Sears closed.

[Skinny rooster]

:sad:

It makes me feel a little sad (and outdated) to see Sears has closed their doors yesterday and are out of business for good. My family shopped there for years, in fact it was really depressing while I was Christmas shopping to see it being picked over like a carcass. Sears was very convenient for Christmas shopping, you could get something for almost everyone. However they stuck with their bad marketing until the very end, the sales were not that good at Christmas and I didn't want to buy a sweater for $60 if I had no way of returning it should something be wrong with it. Only yesterday they were doing a %95 off and people were wondering why no one was in the store, I think no one knew. To be honest I had stopped shopping there for the most part in the last couple of years, the experience was not that good and I could never get anything in my size, still one good thing was that you could order in what you wanted if you were willing to wait. The sign of the times, everyone wants to order on line or shop at a store that charges triple the price for things, which is now some prestigious badge of honour to say you shop there. I'm starting to feel like some old geezer, "I remember when I was a kid and we shopped at Eatons, Kmart, Sears and Sam The Record man and we had to walk uphill both ways during a snow storm to get there"!

[WLLady]

i found an old gift certificate for 20$ for sears the other day. but apparently during the close out they wouldn't accept it.....haven't shopped there in years. but remember it being a great store many years ago....and looking through the sears catalogue in preparation for christmas!!!! end of an era.

[windwalkingwolf]

When I was a kid, ordering from Sears and picking the stuff up at the tiny outlet in Kemptville, was the only way to get household goods or toys without a heavily planned and expensive road trip to Ottawa. --my father worked sometimes 7 days a week, and my mother didn't drive. Kemptville was a one-horse town at the time, and the Co-Op feed store was the largest store in town lol.
Poring over catalogues was always fun, and it was a special treat to go through the Christmas Wish Book every year, circling all the junk we wished we had, while Mom grumbled about how she used to use catalog pages to wipe her butt

[baronrenfrew]

The truth about Sears: they were ahead of the game with a good name, a catalog business, and a good distribution chain. They were very profitable and stood to dominate as a "middle" store between wal-mart and the expensive boutiques. So they were bought out by a hedge fund (vultures) in 2001 and milked the company of all cash refusing to spend money on upgrading and launching (or buying out) a web business. The CEO's hands were tied and several were hired and later quit: nobody wants to go down with a sinking ship.

Case in point: they had even launched "stand alone" Craftsman tool stores and they did well but the hedge guys milked it until the business died.

"But, whatever competitive pressures Sears Canada faced along with other big retailers, its controlling shareholders almost certainly made the company’s demise more likely with their decision to pay out more than $2.7 billion in dividends since 2005 to themselves and other shareholders.

Sears Canada might well have survived if some of the $2.7 billion paid out in dividends had been redirected into updating and redesigning its more than 130 stores to attract a new generation of shoppers."

From: https://www.thestar.com/amp/opinion/com ... quaig.html



Three cheers for Wall Street and their short term thinking!

[kenya]

Yes I too remember going through the wish book at Christmas. It's too bad the big corporation's can't see beyond lining their pockets.

[Jaye]

Thanks for posting that, @baronrenfrew . Many people have been lead to believe that the demise of Sears was due to mismanagement and/or poor marketing or not making an effort to keep with the times, and that is not the case: it's not that they wouldn't: they no longer could. They didn't have the financial means because of a greedy self serving few.

[baronrenfrew]

yep, the business world is full of companies that changed their business and survived or turned things around or reinvented themselves to stay relevant: McDonald's, IBM, Apple, Nintendo, Ford, GM, Blackberry-RIM (now the dominant player at in-car tech), Victorinox (Swiss army knives were sold mostly at gift shops at airports, Sept 11 almost sunk them), Tim Horton's (no more smoky donuts), Disney Animation etc.

And its littered with the bodies that didn't: Eatons, Kodak (once had 50,000 employees!), K-Mart, Zellers, Saab, Corel (Wordperfect), name a newspaper, Country Style or Coffee Time or Bakers Dozen, Quizno's Subs, lots of airlines and travel agencies, Blockbuster, Nortel, Confederation Life Insurance (once as big as London Life - Freedom 55), etc.

(Edited on Thursday- I had Confed life on the wrong list)

The bottom line: people that didn't understand retail bought the business, then they hired a CEO with no retail experience and tied his hands and said "go get them".

[baronrenfrew]

How much did each franchisee lose? $300,000?

[Skinny rooster]

Ok thanks Baron, that makes more sense. I couldn't understand why they couldn't make a go of it, especially since Sears has been doing ordering for years, this should have played right into their hands. Seems like the same frustrating story over and over again. Same with the company I used to work for, when the engineers who understood the business ran it, things went great, when the CEOs, VPs, EVPs, Etc etc stepped in, it began to mimic the titanic.

[muffin57]

Today is the final day here for our Sears Store in Thunder Bay, Ontario. So sad, for everyone employees and customers.