's the corporate mindlessness that wastes the equivalent of 1,000 people's lifetimes on arguing that they didn't do anything wrong instead of just saying "welp you got us".
It's of course natural and sensible for companies to pursue strategies for new products and product lines as existing ones mature and decline. But if doing so means investing in new businesses where you have no particular expertise or advantage, it's unclear if you're benefiting your owners (i.e. shareholders) by doing so.
There's plenty to criticize Kodak about. But it was going to be in a very tough position no matter what. And we can name plenty of other businesses that have been completely replaced by new unrelated technologies. Keuffel and Esser wasn't going to become a calculator company.
Back then there wasn't enough infrastructure to deal with 4M pictures, and they thought that you would send them a memory card and they'd send you a CDROM full of images and optionally 'develop' the pictures for you.
If anything, Kodak was too early, which is a phenomenon I experienced first hand at several startups.
Wikipedia says they started in that space in '91:
> In 1991, Kodak brought to market the Kodak DCS (Kodak Digital Camera System), the beginning of a long line of professional Kodak DCS SLR cameras that were based in part on film bodies, often Nikons. It used a 1.3 megapixel sensor, had a bulky external digital storage system and was priced at $13,000 (equivalent to $24,000 in 2018[6]). At the arrival of the Kodak DCS-200, the Kodak DCS was dubbed Kodak DCS-100.
I was there in 1995 - installing computers and supporting a organization with a group of photographers that had 5 of those cameras. We had 100mb PCMCIA micro hard drives - made by IBM - by the dozens (over $1500 a pop if I remember right). It took a minute and a half per picture to import the raw images into Photoshop on the highest end Mac Quadra. Somehow I stumbled on a company that made a DSP accelerator card ($5-$6K if I remember right) that cut that import time to 20-30 seconds, but it would still take a day for a photographer to import all their photos from shooting a day or two in the field.
The early days of digital photography were not pretty. I can do 10 times on my phone what we could do after spending literally 10's of thousands of dollars - and 1/4 the resolution we have today.
And yet with the right people it still managed to look really good :) One of the best things I learned was the strength of mastering the fundamental basics of any craft. I was working with experienced film photographers where developing film had a high cost in both time and materials so they were very deliberate in thinking about and composing shots before they shot. With digital I pointed out you could take a lot more pictures more quickly, and correct things in photoshop - but an old crusty photographer responded he'd rather spend his time on the front end of the process in the physical world with the camera then spending hours behind the desk in front of photoshop - and even as a computer geek that really resonated with me.
The old every hour of planning saves 8 of execution and all that.
My Nikon DSLR is four or five years old now, but instead of replacing it with another Nikon I'm thinking about a Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera. (https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagicpocketci...)
Video is the new still photography.
He wasn't literally the only developer, but it was close. Sears did not take ecommerce seriously enough, for quite a long time (like, maybe, ever).
I thought amazon wasn’t quite there yet, and then I found this: https://www.amazon.com/ECOHOUSEMART-Laminated-friendly-Build...
Now, if it said "fulfilled by Amazon" - or it went to a different section of the site ("Amazon Dwellings" - I dunno) that was clearly an Amazon branded product, manufacturing and fulfillment system for houses, that'd be a different thing.
I'm not sure how Sears did it way, way back when. But it was probably closer to something like a dealership, where you went inside a store and sat down and worked out the paperwork, etc - then paid the down payment or in full or whatever, then had to go "back home" to arrange shipment from the (likely train) dock or such out to your land...
What I could see Amazon getting into would be shipping container houses/pods/etc - or something like small houses (in conjunction with Ikea maybe?). I know Amazon has at least one offering of a container house, but again, it's third party. What I'm envisioning would be something you just go thru a designer app to come up with the interior layout for the "pods" in the standard container sizes, then tell them where you want it to be delivered, and it arrives on your property ready to be offloaded, with a large Amazon logo on the side (looking like a standard shipping container until it is "unwrapped" or "assembled" more or less. With everything included to make it stupid simple. Heck, if the land sale could be included in it, so that all bylaws and such were taken care of (water, electrical, sewage, etc), plus all the contracts and such for cement foundations or whatnot - it would be one heck of a housing solution.
