I was born in the late 50's and did most of my growing up in the 60's. Sears was a huge deal back then. They carried the highest quality goods that middle class wage earners could afford, and their catalog gave access to just about everything, no matter where you lived. In rural areas, they even had smaller stores where you could go in, look at things like appliances, pay for it, and in a couple of days, a truck would come out to your place with the item and install it for you. My family even bought a farm tractor that way. And when Dad announced we were going to the big Sears store in the city, we knew there was a major purchase in store. We even put on our "good clothes" to go there. This was one way people entertained themselves before we had the internet or mobile phones. And, not to put too fine a point on it, if an adolescent boy was going to see a girl or woman in her underwear in those days, it was going to be in the lingerie pages of the Sears catalog, because it damned sure wasn't going to be anywhere else. And I can also well remember when, on a Saturday, my Dad would say he was going to Sears, I would rush to jump in the car, because I knew he was going to buy a Craftsman tool or tools of some sort, and I can't forget the one time we went, close to my 12th birthday, and he sent me to some other part of the store to look for something. I thought it was odd of him to do that, but he was buying me my very first Craftsman tool chest and set of tools as a combined birthday/Christmas present, and wanted to keep it a secret. If there was ever a special gift to be bought, or an appliance, or a TV set, which were things you did only every few years, you went to Sears. It was also the best place at the time to buy your first rifle or shotgun, or just about any other sporting good for that matter. Both of my older sisters worked at Sears in the 60's, and we could use their employee discount on some things. A local TV personality for kids would make special appearances there and give autographs while they set up outside and gave away hot dogs to get you in the store. If you weren't alive back then, you can't possibly know what a big deal Sears was. That's why those of us who are left are bummed about their demise. Sadly, they changed, did not keep up with what was going on in retail, and for many years became less and less special so that there were few reasons to visit the store. The last items I ever bought from Sears were in 1986 when I started one of my first businesses. I purchased a full-sized VHS video camera, and an HP Laser Printer for my office. I remember that combined they cost in excess of $2,500. Nowadays you can do the same thing with a cheap cell phone and a $99 all-in-one ink-jet printer. Times have changed and nothing lasts forever.
My grandparents say the same. Many young families got their 1st anything at a Sears. It was Th e family store. Dad in tools mom in houseware & the kid up & down the toy isle. It was like the mall of the day. If in a small town it’s wheee u meet new kids from other small towns , the hangout
The mall I go to still has a sears, but I saw the list and saw that the sears I go to will close down. Another mall nearby though which I also go to wasnt in the list, so I'm guessing that the sears at the other mall isn't going to close soon.
It boggles my mind that a company who’s claim to fame started with catalog sales could not jump into online selling with both feet and be Amazon before Amazon was a thing.
Yep... too shortsighted, and bet on the wrong horse... They had basically pioneered big catalog sales in the 19th and early 20th century, then as transport improved and automobiles improved and more people moved from rural areas to urban areas by mid-century, the big 'flagship store" department store model became their prevailing business... and they were uncontested until Walmart an Kmart basically took the low end of the business away from them with an "ultra-cheap little/no customer service thus lower cost/overhead" business model. if they'd stuck with high quality and high customer service/customer satisfaction models, they'd have held market share. Instead they tried to "race to the bottom" to "out-Wal-Mart" Walmart and lost their shirt. At the same time, catalog sales had been dwindling for years, but suddenly with the advent of internet shopping, this was starting to turn around... the internet sales boom was poised to take off. At that very time, they decided to basically abandon that side of the business, when they already had an EXISTING transportation and distribution system and even delivery system in a lot of cases (direct to home furniture and appliance sales and delivery/installation) and of course a pre-existing order system for catalog sales... all they REALLY needed was to hire GOOD web developers to make a really cutting edge online shopping experience with easy to use, clear, and reliable webpages and online ordering system and integrate that with the already existing catalog and direct-to-home delivery system-- it was a HUGE advantage as they already had about 80% or more of what they needed to dominate early internet sales, but they TOTALLY dropped the ball and bet on the wrong horse, that internet sales were a temporary reprieve of an antiquated "catalog order" system that was dying, and the mega-mall end cap stores were the future of retail sales... They couldn't have been more wrong. SO they squandered their advantages in their preexisting catalog systems that could have been adapted for internet sales with a modest investment, and their "race to the bottom" to try and get back marketshare from Walmart and the other low-end competitors went nowhere, so now they're sunk... Later! OL J R :)
Amazon is a very different business model. The problem is that online sales took away what was special about them. They went from having a monopoly to being one of many very quick
My grandpa worked in America in the 80s &90s. He brought home a lot of craftsman tools he bought in Sears. I still have these tools as I'm now a mechanic. I'm from the Philippines and never been into a Sears but I was saddened by the news because my grandpa really loved those stores and always tells me stories when I was younger.
