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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.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @03:09AM
It was not, vultures do not kill, they wait for a walking corpse to swoop in.
Sears was just not with the times. Having started as a catalog company, I don't know why they didn't embrace e-commerce... but there you have it.
Department store model is a fucking dinosaur. The economy of scale is not there in the times of just-in-time wearhousing and huge distribution centers, you actually end up with way too much overhead with your giant stores, and you cannot get rid of underperforming departments, so the store's bottom line is dragged down.
I went to Sears here and there. It was always huge and empty. I generally went for things that were quality (not the generic made in China shit, but shirts that do not disolve in laundry etc). But what can you do in era of mis-information, where the only objective piece of information a consumer has about a product is fucking price. You can pay more, double or triple, but that doesn't aways mean more quality. Picking out quality items so you get value for your buck is a total hassle. I rather go with Costco shit, where I can get a good idea of quality based on the price of the item because they have trained purchasers that stock the store, and they don't mark shit up beyond that since their overhead comes from membership fees.
So no, vulture capitalism had nothing to do with this mummified corpse going up in flames. If it hastened the demise, then it is actually a good thing, because it leads to more efficient marketplace when outdated companies go under, and new businesses move in to fill in the demand.