About the only modification they made was adding electric- this was on a farm in the upper Midwest in the 20s,rural electrification wasn't a thing yet. Apparently they ran the lights off a generator that charged a bank of Edison Ni-Fe batteries.
I do know that they didn't go into a store--the nearest Sears was 400 miles away. He did telegraph to request more details, but AFAIK the process to order the house wasn't much different than ordering anything else. I don't know what details went into authorizing payment, but I don't think there was phone service in that town at the time.
Although 150k for that Amazon house seems like a ripoff, most large lumber yards will spec out a 'kit' for far less than that. I do know that that is still a thing, my brother was a manager at a Menards (Home Depot, but cheaper) and they had a selection of houses that were pre-specced and they would sell them as a kit. Although they aren't delivered as an entire kit, you go back to the store in stages to get the components.
Except you run the chance of getting a counterfeit product if it's fulfilled by Amazon - and even if it's sold by Amazon, because of the whole co-mingling thing. Can you imagine getting a counterfeit house?
Although I did buy a granite 12"x18" surface plate that was FBA- I'm sure they lost on shipping that 2 day, it weights ~90lbs. I noticed that shortly after I bought that the item was no longer fulfilled by Amazon.
I guess they do.[1] Oh well.
1: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/200612770?...
Imagine transforming the massive department that was the catalog service, and it's not even about the physical difficulty of transforming the department, the political resistance at the time will be crazy. Multiple billions are wasted for political games every year in large companies, and it's not clear and cut as 'what if we just do this' because hindsight is 20/20. People and especially management carry a heavy inertia.
Sears was uniquely positioned for the future and they squandered their opportunity.
You had people in there with 3-30+ years experience of knowing the ins and outs of Sears logistics, the product lines, the sales techniques, and the brand. They couldn't learn how to work a Wordpress site? Make a theme? Is it really always faster to take web devs and teach the entire rest of the domain to them?
I wonder what it would do to the inertia and political gamesmanship issues (not to mention retention!) if a company gained the reputation for continuously training employees and executives to keep up with the latest and greatest, that if you were innovative and took initiative you would be ahead of outside hires for new, desirable roles.
Except you can't find a book in most malls.
I've seen at least one mall expand, adding no additional department store space at the corners. Another tacked a Barnes and Noble onto the corner but not really attached (the exception to the 'no books in malls' situation). Two, including the former, added an 'outdoor' area, which was a walkway with shops and restaurants on both sides.
The weird thing about the B&N was they stuck it on the end of the mall that had high turnover in tenants. I never understood why they didn't knock out one storefront and put a hallway through. Maybe access space behind the stores was an issue?
I know they were always made for Sears by another company, just like Radio Shack's "exclusive" brands, but I don't know who made them in the 1980s. (It appears Panasonic had been making them during the 2000s, but some information I've found suggests that Panasonic got out of that business entirely in 2016.)
"A last look at Sears - Route 22, Watchung NJ (built in 1965)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbzAd_DtswM
Sadly, that's why they're entering bankruptcy. The current CEO has little to no interest in keeping Sears alive, but they make a decent piggy bank.
Craftsman (riding) mowers are made by MTD and use either Kohler or Briggs and Stratton engines. Pretty sure most of that is made in the US. I find MTD to be sub par, though.
I’ve never in my life felt going to a department store I’d be met by someone knowledgeable in an area other than makeup.
One thing I’d have loved to see - an emphasis on customization and tailoring. Almost everyone could use a little custom tailoring for pants, blouses and shirts, and it does not scale online well at all as you need to be in person to get measured. If you like a shirt and it’s ill fitting, pay $15/20 for a cheap hem job and walk out feeling like a million bucks.
That was a startup two decades back. Built on automated pattern cutting. MVP was customized khakis. You'd enter detailed measurements on a website; machine-cut parts were assembled "manually" the next-ish day; then FedEx. Had a little tag with a number, so you could order "just like N, but let out a 1/2 inch". It was nifty.