As a former Sears employee you're right we didnt care about the customers, the morale in the stores was so low everyone felt like the company didnt care about us so why should we care about them or their business, we were always understaffed with broken and outdated equipment I was only there cause I needed the money but I hated working there
I worked at Sears in the 90s and I saw the moves being made back then away from full time employees and less customer service. I agree with the statement made in this video about “Sears speaking to the older generation “. These days the service is horrible and the employees do not know anything about the products. I had a blast working there and I am sentimental about the Tulsa store closing but man, they have been an institution. Also props to any company that sold my dad a pet monkey in the 60s via the catalog. For that alone, they will always rock in my book!
I started at Sears in 2001, fresh out of school with no idea what to do with my life. Sears was hiring, so I took the job. The pay started at $9.15/hr, good money in those days for a single guy with no mortgage, no student loans, no family to support. That was 2001. I remember the time years later, I think it was 2009, when the decision was made to start all new hourly employees at minimum wage -- $7.00/hr. I remember thinking that things would deteriorate quickly, and they did. The company's expectations were not commensurate with the compensation offered. Why get minimum wage at Sears, when you can get minimum wage at Taco Bell -- without all the stress and the unreasonably high expectations?
@L K I didn't get fired lol I stayed in the company till my store closed in 2017 also I'm not talking about caring like my mother I'm taling about understanding human limitations like seeing that we are understaffed and expecting me to do the job of four people, like I was expected to be in the merchandise pick up area while at the same time processing online orders and packaging the ups orders on a busy day like holidays that just wasnt possible, even on a regular day it could get overwhelming plus like I said our equipment broke often
@@mikemira-cx1xf I had coworkers who had been there for 15 years and they stopped getting raises like in 2008 eventually with minimum wage raising we were all making the same amount so I who had only been there 2 years was making as much as someone who was there for 15
I was a manager at Sears before and during the time Sears acquired K-Mart. Sears was loosing focus. They still had the strongest sales at the time in appliances and tools, but they were loosing ground everywhere else. They did a survey and asked us were we would like to see the company go. We all screamed the internet, AND to distance ourselves from Walmart by bringing in high end, quality brands. You see, Sears USE to be about high end brands, quality brands at a reasonable price, with a guarantee of satisfaction, or your money back and they'd ship it straight to your door. Exactly like Amazon right now. Walmart is about the price, but they did not offer the best, the top of the line but they did offer a guarantee. Both Amazon and Walmart adopted successful practices from Sears, not the other way around. Sears forgot that. They acquired K-mart in order to compete with Walmart, introduced shopping carts, stuffed the isles so full of product shoppers complained about not being able to move around, and got pissy about returns. I left before it got THAT bad because I knew Walmart would win that fight. Sears didn't have a chance. I'm just surprised at how long they held on.
Imho, you're spot on. The difference between Sears and Kmart and Walmart was, Sears provided a much better quality product than the cheap garbage plastic Chinese junk the both Walmart and Kmart specialize in. Sears used to stand for Quality Above All Else. That is where the other two companies fail big time. I always look forward to going into Sears with their popcorn and chocolates. I despise going into any Walmart and Kmart to.
