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from the and-isn't-it-ironic?-don't-you-think? dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Sears, the one-time titan of American retail, filed for bankruptcy ahead of a $134 million debt payment due Monday and announced that it will close 142 stores.
For years, Sears has contended with the threat that it would become the latest big-name retailer to fall to online competition and crushing debt. The icon once known for its pristine catalogs, and more recently known for decrepit showrooms and a controversial chief executive, saw its stock price plunge last week after reports that it had hired an advisory firm to prepare a bankruptcy filing ahead of the Oct. 15 payment.
Early Monday morning, Sears announced it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy -- which would allow it to reorganize and possibly reemerge from bankruptcy with some part of the business intact -- and received commitments for $300 million in debtor-in-possession financing to carry through the bankruptcy period while it restructures its debt and reorganizes its business.
[...] Sears will close 142 unprofitable stores near the end of this year, with liquidation sales at those stores expected to begin soon. It was not immediately clear where those stores are located or how many jobs would be affected. Those store closings are in addition to 46 others that were expected by next month.
[...] It has also already sold off many of its brands, including Craftsman tools, and hasn't turned a profit since 2010. Many of its most valuable properties have been sold off, with the other half leased and offering little cost savings from rent restructurings since Sears already pays below market rents.
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(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday October 17 2018, @12:45AM (3 children)
Apparently, people have forgotten how Sears started out. Sears Roebuck mail order. They didn't have a lot of brick and mortar to maintain, back in the old days. Sears wasn't found in every town in America when I was a kid. They had some warehouses, and a few stores in large cities, and they had the mail order catalogs.
If Sears were to remember their roots, they have the corporate background to compete with an Amazon. Unfortunately, they've forgotten. Diversification had as much as anything to do with Sear's demise. People my age have watched Sears diversify into insurance, financing, and various services. At any time in the past thirty years, they could have returned to their original business model, established a larger online presence, and gone head to head with the new mail/internet order companies.
As other posters have suggested, the people in charge had other interests than making Sears competitive. Some people are going to make a killing off of Sear's carcass. Not so much customers and investors though.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 17 2018, @11:38AM
We used to go there for Dental (seriously...) and the photographer.
The problem with that is too many middlemen eventually pushed them out. The photographer rents from Sears who rents from the Mall who rents money from some NYC bank thats a lot of middlemen extracting needless profit.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday October 17 2018, @04:18PM
Every time I see Sears with an apostrophe I think of the "Tower of the Se'er" from the Captain Power videos. Loved those things.
Though the animators fucked up and animated the John Hancock Center instead of the Sears Tower.
I also liked that the center of the evil robot empire was in Detroit.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday October 17 2018, @06:21PM
I agree that they were poised to have killed Amazon before it was more than a bookseller but they didn't. And I remember the mail order catalogs - there was nothing cooler than getting the Christmas edition and looking through the toys section - used to wear that out, and sometimes circle specific things that I wanted for Christmas or birthday. Even got a few things from Mom and Dad thanks to those catalogs.
But the other reality is that before they got out of the catalog business it was in the red by tens of millions of dollars. They had every reason to be skittish of this new form of mail ordering called the Internet. And getting into Internet may not have seemed like a diversification but it really would have been because by that point Sears was "just" a brick-and-mortar retailer. They had a lot more in common with opening auto repair than Internet merchandising.
It's sad, because our local Sears is scheduled to close in November. That leaves just one anchor store left at our old-school mall - Kohl's. Mrs. Lawn likes Kohl's a lot and hopes they can hold on. Though I have to admit that since Radio Shack closed the only other store I possibly would want to visit in there is the alterations place right off an entrance. That's not just opinion - I walked it fairly recently just to see what stores were in there. The food court was down to just two providers (down from at least a dozen five years ago). But the open-walking mall (don't know what to call it, but Target is down there) seems to be doing fine.
This sig for rent.