It was acquired by Levis, which mismanaged it into nonexistence. Last-ish factory in the US providing that assembly closed, plus the patent, and that was the end of that. IIRC.
Perhaps in China? Years back, if you needed a new wardrobe of suits, it was worth a trip to HK just for that.
Modern Tailor offers MtM clothing starting at like $50.
Perhaps this was a niche in which US apparel manufacturing might have remained viable, with customization and shipping proximity supporting the extra US costs. It seems regrettable that the possibility wasn't better explored.
Coincidentally, this is likely the highest margin department in the store.
Not never, they used to be awesomely utilitarian and rugged, but that's back in 60s-70s.
My dad still uses his all-steel construction Sears snowblower and had a Sears cast aluminum-housed 2-stroke chainsaw until seizing the motor with a bad mix of gas ~7 years ago :(. These were both from the 70s, fabulous tools, built to last.
> Craftsman hand tools were decent until the mid-2000's when they started changing warranty policies.
Yes, in my opinion when I started getting new Craftsman ratchets from Sears which appeared to be both refurbished and needed replacing just weeks after purchase, it was the beginning of the end. Prior to that, the writing was already on the wall when we couldn't easily get parts for the aforementioned snowblower and chainsaw from the service/parts department. It used to be a sure thing even in the 90s, 20 years after purchase!
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sears-lawsuit/sears-sues-...
Careful leaving too much cash or value creation lying around, the extractors will come seeking it, and take it if you aren't vigilant.
Sears lost that battle long ago. In an alternate dimension, a value creator is in charge of Sears decades ago, and there is a nice competition of Amazon, Walmart and Sears in that place, making pricing even better for consumers. In our current dimension, Sears management got too comfortable counting the beans.
Sears knew a major change was happening and did not become a top player in that change, it was inevitable.
Amazon will never get lazy like that, Amazon is a pure R&D machine.
I’m starting to see Walmart delivery trucks everywhere now so they must be doing something right.
For perspective:
Walmart makes ~58.7m an hour
Amazon / Macy’s / Best Buy / Sears / Target / Gap / Big Lots/ Kohl’s / J.C. Penney / Nordstrom / Dollar Tree / Barnes & Noble / Bed Bath & Beyond
... make ~57.3m/hr combined
At least Sears has been consistently crappy for the last 20 years.
Amazon sells you counterfeit goods comingled with whatever manufacturers drop-ship to their warehouse. It's a totally different model.
Personally I think there's still room for brick and mortar retailers with some expertise and services that are reliable. Not sure it will scale the same as non-cog people / expertise are involved but not everything has to.
Name one novel thing Amazon has done for those buying products over the last few years?
Amazon though makes most of their money from AWS, they found a way to reap ROI on R&D for their own supply/services chain. That is what really nailed it, this only came from an engineering focused research and development push that reinvested every dollar for a long time back into it, breaking all the rules of showing profits for a long time.
Walmart also is very good at supply chain and fulfillment. They have always been early to technology improvements there including pushing suppliers to EDIINT/AS2 and digital purchase orders and invoicing, up until 2003 everything in retail ordering was still really fax or e-mail orders. They were doing RFID in warehouses really early on. They got tons of improvements early on Target and other retailers moving on this early. Walmart Labs knows you have to reinvest in research and development.
Sears, without a competitor for a long time, and a lack of product/engineering driven leadership, got fat, happy and nappy, eventually was decades behind before they woke up.
Feels like most of their focus went to aws.
I really don't know what the plan was if it wasn't to just bleed it dry. Because, as you point out, if they're scared to take a big hit, then they'll just survive and never go after a market or a competitor. You want to sell shitty tool-shaped objects and hope no one notices, or how about you got after Snap-On with your new Professional line that's 30% less but just as good (Craftsman ain't the only one riding on reputation)? And, yeah, Sears actually sort of did that about 20 years ago. How about "fuck Viking, Sub-Zero and their shitty, overpriced appliances. We make better ones, and they cost less. 'cuz Kenmore is back, bitches."? Or something, I dunno. What I do know is that I don't need a fancy MBA to tell you the end result of gradually eroding quality and not maintaining your stores.