My dad worked as Sears for 20 years at the auto center. When he started Sears was doing fine but he says that when Sears stoped the catalog in 1993 that is when Sears messed up and should have gone online LONG before amazon got big. However all Sears was worried about was getting traffic in stores. However Eddie Lambert wasn’t the first CEO of Sears Holdings. Then he forced the former SEARS CEO out of his position. However I don’t know why Sears or KMART is still in business. That don’t advertise at all anymore and didn’t get a shit for online or other ways to keep Sears truly alive.
leschatsmusicale Kmart actually was strong after bankruptcy in 2002 but they blew through all their money they were making to acquire Sears in 2004 and it just wasn’t good at all for both a few years after the merger.
I was born in the 1950's and remember a time when Sears was jammed with shoppers on any given weekend, especially during the holiday season. I can still remember the smell of popcorn when we would first enter the store (they used to offer it free of charge to shoppers). As I remember it, Sears was the store that catered to mostly middle class folks and families. They were not the least expensive stores, but they offered nice, friendly and helpful customer service with a wide variety of useful items and of course offered the warranty on a good number of products. They were not among the higher end stores either like Neiman-Marcus, Macy's, The Broadway or May Co. On a moderate wage, a person could afford your everyday household products, hardware, appliances and clothing and then finance bigger ticket items like refrigerators or washers and dryers, etc. Sears would even deliver and set up items like that as well. Sears was kind of the store for the common man. Things were so vastly different then. Not better or worse, just different. There was more of the social status involved with some shoppers. We didn't have Best Buy, Target or Wal-Mart stores. They didn't exist until much later at least where i lived in the west coast. Choices were much more limited. We had more time, less money and fewer options. As time progressed, Sears and that whole type of shopping experience literally grew obsolete, I believe. With the tightening of budgets and the cost of living so frightfully high, one looks more for products on sale and is more apt to bargain hunt. The internet has changed everything drastically of course. In a strange sort of way, you could say we have come full circle. Rural Americans started shopping from home through the "Sears Catalog" many decades ago and now many Americans have returned to shopping from home through online catalogs!! These are just.my memories. Perhaps someone else can either elaborate or present a different experience.
William I remember going to the sears in Durham NC in the mid to late 70s, before wal mart etc..and the place always had a lot of people and most importantly as a kid remember the pop corn candy island right smack in the middle of the aisle going to the mall...miss those days.
Back around 1970 when I was 12 or so my Dad would let me drive his car in the Sears parking lot on Sundays as they were closed and it was empty. The store and catalog was a part of my life in those pre-internet days. Wore a lot of Sears jeans before I finally caved in a wore Levis and Cords when I got into jr. high.
I was born in the early 70s, and I whole-heartedly agree with your sentiment. When you needed an appliance, your choices were Montgomery Ward or Sears. There was always the local appliance store, but you would pay extra for it. Kenmore stood for quality, they had the selection, and, most importantly for many people, they offered financing. My mother would talk about the first item she ever bought on credit was a typewriter at Sears in the early 60s. I still have it. Do Sears Appliance stores still exist? I can remember small towns having one where a full size Sears wouldn't be viable. And if you needed something else, there was the catalog. I was so excited when I bought my first Craftsman tool set in 1990. This was the big time, made in America, guaranteed forever. Now, made in China. You might as well buy Kobalt or Husky and save some money. This last Sunday my car battery was going dead. Sears is close to my house, so I thought I would run over there. The auto department has a hand drawn sign they are closed today. A plastic chain is pulled across the area, so you can't even look at the merchandise. Who had my battery, was open, and was $20 cheaper for the same item? Walmart.
