Thread regarding Sears layoffs

@7jcn

I am sorry I don't come here often. Tech at Sears was great in patches; poor in others but mostly stable. Nothing great.

The way I saw it- too many cIOs came in and left AND the new ones got their own teams and strategies. Hitting the reset button far too often.

Not sure whether their departures were on their own.

The final straw for me was one guy who talked about writing code by himself. I understood his intent but

Hello..Mr cIO...we will do that for you..you have a LOT to worry about.

And I think not investing in the system consolidation across Kmart and Sears was something that hit us frequently esp in inventory.

But, still hope Sears survives in some form. Would be sad to see it go away.

@7wnj

Interesting.

How do you grade the it at SHC? Eddie always talks as if its a focus, at least customer facing digital is a focus..

@ 7yqf

About Metscale..the comment was more about competition. It's not like the big tech setups would not have been able to execute such programs.

It just helps if the goals and plans to get there are clearer and not sure if Metascale had them.

7rfy

Thank you, so was metascale just not a good idea? It seemed very promising..

“Mind you, we have so many companies with clear cut paths to sales with solid back end”

Do you mkmd clarifying that quote a little, this sounds intriguing

7rfy was about Metscale

@ 2oi

We shutdown the programs internally. Then metascale was to be sold. Problem was finding a buyer for a concept which is not clearly cut. Was it tech services, consulting or product driven?

Mind you, we have so many companies with clear cut paths to sales with solid back end teams.

Some of the metascale are clearly doing well for themselves after Sears.

If they hope to have SYW ever have value by itself, the points need to have useful value outside Sears/Kmart. But despite all the advertising partners it's landed, not one has agreed to accept SYW points as payment for what's advertised, yet. But also note the recent demise of the Plenti program, which had its (very low value) points portable across multiple retailers, so that doesn't guarantee much.

Hey Dsu,

Thanks for your rational comment. Any idea what happened to metascale?

TIA

Regarding the data crunching, I believe it because of how the store metrics are sliced and diced. I wonder how the zillion fake accounts factor in though? So many fraudulent accounts. Double dipping, false accounts created by employees, you name it.

It's a good question since you can only buy Sears/Kmart products with your points. I guess they could become like fingerhut or Montgomery Ward online or Figis with those over priced bedding sets that they try to get the extremely poor to purchase with 30% interest.

As a former Sears tech guy, I can tell you it is a data crunching beast. But, I doubt it is a product which can be plugged onto other systems with minimal effort. And then there are real products as competition.

Go figure.

very little money will buy it all. It is a nothing burger in the it's space it competes

@mgs Leena is a fake and people she hired to run her pet projects are just as ineffectual. People who has no retail experiences and shallow IT and no logistics background were put into running a very complex retail behemoth. Two retail behemoths as a matter of fact. That hedge fund guy is also ineffectual.

@klx I doubt that it will have any value since they already partnered with many marketing vendors. Those people already mined sears customers data to their heart content and not going to see any additional value in it. If they did, Sears will not be in this predicament.

The big nose, pe--sIndian woman will take it for herself.

That wouldn't even be allowed. It will get sold to the highest bidder. Maybe someone will want to bid on it as a whole and continue operation, but without Sears there's just a smattering of participants like a 100 other online rewards companies who are the likely bidders for the assets.

LOL

It will continue as a viable and profitable entity. Read their financials.

SYW is not technically part of SHC. If you read the financials it is its own company. As a matter of fact, every time someone signs up for SYW, SHC pays SYW a fee to be a parner. That is why if you look on the SYW website the partners of SYW are JCP, Target, many restaurants, and many other retailers. You can actually get more SYW points from Target than you can from Sears or Kmart sometimes.

SYW will survive and be just another rewards program like ebates and others

The data is definitely worth something. not enough to save Sears by any means, but the data itself is actually worth more than any of us would ever make. Millions get paid for customers lists, companies get bought out for data, data scientist are in high demand because they can make sense of it all.

To the right company a purchase of the SYW data, and overall the purchasing data of its customers, can be parted off and resold for huge amounts.

Targeted interactions and AI are huge in marketing, and even at more basic levels just understanding what to stock in locations. Tires for example, is a crazy market. You need to know what cars are in your area, and what the sizing is on them.... and then if the area typically buys more of a premium brand of tires for their car. Some areas have more trucks, but what options of tires do they usually have.

Having the right products in stock is so much more important than it used to be, people no longer wait in this world of Prime expectations. Even Etsy was having issues trying to meet the demands of having things shipped in 2 days, for customized and often unique items, simply because of the expectations of the modern consumer.

Sears sells the same stuff other companies do, only at much lower volumes. The data is not unique, and it's not valuable. I doubt the data is worth anything at all.

The data and patents go to the highest bidders. People probably have a few days to use points, if any.

It gets sold for all the data collection for a couple of million