Now where will I buy my Craftsman tool? The end is near for Sears.

Let it die

Sears no longer selling Whirlpool?!?

Well, a good many Kenmores are made by Whirlpool, so it's not quite the end of times.

Sears to close 63 more stores after Xmas. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-s...tores-after-holiday-season-idUSKBN1D32HA?il=0

Good. I worked for a Sears years ago, and the sales model was just ridiculous. I worked in the electronics department on commission. The commission rates were so low, that there was a borrowing program made available, where if you made less than $25 a week, they would front you $150, and you'd pay it back over the next 3 weeks. My specialty was selling computers. I remember, one week, selling $30,000 in computers. It was right up on Christmas, so people were looking for presents. This was back when desktop computers were still the big thing (around 2001/2002). Anyway, $30,000 in sales in one week. My commission for that week? $98.

Now, TVs made more money, and phones (regular landline phones) made money, but we had one sales associate who never missed grabbing a TV customer, and the phones were only $30-$40, so the commission was, maybe, $1-2 per phone. There was just no money in the place for any of us. They made bank off of their employees. In comparison, I sold the fuck out of merchandise at Walmart, and would average about $175-210 a week because it was based on hourly wages. When Walmart's kicking your ass in take-home pay, you're a shit company.

I worked at Sears Auto Center in the 70s (Southpark Charlotte, one of their flagship stores). I was part-time but made a reasonable base plus 6% commission. Roadhandlers and DieHards weren't cheap. It was a good gig. At the time, lifelong employees had great profit sharing plan balances and pensions.

Going back in the 80s it was obvious they'd adopted the k-mart model of cashier stations and temporary employees. No one knew what they were selling (appliances and electronics may have been an exception).

http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/04/news/companies/sears-kmart-stores-closing/index.html

A new round of store closures right on the heels of the last round. 103 more stores get the axe.

The end is nigh.

Yeah. Sears is another dead-man walking.

Just think......

When Sears started offering the catalog way back in the mid-1890's it quickly became a hated company. It was the Amazon/Walmart of it's time. Back than if you needed supplies and you were out in the country you had almost no choice but to go to a local general store that offered a narrow selection and high prices. And any credit you had was at the whims of the owner as well.

Sears bypassed all of that with it's catalog. A wider selection of goods, clearly marked prices, and often less expensive than the locals. Really pissed off the local businesses.

A lot of them refused to carry the catalog. Sears offered free rural delivery and an iron-clad money back guarantee. Some of the local businesses put pressure on local newspapers to not carry advertising for the company. Sears response? Start advertising in new popular magazines that were delivered by mail.

And Sears sold a lot of stuff besides equipment for farms. Clothing, sewing machines, toys, typewriters, cars, stoves, bicycles, sporting goods, tools, food, even houses (from 1908 to 1940) where just some of the things it sold. You would buy the house and they would ship it to you and you would build it!

In 1933 they introduced the Wish Book for Christmas. Nothing but toys. I remember as a kid in the 70's and early 80's going through it.

Than they opened the stores and their business just exploded. They were the country's largest retailer until the early 1990's when Wal-Mart took the title.

Here's some links on the houses. It's really cool because they weren't just selling one room shacks. They were selling everything you needed to build a real multi-bedroom multi-story house.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Catalog_Home

This is a Sears House:



(The floor plan is at the wiki link. File too big to put here)

http://www.antiquehome.org/House-Plans/1935-Sears/

http://www.antiquehome.org/House-Plans/1916-Sears/

http://www.antiquehome.org/House-Plans/1928-Sears/

This site also has other homes from other companies.

I remember the Sears Wishbook!

Sears also sold cars and scooters! This article says that they sold Lincolns rebadged as Sears Motor Buggy from 1908-1912, but I've seen examples from that time with the Allstate badge. They also sold rebadged Henry J's as Allstates in the early '50s. The scooters were rebadged Cushmans and Piaggios.

Allstate, now an insurance company but originally part of Sears, even sold its own brand of cars back in the 1950's. True, it was a rebranded Kaiser but it was the absolute cheapest new car you could buy in 1950-1955 in the US. None of the Kaiser-Fraser line was glamorous but they were functional, cheap, and reliable with a good warrenty from Sears. They were struggling to establish their brand and build sales volume so they struck a deal with Sears to sell the car under the Allstate brand name in Sears stores and through the Sears catalog.

Amazon goes brick and mortar.

I thought Amazon already had real books stores but this is more like a supermarket/department store?

Sears likely to file chapter 11 this year and stock closes at just over $3. https://www.thestreet.com/story/14450394/1/sears-could-bankrupt-in-2018.html

Sears is going the way of the dodo!

I can remember a high school friend who got his first job at the Sears at the UTC Mall. That Sears closed a year or two ago and still sits empty. I suspect Westerfield is trying to get approval to tear it down and build something else.

UTC seems to be getting more upscale. I think Macy's and the new Norstroms are the only two major department stores there. That's two more than Horton Plaza has.

http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/12/news/companies/sears-downfall/index.html

Even CNN thinks Sears is toast.

Horton Plaza is a ghost town. When it opened in the early 1980's it was a world wide example of urban renewal with urban planners from all over the world coming to see it and vowing to learn from it so they could build similar examples back in their home countries. Now? All the big boxes are gone and the holding company is charging for parking so no one wants to go there. Why pay for parking when every other mall has free parking? Or better yet just buy online and skip the crowds all together.

Well, Chipotle doesn't appear to be long for this world. They just hired the CEO of Taco Bell. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/13/chipotle-picks-taco-bell-ceo-to-be-its-new-chief-dow-jones.html

It has literally been years since I went to a Chipotle yet I eat Mexican several times a week. I will confess that Del Taco has really upped their game, it is still not authentic or high quality but with their new $0.59-$0.79-$0.99 menu they have decent offerings below even the magic $1 value menu price. Their "Zesty Chicken soft tacos" are actually half way decent and a great bargain at $0.79 each.

As far as fast food Tex-Mex goes, I'm partial to Taco John's.

Never was the biggest fan of the authentic stuff, I hate it when my food touches.

They're going to be closing 200 stores. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/02/...-stores.html?referer=https://news.google.com/

Now where will I buy my gameboy cartridges?

Saddest part is they actually turned around and were running operating profits for the first time in ages.

However the leveraged buyout used to purchase them saddled them with too much debt.

Toys R Us is to become We B Gone. https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/...n-of-u-s-operations?__twitter_impression=true

We B Gone

Not just Sears. Toys R Us is on death's door too. I wonder how much time Best Buy has left?