Perfectly spot on when talking about today’s consumers’ budget. I’m a millennial who turned 18 right before the 2008 economic crisis. My whole adult hood had been being as frugal as humanly possible and solely surviving. I can’t afford to rent a one bedroom apartment/house on my own, let alone finance a fridge and washer and dryer for it. Sears’ prices and types of brands that they sell didn’t change to reflect a financial crisis and a growing lack of a middle class and I think that’s what started to hurt them so much. I see stores like Sears, Macy’s, J.C. Penny, Montgomery Wards, etc. as a shopping experience for the baby boomer generation (not a bad thing; just a lot of financial differences between boomers and millennials). But millennials are a huge generation at the moment and we are at the peak age of our consumerism, so companies that can’t adapt and cater to us will undoubtedly fail.
As an 8-year old kid, my father always took my mother and I out to dinner on Friday nights. This was around 1974, and I fondly remember Dad taking us to Sears after dinner; they had the Pong game, and I can remember Dad and I standing in line for our chance to play table tennis on a TV! After a few weeks of this, he eventually broke down and purchased a Pong game for our home. Back in those days, Sears was a destination retailer. I also remember the excitement when the Sears Christmas Wish Book would arrive in the mail. This was their big Christmas catalog, full of all of their products, and all available from either shipping or ordering and pick up at the store. We used to spend hours going through it, looking at all the stuff and always listing way more things than we could possibly expect to receive from Santa. Like with Kmart, it's really sad to see what has become of Sears.
I'm 23, but I have a sense of sadness with the fall of Sears. My grandpa worked as an appliance salesman there from the 60's until the mid-2000's or so when he retired. I always loved going to see him at work, dressed up in his suit and tie, back when he still had a full head of dark hair. If I was at his house before he went to work, he would let me pick his tie for the day (usually I picked the one with Mickey Mouse on it). Makes me sad that the era of being able to make a real career out of retail seems to have gone away. He took pride in his job, everyone at the store did. They were paid well, and they were able to retire comfortably. It seems to me that when taking care of your employees is no longer a priority, you lose good, hardworking people and end up hiring people who don't give a single shit. Because hey, it's just retail.
I'm 25, and pretty sad about the Sears. I remember going shopping there with my grandparents. I mean, it was a great place. It sucks what is happening. I am glad you have good memories with your grandfather though!
Fantastic story, by the way. Absolutely spot on . The first sign a company is struggling is how they treat their staff. Since labor is usually the biggest expense, that is the first line to get the chopping block. What usually follows is pretty predictable, and Sears is a great example of it. But you can look at other businesses that were primarily customer facing, and the same thing happened before their demise: You treat staff like shit, they quit, you hire lower cost employees who do not care. Customers notice, they stop coming back. It's a death spiral of service, and any service based industry should see it coming a mile away.
I remember even 11 years ago when i was a lil kid, that place was so cool and i bought all my clothes there and my parents bought most of their appliances too but then they changed. No one ever goes there anymore unless they're poor or nostalgic. The one in my local mall is so goddamn empty and sad and the music is so low. Its depressing and the people working there just have a vibe of dread drenched around them. They don't even greet you anymore when you go in
My Grandma had a similar career at Eaton's (a Canadian equivalent to Sears). She worked there until they went bankrupt in the 90's. A 30 year career and a pension, all for working retail. Completely unheard of today. She cared deeply about her job, and worked hard, because her employer cared about her.
Lampert's goal was obtaining assets below market rate, and getting interest payments to his hedge fund investors at a higher than market rate. It's quite simple. The longer he strung Sears along, the more interest he would make for his investors, and the longer than the real estate appreciates. He gladly injected capital into the company, so it would continue operating longer and thus making more interest payments to ESL investments. In order to continue making payments on the debt to Lampert, Sears had to keep selling assets. Who bought them? Lampert and ESL investments, at below market rates. Then Lampert would rent the real estate back to Sears. Then when a store closed, he found another tenant (Cheesecake Factory went into the Sears near me). Once Cheesecake Factory was in place, he did a cash out refinance on the property due to the increased appreciation, thus earning even more for his ESL investors. This was the plan all along and why he bought Sears - for the assets. The show BIllions has a season dedicated to this.
