And if they will get out of clothing all together?
Any thoughts
11 replies (most recent on top)
@1ygl you are so right !! Theybuyers are awful our clothing is so boring
What I never understood when we sold men’s Docker pants, why didn’t we carry women’s Dickers?
Same with Levi... carry all kinds of men’s but no women’s Levi
And Laura Scott .. yikes .. that brand shrinks up really bad
And now it’s just too late..
The problem with hardlines is that the margins are so much slimmer than softlines. Obviously you need softlines that sell, but without the profitability from softlines it's hard to make hardlines work.
Plus you have the huge issue of the stores being 2X to 5X too big for any new format, and no money to change over 400 or 500 stores to a new format. Eddie simply doesn't have a lot of moves left.
@1ygl I heard last year that some Sears stores actually received a bunch of big-name sports-team apparel, NFL or MLB or something like that, but they couldn't manage to ship it to the right markets! Illinois getting stuff for Texas teams, Texas getting stuff for New York teams, and stuff like that.
"The "smaller footprint" will be the financial trickery that jew Eddie Lampert did to pad his fortune."
What is WRONG with this poster??? I bet he/she doesn't even know any Jewish people. Substitute "randian" for "jew" in your posts, Herr Goebbels, and you'd at least be making a decent point
I'm a softlines zone supervisor and I can say that it is not worth it for us to continue to stay in apparel business. I've been doing this for three years and our buyers have been constantly bringing in things that wouldn't sell, and still do to this day. Every year we have about 1/2 of apparel put on markdowns until about March-April. Even when things drop to stupid low prices like $3.99 or $1.99 we end up shipping most of it back. I think they sit on whatever the stores send back for a few months because it comes right back a few months later.
I don't think that there is any proper planning. I don't think that they are analyzing each store to find out what makes it tick and find out what people are coming in to buy. I get the impression that they are randomly clicking "Buy" buttons, throwing random boxes onto the trailers and hoping for the best. That's not a good strategy.
Take BTS for instance, we totally miss the boat on that one. We have hardly no "name brands" so kids and teens are naturally going to balk at our offerings. Our boy's dept was mostly full of little more than Everlast athletic apparel. If boys wanted pants they were probably onlynable to pick from the ridiculously tall stack of knit workout pants folded on the table. Over in Girls, we had all these bulky promenade dresses yet very little basics and hardly any jeans. Junior's was very thin in product, yet I guess if a high school girl dressed like Ugly Betty there was LOTS of Laura Scott to choose from over in Div 7!
Appliances and mattresses... two product categories Sears has been having serious problems getting delivered since Chapter 11 started. Those little stores are going to be empty of products in addition to customers.
Local Sears small appliance store was doing ok, but closes this Saturday . Ain't no winning combo for this brand
Mattress Firm just filed for bankruptcy. Biggest trend now is purchasing mattress that comes in a box and is delivered to your door. There is a Sears Appliance store a couple miles from my house, doesn't appear to be very busy. Every time i drive buy, I see the employee's standing out front of the store smoking c-gare--es and talking.
They tried that in our Sears store. It didn't work and we closed this summer.
I like that store format!! Lol
The "smaller footprint" will be NO STORES.