"amazing that the company that pretty much invented "online sales" couldn't transition to the real thing"
That's a comment somebody left on a Sears article and it really hit home. Even if we disregard the history of catalog shopping (we used to mail people houses, for crying out loud!) we had one of the first online platforms available EVER and we managed to squander that advantage monumentally. And for once, we can't blame that on Eddie.
I get the nostalgic pangs for Sears stores. And the Boomer notion that companies should care about their people and customers. However, it really was all about the real estate.
Searstowns snd Sears Shoppingtowne malls reinvented retail as the world knows it, The malls were also set up as MASSIVE tax shelters that were designed to fail at one point or another.
Sears was the first company to build malls and charge the tenants not only a flat fee per month, also a percentage of the profit a store makes after taxes and expenses. Sears did not keep innovating and the reason was simply that the retail arm of the business was designed to fail and the hope and belief was that the company would live on being the landlord for the grandiose properties they built.
Two major problems with this idea though, the cost of maintaining behemoth sized and highly ornate properties is astronomical, and the opportunity to take the money and run while hiding under various tax shelters for the squalor their disrepair causes is far too tempting. Eddie Lampert smelled blood in the water, game over.
$60B a year revenue is demonstration enough that it wasn't about the real estate, it was about the customers. People are the single biggest asset at any company, not only the institutional knowledge but the profit premium that comes from having a well known reputable brand and repeat business. It's residual free money. Only Eddie and people mo--nic enough to believe him would think that the real estate was the primary value to be found in Sears. Where others invest in customer retention and experience to reap massive return, good old Eddie actively drove them away, because Sears "has all the customers it could possibly want". The guy thought that because he got lucky in a couple of pump and dump scams by going scorched earth on investment and costs, that he was competent in anything really.
When Eddie bought Sears Amazon sold books and Target didn't even have an online presence. I believe the biggest online vendor was Walmart of all companies. It's not talked about enough, but Eddie Scott Lampert was in no small part a ringleader behind the decline of malls. When an anchor doesn't get updated for decades, everything in that wing dies. A malls became B malls, Bs became Cs, and Cs became abandoned primarily because of Eddie Lampert in numerous instances. The failure to invest and simply maintain marketability absolutely destroyed the real estate value for both Sears and the Seritage properties over time.
Horrible take. Modern, post-1949 Sears was always about the real estate. Then in the 70s, Sears decided to pursue the financialization. The stores then became primarily loss leaders for the credit side. After everything was sold & spun off, the fat pile of cash attracted Lampert. The rest is pretty easy to understand.
"All the while making massive investments in... " There's the hurdle Sears was not willing to overcome. In order to take advantage of any opportunity, Sears would have had to make massive investments in...something. New brick and mortar stores to compete with the big box hardware stores, such as Lowes and Home Depot. New and better distribution systems to compete with Walmart. Badly needed maintenance and improvements to existing stores. How about investment in employees so they could keep a trained and professional sales staff? Instead, for many decades now, the answer was always "cut costs" and hope the buying public wouldn't notice the better and more convenient choices available to them.
Unfortunately for Sears, Lampert came in with the exactly the wrong mentality for this company to have any chance. All he ever cared about was extracting a "return" for himself. Actually investing money to get the return wasn't part of the program. He didn't start the downfall of the company, but he sure brought it to a faster close.
There is such a thing as being too soon.
When Sears "Invented" online sales, the market of available households was relatively miniscule and brick-and-mortar was still king.
In order to succeed, Sears would have needed to stick it out for at least another decade all the while making massive investments in technology infrastructure to compete with venture capital funded upstarts.
Looking back, it would have been the smart and correct thing to do, and Sears made the wrong choice by exiting when they did. But I don't know if the institutional and individual investors would have been patient enough for it to work.
Have you tried to order anything from sears or kmart.com?
It's impossible, half the stuff when you get to the checkout is out of stock which they are kind enough to alert you AFTER you get to checkout, they don't offer free shipping on things from kmart so you pay more in shipping then the value of the item.
Half the stuff can't even be shipped and if there is no local store you can't get it.
What a nightmare experience shopping is supposed to be fun and I just wanted to use the points i had that were expiring and couldn't find anything of value.
True