I'm glad someone said it. That cocksucker Lampert was definitely responsible for the constant issues that sears has. He's purposely running it into the ground to buy up the assets on the cheap
I noticed for years before Sears closed down, they had a negative net worth. I wondered how in the world are they still in business? And what kind of a leader is Lampert, running a business that is going bankrupt? Then I find out he was the primary creditor on all that debt. He effectively pulled a Carl Ichan.
As someone who worked at Sears during it's bankruptcy I can say this: most "members" feel entitled and they would say "mY faMIly hAs beEN sHoPpiNG hErE 4EveR WHaT dO U meEn I kaNT haVE tHiS 4 fReE?" Then go about screaming at us for not having in stock what Sears sold 20 years ago. I even had a hammer thrown at me in the tool department.
Yup, I spent 22 great years at Sears #2270 and some of the customers could be very nasty. And your right....they used as an excuse, the slogan "Satisfaction Guaranteed or your Money Back" And expect it for free. One customer bought a battery for his car, and it didn't work, probably because something else was wrong with the car. But the customer told the salesman to stick that battery up his rear....and without any hesitation, the salesman said the battery wouldn't fit cause he had four tires up there from the last customer. I was standing there, and the customer left the battery and turned and walked away. Most of the employee's were older, and treated customers real good, but on the other hand we didn't put up with their crap either.
I'm 46 and I can answer your last question. My parents were Sears loyalists. The main reason was because of the "warranty agreement." Anything bought from them they would send out a tech to fix and if they couldn't you were able to pick another no matter the price for free. My mom's home is full of Craftsman and Kenmore appliances. This year her lawnmower went out and she called them to fix it. She got the run around for 3 months and told her that she had to take it to a 3rd party repair company. When she did they told her would call her if it could be fix. Long story short she had to call them and they told her they could not fix it and to go pick another. Gor to the store and they told her she had 30 days after dropping it off to come back. It was the 31st day. She cancelled all her warranties that day. Like you said, they didn't care. She had been a customer for over 40 years
1963Iota I bought a craftsman lawnmower this summer at Sears (my original lasted 20 years). I didn’t like the bells and whistles on it so I called them and they let me bring it back (opened product) and pick a different model and they credited the difference. I totally get that Sears customer service is outdated, but I think they get a bad rap as people just want to pile on sometimes. I’m not saying you’re lying as I’m sure it happened, but let’s not pretend every retailer is perfect. I have my stories with Best Buy, Amazon, PC Richards, but it’s too easy to crap on Sears.
@@chrisolivo6591 ....not crapping on Sears at all. They have been good to my family for years. I just hated to see what they did to my mother after years of loyalty to them.
Best to buy Speed Queen Washer / Dryer they are commercial but they hold up and the parts are easy to get and repairing them is also easy. Also commercial might seem like they cost $$$$ but no you can pick up a washer for like $600 plus being "commercial" they don't have to use less water so you actually get better cleaned cloths like the old days.
I'm 61 and took a broken wrench in for replacement. They checked the number stamped in the wrench and said it was too old, the life expectancy of a wrench is 15 years. I read the Lifetime Warranty from a large poster above the cash register in the tool department. Aloud. No part of it says "Guaranteed for the life of the tool". I bought that wrench new and I'm not dead yet. They no longer replace ratchets, they give you a repair kit. If it's an old one, they don't have a kit. Also, a torque wrench is not considered a hand tool.
It would seem that Eddie Lampert didn’t buy Sears to run Sears, but bought it to lower its value and sell off its assets to himself at a lower resulting price. To put it in terms of cars, he bought a car not to drive it, but to sell it for parts
I suspect the parts he's really eyeing is the real estate. I believe Sears owned much of their stores. All those closings opens up some really nice properties in valuable locations.
Like the downtown Santa Monica location that's a block away from one of the most popular malls in the LA area? Or the other one in the recently gentrified Boyle Heights? Nah.