But, once it's run by somebody who could move on to somewhere else next and has no particular attachment to this particular CEO job, it can go downhill no matter how high the hilltop you're on.
We haven't seen what Facebook, Amazon, or Google look like when a non-founder is in charge, but we know Apple nearly got run into the ground after they kicked out the founder. They are doing better now, but I notice that it took the return of the founder to put them back on track.
When it's just about the money, and you can move on to another company to loot it later, the company has very little protection from its own CEO.
Also, iirc, everyone thought that the real estate alone could bail out the investment if everything else went to hell. I think that is still yet to be seen.
Plus the looting started before retail began to collapse.
https://soundcloud.com/grubstakers/episode-105-eddie-lampert...
Reminds me of Ramesh Balwani from Theranos.
Listen to the podcast - it's outrageous.
The entire goal of the Sears/KMart management is to siphon shareholder value and money from the parent company into shadow companies that the executive team owns, while saddling the main company with increasing debt and passing it through various stages of bankruptcy. At each stage the maangement will pilfer real estate and other main corporate assets from the main company.
Why this is tolerated, who knows.
Note: I can't read the WSJ article. I have subscriptions to NYT, FT, Bloomberg, and The Atlantic, but not WSJ.
Earlier this year I accepted the $0.99/week deal for The NY Times. I'll reconsider when it renews at the regular price next year.
AFAIK, my Bloomberg and Atlantic subscriptions are at the regular listed price.
Edit: Thanks for the responses everyone. I'll do a bit more reading on chapter 7 vs chapter 11, very interesting stuff.
If there is actually a viable business there, it makes sense to wipe out the shareholders, extinguish the debt, and make the former bondholders the new shareholders.
If there is no viable business even with the debt, then liquidation is the right path.
(I'm not a finance professional, just another person on the internet with an opinion.)
Some companies get into trouble with debt, are victims of economic winds or otherwise get into trouble. But the business is fundamentally still viable. So the company declares chapter 11 bankruptcy, is able to break out of unsustainable contracts, and the suppliers take a haircut.
Other companies are just done. So they declare chapter 7 bankruptcy, sell off anything of value, and pay out creditors based on the judge/bankruptcy trustees order.
It all comes down the the judge saying "hey banks, you will never get your money paid back, what option to get some of it back do you want us to take. Options are the company doesn't pay for a few months while they make some changes, and then continue paying off their loans, or the company is sold and the bank gets the proceeds of the sale - one common variation of the latter is the bank gets ownership of the company to run as they see fit. Again, the bank gets first say, though the company will make proposals, and the judge will force things.
Of course in the real world it isn't one bank, it is hundreds of banks and bond holders each who want their say, and there are contracts saying what say each party has. The judge is just there it get all of them into court and come up with an agreement that as many can accept as possible. Sometimes that means the judge says to one bank you want X, but everyone else wants Y so you lose. Bankruptcy is common enough that judges (and any bank) understands how to deal with it and the rules are common.
suppose sears goes bankrupt and the bank wants to sell off the assets of the company to recoup some of its loss. The name "sears" has a value and is something that can be sold.
nope. only thing bankruptcy guarantees is that creditors are prevented from getting your assets and have to negotiate to see if there is anything they can get
forces people to the table all at once to see what kind of possibilities there are
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/09/05/437628996/epis...
There are maybe more subtle areas of economics for which I don't fully agree with it's model of the world, but I still think it's a pretty good podcast for starting econ.
My sense is that yeah there's Amazon and all the other missed opportunities, but don't they also have some corporate raider type as CEO who's totally cashing in on running this chain into the ground?
IIRC he's kind of an extreme libertarian who actively pitted different parts of the company against each other, to compete.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-11/at-sears-...
