Goodbye Sears, you will not be missed.

Sears, once a retail giant and American institution, is rapidly going out of business. I felt kinda bad...until I attempted to buy a mattress from them. The sales price posted on the mattress was not actually available in any way. The salesperson assured me it was the real price, no gimmicks, no special considerations, and then rang me up for $500 more. I held the sign in my hand, confirmed it was not a misprint and that he just confirmed that it was the real price...but he just smiled and shrugged his shoulders and offered a possible $100 discount. He had some story about boxsprings, but the bottom line was that Sears could not and would not sell me a bed for the posted price.

So I tried to buy it online. I could get the sale price, complete with whatever boxspring I wanted, and even an offer to use Sears credit for zero financing. So I apply, get the credit and return to the site...but there was no way to use my new credit to make a purchase. You have to wait 7-10 days for the actual card, at which time, the sale is over. So what was the point in that? I call and try to get someone interested in making the sale and taking my money, but only succeed in canceling the card and walking away from the mattress that I wanted and was buying from Sears because you can't try out a mattress online.

The one advantage that Sears has, they don't capitalize on. No wonder they are going under.

I got some awesome deals on tools there recently, like ratcheting wrenches with lifetime warranty for $2 each, so I will miss that for sure. Unfortunately the warranty might not mean much when they go under...

every Sears will eventually be turned into a K Mart... you watch..

Went to look at appliances. Utter crap that they couldn't actually sell you on the floor. What they had was beat to E36 M3, no ability to order. Even the guy there said buy elsewhere we're uncompetitive.

novaderrik wrote: every Sears will eventually be turned into a K Mart... you watch..

Yet the nearest Kmart to me is going out of business.

Who goes into a Sears, other than to use the bathroom at the mall?

Kmarts getting buried. Sears, once an american mainstay, is shopped almost exclusively by immigrants. My dad has been a Kmart employee for something like 25 years as a warehouses manager, and I still don't shop there.

moparman76_69 wrote:

novaderrik wrote: every Sears will eventually be turned into a K Mart... you watch..

Yet the nearest Kmart to me is going out of business.

Yep they are or already have gone out of business in my area.

I don't even buy tools there anymore. About the only reason I'd go back at this point would be to replace any of the Craftsman stuff I already have if it breaks.

I heard years ago that the only reason Sears had a storefront is to sell you items on credit. They made most of their money through Sears credit cards. Since it was a captured audience, they could charge whatever they wanted to.

Not sure if it was/is true, but explains why things are always more expensive at Sears, yet they stay in business.

-Rob

I worked at a sears that was formerly a kmart, and they have most recently changed it back to Kmart. One of the worst places that I have worked for, no surprise that are going under. People would bring their tools for exchange and they would be sent to the back, repaired with Chinese parts and put back on the shelf.

I read somewhere that K-mart (and Sears) in trying to compete with WalMart and similar companies have started adopting their policies, including how they treat their employees, how they outfit the stores, etc.

ThunderCougarFalconGoat wrote: Who goes into a Sears, other than to use the bathroom at the mall?

Hey now, they sell Carhart & Levis cheaper than anyone around here. I mean... until I got Amazon Prime. Bye-bye Sears.

I have been a serious student of business for a while and Sears is going away. At least it will be gone as a retail store. Their business efforts have been focused more on real estate and financing for a long time. Recently Sears lost its insurability of payments to its suppliers. This means cash up front or they don't get product. Also the CEO has been making questionable deals with Sears. Last one I heard was a loan for 400 million from him personally backed with 500 million in Sears real estate as collateral.

Craftsman tools are now made in China, bet they change their warranty before February 2015. I see a strong earnings projection before Black Friday and Cyber Monday with a quiet time for the rest of the year then an announcement of catastrophic actual earnings early next year. Stock tanks, liquidation to cover debts, store closures and then the name Sears fades into obscurity like Otasco, Woolworths or Wards. Some of their other holdings will remain such as Land's End, Penske, but Kenmore, Craftsman and Diehard are already separate companies.

