It looks like the consequences of Sears’s downfall are spilling beyond the US borders as it was reported that Sears is closing its Israeli development center, located in the town of Herzliya. 80 employees that have been working at the center are being let go, with a pay package to 45 working days.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3750042,00.html
@ixf No, the Citi/SYW credit card has been around for several years. The $400 million payment was just because Sears got so desperate for immediate cash that they agreed to take an up-front payment in lieu of the per-signup/per-transaction royalties they had been being paid by Citi.
SYW never worked. Some people learned how to game the system to their advantage, but it was overall a colossal failure. They wouldn't show the financial analysis behind it since it was so bad. Now that everything is visible for the bankruptcy it can't hide the failure any more. Same thing with digital advertising instead of print. It was only to save cost and gives back no benefit. No wonder those teams were decimated in the layoff last week.
Didn't Eddie con Citi into paying 425M to cobrand SYW earlier this year? You'd figure he'd try to at least keep it functional it he had some kind of go forward plan. Guess Citi decided to bail on it completely.
The Israeli team was responsible for administering much of shopyourway.com and the injection of points and other member benefits of Shop Your Way. It was also integral to the operation of Sears.com and Kmart.com. Sears won't comment if these functions are part of a wind-down of SYW or if they are transferring those functions back to the USA.
Oh, and Pebble that brought us the glory of Eli Wexler!
Oh my gosh, what's going to happen to Alfie? Losing Alfie could be just devastating for SHLD. Alfie, the backbone of SHLD's glorious transformation into the next Amazon. Now all hope is lost!
Weren't these the guys developing SYW? So much for that.