> Lampert runs Sears like a hedge fund portfolio, with dozens of autonomous businesses competing for his attention and money. An outspoken advocate of free-market economics and fan of the novelist Ayn Rand, he created the model because he expected the invisible hand of the market to drive better results. If the company’s leaders were told to act selfishly, he argued, they would run their divisions in a rational manner, boosting overall performance.
> Instead, the divisions turned against each other—and Sears and Kmart, the overarching brands, suffered. Interviews with more than 40 former executives, many of whom sat at the highest levels of the company, paint a picture of a business that’s ravaged by infighting as its divisions battle over fewer resources.
> Under the new model, Lampert evaluated the different divisions—and calculated executives’ bonuses—using a metric called business operating profit, or BOP. As some employees had feared, individual business units started to focus solely on their own profitability and stopped caring about the welfare of the company as a whole. According to several former executives, the apparel division cut back on labor to save money, knowing that floor salesmen in other departments would inevitably pick up the slack. Turf wars sprang up over store displays. No one was willing to make sacrifices in pricing to boost store traffic.
Grocery stores sell milk as a loss because people look at the price of milk and buy from the cheapest - then buy the high margin cereal, candy (or whatever is high margin) that more than makes up for the loss in milk. This can still be short term thinking, and yet result in the whole doing well over the long term.
Short-term thinking is letting your stores fall apart to boost profits, ignoring the exponentially long-term costs of a lack of maintenance.
They were a European powerhouse who came to North America, launching in Canada first, and then in the US when they had used the Canadian launch to sort out doing business in North America.
The Canadian unit paid a big consulting firm to build an online banking app. Fine.
When they launched in the US, the Canadians didn't want the US unit to have the banking app. Why? Because management at Trappist Financial stack-ranked its business units against each other, so if you help another unit, your bonuses will suffer.
There was a protracted fight, and eventually the US unit got the source code in one big lump. However, the consultants that had built the app were forbidden to do any work for the US unit, thus the firm I worked for were parachuted in to take over.
Development diverged, with both Canada and the US adding new features, but the code forked and neither unit would share its additions with the other unit. So there was much duplication of features, and zero knowledge-sharing.
It's not for me to say whether this made La Trappe Financial more successful overall, but I can say that I witnessed a great deal of wasted engineering and lost opportunities that everyone attributed to the perverse incentives created when units compete with each other rather than collaborate.
I imagine that they only way they would have cooperated on a project like internet banking would be if someone was savvy enough to create the illusion that only by cooperating could they beat Germany, or A/NZ, or Japan, &c.
What a colossal waste.
Another example I can think of is Microsoft under Ballmer; they operated that way to a certain extent. It didn't work out too great for them either, but they were a monopoly of sorts, so they had the luxury of being able to operate that way without it killing them.
It’s just the nature of ideologues to think this way; you don’t become an ideologue by practicing pragmatism.
Now this all makes sense. I used to shop there and sometimes the entire floor was devoid of staff to help you except the one person ringing up at the counter. It became too depressing to shop there at some point.
I can't remember seeing anyone defend him much anywhere, and even though I don't think much of libertarianism and Rand these days, it would be interesting to read a defense by someone who was reasonably intelligent and had done some research beyond just listening to the stuff everyone repeats. I have a feeling that even though his management may have been destructive, the stories are greatly simplified and distorted to make good stories.
Institutional Investor tried to answer that question in http://institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1c33fqdnhf21s/Eddi.... Their take:
"… ESL hasn’t lost the entire $1.5 billion it invested in Sears and Kmart equity. Including the gains and losses on the major spin-offs, dividends, and interest income, it appears that loss was narrowed to about $624 million. Adding back the $2 billion in gains from hedge fund fees would give Lampert a net profit of approximately $1.38 billion. And that’s not even counting the uncertain value of his $2.6 billion in Sears debt, with its liens on Sears real estate, among other items."
Industry consensus is that no one would have chosen to make this investment if they knew what the next 10 years would look like, but given those abysmal results, he did far better than any other stakeholder.