I'm 58. Sears was Craftsman tools, Kenmore appliances, etc. They were GOOD QUALITY products at reasonable prices. As other commenters mentioned, going to Sears was a "Family Event" that happened a few times a year. The biggest memories for me, were getting clothes for back-to-school in the late 60's thru 70's. Also Christmas... and if we needed tools (my Dad was always a handyman) it was Craftsman or bust! Also, appliances. Kenmore was reliable and reasonably priced. So, I do have some deep roots into Sears, and was genuinely saddened by the demise. :( I saw the condition of our local store before it "died" and was really bothered by it. "The death of an icon". Sigh. :'( RIP Sears. You were great in your day.
The saddest part is that Sears had the infrastructure and supply chain needed to become what Amazon is today already in place decades ago. Essentially, Amazon is the 21st century version of the Sears catalog. If only someone at Sears corporate had the vision to see the internet for what it was back at the turn of the millennium.
Yup, i look at that as the old man mentality at a company. "it works so why change". Then at a certain point it just doesn't work anymore. I'm into motorcycles, modern brands know that it's not races that sell bikes but hell the brand I'm on GasGas they still believe in the "what wins on the weekend sells on Monday"...um no I have never bought a bike like this nor have my friends. UA-cam reviews sells products, dealers having the product sells products. *shrug* Some companies are stuck in the past and won't move forward with what they don't know or understand.
I agree. These companies could’ve survived had they seen that their methods were about to become outdated due to technological advancement. In my opinion, Netflix handled it the best. They could’ve kept to their dvd rentals and been buried next to blockbuster, but they realized that the internet and streaming was the way forward, making a change to keep their company afloat long term.
I agree. Sears was there with the internet shopping in the 90s before Amazon. They also did the "shop online" and pick up your product at the store. This is something that brick and mortar stores are still in the pioneer stage or about to just get a grasp of today.
Karma's a Bitch. I honestly believe the Blood of Little Adam Walsh has haunted SEARS for over 30 years. They NEVER owned up to it, tried to BRIBE John Walsh and his Wife Reve, and DESTROYED documents to cover their own asses.
Tornado1994 Nothing to do with that. This current CEO/owner has been slowly milking off the real estate values of all the Sears properties and name brands since 2005. He intended this to be a quicker sell off but I’m sure it took time while the real estate values of the storefronts increased over the years. He killed Kmart and now Sears is about to die off.
@@dolfan29 it does seem like he's assist stripping Sears, and intentionally putting them a company he holds majority stake or close to it into major debt to another company that he owns outright and to a 3rd company he owns stake in, plus he kind of loaned money to himself. But then again I'm only using common sense observations
Speaking as an older viewer of this channel, Sears really was the Amazon of long ago. They were the go-to store for just about everything in your house... and even the house itself. Yes, you could order a house from Sears at one time. I drive by one often, and you would not know it by driving by it. I have been in it and it is a quality pre-fab home. When I was a kid, we went to Sears for just about everything. My first credit card was Sears. My first record player was a Sears Silvertone. I slept on a Sears mattress. I wore Sears clothing. Today the appliances in my house are nearly all Kenmore from Sears. HOWEVER, they did not adjust to on-line ordering. What made them so good long ago (ordering from the catalog for home delivery or store pickup) is exactly what they bungled when the Internet became a way of shopping. They could have kept going. Like what JCPenney and Kohls is doing today to try and stay alive, they could have had a significant on-line presence and offered key must-have items in the store. They missed the boat, and that boat has sailed too far from the harbor to get it back.
has it tho? One problem with keeping companies alive is to try to be like in the heyday instead of shrinking and then trying to grow again. I don't know. I'm not a business person. But they didn't start off with stores. And some stores are still going. Some comments mention smaller stores with more precise merchandise. That's an option like best buy. Or going cheaper but slightly better quality than walmart. That can't be hard to do. Sears has a recognizable name. They need time to low key build up their reputation more than enough.
