Thread regarding Sears layoffs

Any update on this?

Isn't sears.com just a front page for eBay now? Transform can close all stores and hire one person on Mechnical Turk to maintain the site. This way Eddie can put a feather in his cap and claim the transformation into a profitable business is done. Speaking of which the domain admin email isn't working anymore. Will anyone be around to renew sears.com next year?

The place continues to defy expectations but the detritus can last for so long. We can count the enduring but inexorably shrinking business units. Sears.com, kmart.com remain; people still get email promotions. Home services and SYW exist to some extent apparently; garage door ads still run on TV. There have been no reports if the Brands business has any viability; an effectively defunct Kenmore brand still exists. An unknown number of properties may continue to generate lease or property management revenues, or might still be sold. Brick and mortar is gone--Covid was the blow from which it could not recover. Hoffman was alleged to be sold to some unknown party; there has been no published proof of this; pending such proof we should assume they still own this place. With tax abatements long gone, if the company still owns the complex, this place has to be sucking dry the last of the vestiges of "unlocking the value." Besides Illinois property taxes, utilities, maintenance and security costs must continue lest the place begin to leak, grow mold, or attract thieves. The vapors in the gas tank have lasted longer than anyone imagined, but the tank will run dry at some point.

@gwy. Don't hold your breath on Burbank.

And yet, they plan to reopen Burbank and Union Gap?

@rjc,@alv - WOW!!
Agree

You sound like ‘insiders’

A decaying corpse for sure. For more evidence, take a look at the Transformco website. The company no longer has a spokesperson. The last press release was over a year ago, for a store closing. The last blog entry was in 2021 by the CEO of Home Services, who quit last year.

Leena Munjal, the "Co-CEO" left and went to work for St Jude's Hospital.

They just finished up closing all the Hometown stores. The infrastructure to support any kind of retail business, online or otherwise, has been almost entirely dismantled.

There isn't much interest in the remaining store properties, which leaves Eddie without a source of asset sales to sustain this dying wreck of a company. Eddie is personally selling off assets, such as his mansion in Aspen, and the yacht.

Eddie could re-market himself as a one-man company wrecking ball. Sears was a profitable company before he got hold of it and "transformed" it into a pile of rubble.

The company has looked, felt, and smelled like a decaying corpse for years.

It took a smart guy like Berkowitz a decade to figure out that accumulating NOLs isn't a sustainable business. Lampert acts like it's the ultimate goal. There's a magical thinking blind spot where the Smartest Guys in the Room believe cash keeps flowing if you don't invest and keep cutting costs. Amazon was a bookseller that partnered with Target to sell other things when Lampert took over. Sears was ki-ling it with door delivery before these companies even existed, and Costco bought Innovel to get in the game. They invested heavily in the future while Sears used funds to buy stock in Sears naturally leaving it short of cash and forced to take loans from Lampert culminating in the credit bid where he was the only realistic buyer. He cleverly plotted to take over a NOL generating machine whose underlying value he decimated himself and patted himself on the back for his genius every step along the way. So it was with Sears, so it is with Transform.

Shop Your Way and branded credit cards were seen a profitable substitute for infrastructure investment while going out of the way to destroy vendor relationships, and ignoring things like inventory turnover, profit per square foot, and especially retention and the customer experience. Real Estate is only valuable because of what people do with it. Brands are valuable because what they represent. Lampert hired a lot of smart guys who knew better but had to adhere to id--t directives and deliberately created infighting fom above.