[1] https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1c33fqdnhf21s...
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/discount-tire-lawsuit-c...
Wheel retailer Discount Tire claims a rebrand by Mavis Tire Supply LLC—labeling its stores Mavis Discount Tire—violates its trademark rights.
The company’s Dec. 26 lawsuit says Mavis started renaming stores after buying multiple chains located in the South and Midwest, where Discount Tire does business. Mavis intends to confuse customers and profit from goodwill built up in the Discount Tire trademark over decades, according to the complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Georgia.
Mavis previously used Mavis Discount Tire branding only in northeastern states with no competing Discount Tire stores, according to The Renialt-Thomas Corp., Discount Tire’s corporate name.
Looks like an interesting case!
https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Mavis-manager-Invoic...
"The alleged falsification of the records and the shop's purported failure to perform work on the 2001 Ford Excursion were part of a systemic practice at the auto service outlet as it tried to meet corporate sales quotas, according to court records."
Amazon changed the game fundamentally. The only two effective strategies are to challenge them directly (Wal-Mart and their logistics and their free 2 day shipping/no membership website competitor) or to effectively blend the store/online experience with a huge push towards mobile ordering and curbside pickup or gig-style personal shopping delivery.
I'm not sure why Sears thought they could half-ass this transition and kind of do nothing to compete in today's market. Last time I was in a Sears, it was eerie and quiet, it smelled old, the prices were NOT GREAT and I ultimately priced the tools I wanted on Amazon for a good discount. Not like the old Sears Craftsman name and warranty mean much anymore anyway.
Amazon has clearly opted to go with the value extraction model. They're the polar opposite of Costco. For me, Amazon's retail image is now of a vendor whose goal is to make a commission, while shifting all liability to other unknown vendors. I have no idea what I'm getting at Amazon.
On the other hand, at Costco, I know there's an organization that will stand behind the products it sells, even if they aren't the manufacturer, and they take care of their employees, so I feel more confident the employees are more invested into the products as well.
When Amazon opened up to third party sellers, the floodgates opened. For many products it feels like buying from Aliexpress but with faster shipping and higher prices.
Don't get their bananas, though, they go from green to brown, completely bypassing yellow. I'm pretty sure that they are getting too cold at some point in the supply chain.
The same goes for their avocados. I'm not sure what the problem is, but they're pretty lousy in my experience. Trader Joe's seems to have the best deal on these that I've found, and they seem to last a long time too.
All your 'cheap' tools come from Harbor Freight
And the high-end is still Snap-on, MAC, SK, those kind of companies
So where does Sears fit in?
And once you lose your reputation, it's impossible to get it back.
I still prefer to buy Milwaukee for my power tools, at least for anything cordless - lack of battery standardization and interoperability sucks, so once you start buying into one brand, you kind of want to stick with it, and the M18 line is solid.
HF's power tools, on the other hand, I'm not so sure about, but they do look like they've gotten better over the years.
Sears in particular really didn't know what it wanted to be. It did clothes (including buying Lands' End). It did tools, It did appliances. But it wasn't a discounter like Walmart. (Which drove a lot of regional discounters out of business.)
In short, it didn't have a strategy and tried to focus on everything.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-sears-lost-the-american-sho...
Outline here because I think it's semi-paywalled. The first time I got to it, it was fine (maybe because I googled it): https://outline.com/84tyGU
...And in other news, water is wet.
[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/business/the-incredible-s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma
;-)
You are correct, a specific dive into what went wrong at Sears and why they aren't Amazon today would be incredibly valuable.
But re-reading "The Innovator's Dilemma" sheds some light as to why they not only didn't, but really couldn't catch the Internet wave.
Incumbents need to recognize when a disruptive, extinction event is looming, and everything in their culture works against that. Typically, when one of these things comes along, sales are robust, the incumbents have cemented the value of their brands, and their margins are industry-leading.
It's very difficult for incumbents to even see the disruption as a threat, much less to pivot, embrace the disruption, and disrupt themselves.