Think you are pretty much spot on. I was born in '49. Remember well the Christmas catalogs when we were kids. Thing for me was back in the 70's all I had was credit to buy with (yea, I know). Was shopping for Christmas presents and all I had was a Visa card, but Sears only took there own card. So I went elsewhere. Really have not bought much there since..the experience soured me. Wonder how many folk were "soured" over the years. They had plenty of opportunities to do it wrong, or right, in the customers eyes. Then there are the Mall stores, never have really liked going to Malls in fact have not gone in years, like 20 years! But then I find getting a quart of oil on one side of Walmart and getting groceries on the other a less than satisfying shopping experience. Too far to walk. And no I do not shop as I walk so that old store setup mantra does not work. Online shopping with no or low price shipping is the way I go now. Wonder how long Walmart will make it now?
"Sears has a recognizable name." Yeah, but not in a good way to everyone. A lot of people recognize Sears as "overpriced junk I could get from Amazon or Walmart for cheaper". Older people might recognize Sears for something else, but for the younger people? Might as well retire the Sears name, because a lot of people don't give a fuck about that name.
I was born in 1988, and honestly one of my strongest childhood memories was browsing the Christmas Sears catalogue and making up a Christmas gift list to give to my parents, just to inevitably not get a thing from that list. Lol.
My grandpa once pointed to a small small house while we were driving through the countryside and said: You see that house there? Me: Yeah, what about it? GP: that house was sold out of the Sears catalog in the 1930s. Needless to say i was shocled that something like that was possible especially back then, so seeing Sears in such a rough state right now is quite sad
There's a Sears House Ct near where I grew up, so named because up until a couple decades ago it was the site of an old Sears mail-order home. Now it's just a collection of cookie-cutter single-family homes.
There's a documentary about sears homes on yt. They would sell either all the pieces, like a big Lego set, and the buyer would usually just build it themselves with the help of a local carpenter. Sears would give the option of using their own carpenters but usually most wouldn't take their services.
I'm 41 years old. When their catalog got thinner, I knew it was over. As anyone around my age will tell you, the back of that thick Sears Christmas catalog meant EVERYTHING to us 80's kids!
I am a bit younger than you, but one of my fondest memories was a Sears catalog from 1987 or 1988. I remember looking at their toy displays; especially the one they had set up for Ghostbusters toys.
I know what you mean about the catalogs. I couldn't wait to see the catalogs for Sears and also JCPenneys. Especially their Christmas versions 😍💕. It always felt like a dream look at the things I would put on my holiday list!!
LOL SEARS catalog, As a child, I would look thru and decorate my future house. At 28, my 3 yr old had his SEARS bedroom. My Mom and Nana burst out laughing when they saw the pictures!!! Also, once I became said parent, I realized their little boys' clothes did not wear out at the knees. And yes, those Christmas Catalogs from any major department store were our Everything around this time of the Year!!
The only time I've ever been in Sears is when I would park by their doors in order to access the mall faster, especially if it was raining. I'd fire thru Sears really fast and then shop at the rest of the stores. It was never anything more than an entrance/exit.
As a young kid growing up in the early 60's you could not wait to get your hands on the yearly Christmas catalog. They were also the go to place for appliances and tools. Sad, but they just didn't keep up with the changing retail climate.
basically only really old people would care about it, i was borne in early 80s i didn't give a shit about Sears, it was far to expensive, best thing was Catalog but we never really bought anything from them, we just used book for gift ideas or stuff we needed in house hold and my family went out buy similar or same thing from another company which was much cheaper.
There was a time when Sears and other retail stores (Penney's, etc) paid their sales associates decent wages and commissions. These associates became experts in their areas and were motivated to sell. Now, almost every brick and mortar seems to treat their sales associates as just someone to ring up the sale. My experience has been that I have to find what I'm looking for, no one around to ask questions (or upsell me). Very disappointing. I loved Sears growing up.
