Our prices were already more expensive than our competitors when we had lots of stores. Now we will have many fewer stores and lose the economies of scale in buying large amounts of product, driving up our prices even more. I just can't see this working. Please let's not do it.
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They’re bringing in tons of kids clothing and baby merchandise locally to try and go after the Baby’s R Us segment now.
Stop trying to compete with everyone maybe? Sears at this point is Walmart/Target with appliances and exercise equipment in place of food and no electronics or decent toys or outdoor recreation stuff with higher overhead and less selection in worse locations. No people of Walmart yet, but we don’t have the clientele of Target. It’s Best Buy with clothes, toys, exercise equipment, tools and no electronics. It’s HD or Lowe’s with clothes, exercise equipment and toys and less home improvement supplies. Kmart is a c-appy, expensive Walmart that acts like it’s trying to be Target.
In practice, SHC competes (or tries to) with Walmart, Target, Macy’s, JCPenney, Kohl’s, Dillard’s, Old Navy and Men’s Warehouse for softlines, and HD, Lowe’s, Menard’s, Best Buy, Harbor Freight, Ace, Tru Value, a sh--load of mattress stores and damn near every hardware store in the country for hardlines. This doesn’t include misc. junk like toys or jewelry. Note that these lists are not inclusive and notably do not include Amazon or other online only sellers. If you want to see a list of competitors, look at the list on the register when you select price matching and it prompts for the competitor’s name. It’s ridiculous.
One format is going to have to go, (IMO it’s Kmart, too much relative goodwill (not that that’s saying much) left in the Sears name) and whichever one is left needs to figure out what segment it wants to compete in and STICK TO THAT SEGMENT. No more “Sears Grand,” “The Great Indoors” or “Super Kmart” etc. marketing b---s---.
@cpv Ames was profitable following the initial bankruptcy. The stock got pretty high and they even had to initiate a poison pill plan to prevent a hostile takeover. What ended up happening was they bought Hills and assumed their debt. That was really their downfall. Hills was heading towards bankruptcy anyway. Ames spent money remodeling former Hills stores then had all the debt from the purchase to contend with. If not for that Ames probably would have survived. They wrongfully thought they had to buy themselves a bigger store base to contend when in reality all they had to do was keep doing what they were doing. They could have let Hills close and bought the stores they wanted. They’d probably be snapping up these vacated Kmarts today.
@XrabCWJ-bsk Ames? The company that filed for bankruptcy in 1990 and again in 2001 which turned into a Chapter 7 in 2002.
"Continued softness in sales, combined with tightening terms and slower shipments from our suppliers, have reduced our funds availability below critical levels," Ames' chairman and CEO Joseph R. Ettore, said about Ames' decision to go out of business"
You can’t. If all the stores were in a regional area you might have a chance, but logistics and transportation costs will kill it in the end.
Forget that you’re a retail enterprise, you’re just trying to offset costs until the building is sold or the lease runs out.
The company will have approximately the number of stores Ames did in the mid 1990s Ames did $2.5 billion less in sales and was profitable at that time.
Remember, it's all about the real estate. The stores are a non factor and unimportant. They have and will close a store in a heart beat if they can get a solid offer for the real estate. That's what happened to our Sears store.
That should be fewer stores.
There is going to be a massive day of reckoning for the remaining employees. Smaller stores can be managed by a handful of employees at a time, reducing the overall staff by 1/2 to 2/3. Fewer products and product lines means that there won't need to be logistics or buyers. Smaller operations with fewer skus means far less support staff, like IT. If it survives, the company will be a tiny sliver of its former self. A company like that can run with 20000 employees. Eddie's deep heart-felt concern for (his image) the employees will be swept aside by reality.
But true reality says that this company can't even make it out of bankruptcy.
You can't, unless the reduced debt service costs and other cost cutting makes it possible to compete.
That is the purpose of bankruptcy. It doesn't usually work for retail stores according to some of the reports I've seen in the media. But it's all they've got.