When you're running a successful business, it is nearly impossible to decide to go all-in on a new business that will cannibalize your existing business at lower margins. If you're a public company, your stock will head right down into the sewer to be gnawed upon by short-selling Norwegian Rats.
It's like when people say the moon landings were faked because the Van Allen belts would have killed the astronauts. Well, how do we know the radiation isn't lethal? Obviously because people went through to land on the moon!
Toys R Us seems to have met a similar fate of acquiring massive debt (in its case via a leveraged buyout rather than a merger) and then having all of the money sucked out, but I still hope it might return somehow.
I'm not sure if PE exasperated the situation, slowed the bleeding, or caused it to sink, but I doubt that Toys R Us 2005 was ready to face Amazon in the coming years if it was struggling with Walmart and Target.
Last May they rebranded with a new logo, that looks like a cross between AirBNB's logo and a natural gas flame. It looks like something they got from Fiver or a stock image site. They're throwing away decades of brand equity for this?
I hadn't been in a Sears in a long time, but when I saw the new logo it made me go look at their site to see what they were up to. What I found was a website chock full of big promotions, but also chock full of complicated fine print. For example:
The offer: $60 in CASHBACK points when you spend $60
The fine print: Offer valid 5/5/19–5/18/19. Members get $60 CASHBACK in points in 6 weekly installments when you spend $60 or more on qualifying purchases at select Sears stores and items sold by Sears on sears.com. First $10 in points issued within 48 hours and are valid for 7 days. Subsequent payments of $10 in points issued every Sunday starting 5/26/19. Offer valid 5/5/19–5/18/19. Maximum $60 CASHBACK in points per member.
So their website was plastered with $60 "cash back" offers, but they don't give you cash back, they give you "points" worth $10 in weekly installments that are only good for one week, so to get your $60 you have to come back and buy at least $10 worth of stuff for 6 weeks in a row!
Also, almost everything worth buying is on the exemption list. This is the exemption list just for Bedding (there were a lot more!):
Excludes Lands’ End, select mattresses (Chiswick, Chelsfield, Camberwell, Cavell, East Channel, Harlington, Harrowby, Isleworth, Kenney, Romford, Beautyrest Black, Sealy Conform Performance [High Spirits, Fondness and Thrilled], Sealy Conform Premium [Gratifying and Wondrous], Stearns & Foster, Serta iComfort, Serta iComfort Memory Foam, Serta iComfort Hybrid, Sealy Hybrid, Simmons Beautysleep, Tempur-Pedic, Tempur-Flex), Protect-A-Bed, SleepTracker, Mantua bed frames, adjustable bases (Beautyrest Smart Motions, Sealy Ease, Serta Motion [Essential, Custom and Perfect], and Tempur-Pedic [Tempur-Up, Tempur-Ergo Plus and Tempur-Premier]), Serta iComfort pillows, Tempur-Pedic Tempur pillows, Stearns & Foster Premium pillows, Sealy Premium pillows, Serta Premium pillows, Beautyrest Premium pillows. Items must be sold by Sears. Purchase requirement before taxes and after other discounts and must be made in a single transaction. By accepting Shop Your Way® member benefits and offers, you agree to the Shop Your Way terms and conditions, available at www.shopyourway.com/terms. Members earn points on qualifying purchases, excluding sales taxes and other fees. Extra points are inclusive of, and not in addition to, any base points earned on qualifying purchases. When extra point offers are combined, total points earned will be less than the combined point totals for each individual offer.
I found this astonishing! I've never seen such a complicated promotional offer before, and it really feels like a big "fuck you" to anyone who would bother to shop at their stores. Nobody wants to do business with a shop that's trying to bait and switch them with deceptive "deals".
No wonder they're having trouble turning things around...
You'd be surprised; there's always a bunch of suckers out there. And some businesses are able to get away with a big "FU" to customers: just look at Apple and their AirPods (see articles about terrible battery life, inability to replace battery, high price, etc.). But Sears isn't Apple, and there's only so many suckers left willing to shop there, and they're all probably elderly.