Bruce

http://www.amazon.com/Sleep-Innovations-SureTemp-Mattress-Warranty/dp/B003CT37L0/ref=sr_1_3?s=furniture&ie=UTF8&qid=1413919307&sr=1-3&keywords=mattress

Yeah, Rob, their credit card, like Dillards, is the prime source of income. 25% interest versus losing money on the crap they sell.

True K-Mart story: My friend worked for K-Mart as an industrial engineer. He was to fix their DC's. At the time, the DC's were full of goods and the stores were empty. So, at the DC, he sees an entire wall of goods on shelves. "What's that?" "Oh, that stuff that didn't fit on the trailer." "Does it go out on the next trailer?" "No, it just sits there." Now, they have this trailer packing figured out. So much stuff will fit in a trailer, no more, no less. So why didn't that stuff fit? He looks and there's a trailer ready to go to a store. He opened it up and there was a wall to the ceiling of boxes. He took the top box row off and the next layer of boxes was one shorter. Took that top row down and the next layer was one less. They had loaded the trailer like a sine wave and put all the stuff "that didn't fit" on the side wall.

The local Sears went belly up. It's being replaced by a Belk, sorta a semi local chain. The kicker there is that move involves the closing of a Belk a little further up the road as a consolidation move, thus turning another local mall into a ghost town. The K Mart around the corner closed too. Wal Mart has killed that whole category, there's just not enough bricks and mortar retail sales to go around any more.

Worked for sears a few years back in appliances. There are a large number of reasons they are tanking, most of them being that they have not been keeping up with the times at all. The amount they focused on pushing credit and "service agreements" were a strong indicator. They became less and less product oriented and more and more peripheral profit driven as time went on. Plus the rapid changing nature of their prices, we literally changed prices on most items on an almost weekly basis, which gives consumers little confidence in their purchase whatsoever. You never know if todays "Sale Price" will be better than tomorrows "Sale Price", god forbid you ever pay the wholly uncompetitive base non-sale price for anything there. Its almost too much effort to track when you will be able to get the best price on anything in the store. Consumers get frustrated and go somewhere else with more stable and competitive pricing.

I do not miss "Friends and Family" shopping days, or working there on black friday AT ALL.

Ahhh...the good ol' days when you could buy a car from the Sears and Roebuck catalog. I used to have one from around 1915 or so.

Funny that the credit card business supposedly is where their money is at. Years ago when trying establish my credit, I went to apply for a sears card. They said since I had no credit history they could not issue me a card, not even a prepaid one. Now, if I had bad credit, they said that would be no problem. I have not set foot in a Sears since. G'bye Sears, you won't be missed here either.

Klayfish wrote: Ahhh...the good ol' days when you could buy a car from the Sears and Roebuck catalog. I used to have one from around 1915 or so.

That Sears catalog was what Amazon is now.

Sears used to sell houses. I've been in one. OOG's dad's. It was pretty interesting. They delivered them to the rail head and it was all precut with directions: put board A on board B...

On another note, I exchanged my busted Craftsman 3/8 ratchet for a new one, no questions asked. Yay?

Dr. Hess wrote: Sears used to sell houses. I've been in one. OOG's dad's. It was pretty interesting. They delivered them to the rail head and it was all precut with directions: put board A on board B...

One of the nicer restored homes Locally is a Sears catalog home. It's been refit to offices but was really nice when I was inside. I'm told you can still see some of the stamp labels on the boards in the attic and basement.

Tom_Spangler wrote: I don't even buy tools there anymore. About the only reason I'd go back at this point would be to replace any of the Craftsman stuff I already have if it breaks.

And you can get Craftsman tools at Ace Hardware stores now, FWIW. (Said "WIW" used to be a bit more before they focused a bit too much on cost cutting on the tools.)