You are right about the sales associates not being proficient due to a lack of respect from the retailer. I worked at Guitar Center for a short time. When I started the commission formula yielded 12-18% for the salesperson. After a few months of making a decent living, the formula was modified to yield 7-12%. It wasn't long after that I left. Additionally, I was scheduled to close one day and after my housekeeping was completed I found that the doors were locked and I could not leave. I found the manager on duty and he told me that we were doing inventory and I had to stay until that was completed. There was no mention of this until that moment. I had a gig that night and I needed to leave to make it on time. His answer was "too bad." I demanded that he let me leave and pointed out that refusal to open the door was illegal. False imprisonment. He laughed and I called the police. after over 30 minutes the police arrived and he denied keeping us there against our will and then decided to unlock the door. I pretty much thought that I was fired. They called the next day to ask why I wasn't there for my shift. I went in and the GM wanted to speak with me. He was writing me up. I refused to sign it and told him that the next time they lock me in the store I will not call the police, I will call a lawyer. I worked there for about another two weeks before taking a much better job. No two weeks notice for these clowns. I no-showed and when they called I told them I was on my way, without any intention of going there. The idiots called me two more times! The last call they got rude so I laughed and hung up. I buy gear online now. So does just about everyone else.
@@jameslovell405 And now they filed for bankruptcy. I used to mess with the slimey workers there that were salesman and didn't know anything. Not to the cool ones tho, of which there were few. They bought out the well run musicians friend store, and turned it into Walmart of music. Good for you for moving on. Of course you had to make that gig, there was faces that needed melting. 🤘
Your right Roger, I worked many years at Sears, and we had an older store with many employees that started there in the 1940's just after the war. Dedicated people that taught new employees how to treat a customer. I loved the store with people that ended up being one big family. I was the last hired as full time, and at 65 am now the youngest of the lot. I head up/help with yearly retirement get togethers and every year we lose one or two. I truly loved all those people I worked with. I'm a Sears guy to the end. 22 years for me, my son 24 years, my girlfriend 27 years. I only left because of the corporate management had zero common sense. Such a great company, with such poor upper management. There is a book you need to read, "The Big Store"....its dead accurate.
TRUE AS HELL! I have worked in retail for 25 years and both penneys and sears got really cheap with their employees in the early 2000s. well see how well that has worked out for them. both used to offer pension plans to their employees, thats right a PENSION plan. When i worked at JCPENNEY I quit 5 months too soon before I would have recieved a pension today at age 55. HOwever im not sure how that would have played out as they have since declared bankruptcy, but they RARELY talked about the pension plan. maybe because not many stayed there for a long period of time???
Amazon's success is a BIT more than just throwing up a web page. Sears *did* and *does* have a web site selling their goods, but Bezos knew what he was doing, and the Sears Mgmt did not.
When I was a little girl, 50 years ago, the Sears Christmas catalogue was everything! My sibling and I would spend hours looking thru the pages at all the “stuff” you could buy dreaming about what Santa might bring. We didn’t have as many toys as kids do today. It was like a mall in a store
Me too! I was born in 1959 and probably around 1963 I first remembered getting one and the moment it came in the mail I'd steal it and take it up to my bedroom and circle everything I wanted with a red crayon. A good Christmas was one that I got 10% of those items. Eventually I got to where I numbered them in order of priority. When my little brother was old enough he got the green crayon and my sister got the pink one and my color changed to blue. Then we would leave it out in the living room and Dad would tear out the toy section and send it to the north pole. I think we got it every fall but I don't remember the month. Maybe September or October. We were unaware of any other source of toys. The way we thought it worked was Santa sent us the catalog and we would pick out what we wanted and then he would bring us toys based on our requests and how good we were that year. That's also when I found out that poor kids weren't every good and rich kids were very good. But I digress.
My grandma's favorite store was sears. As a kid I hated shopping there because their clothes were always out of touch with the fashion of the time, plus they never seemed to last. Then I got my first job there at 17 years old (2010) and remember being incredibly frustrated with their ancient computer system for the cash registers that oftentimes froze completely until it was rebooted. Right before the sears closed down for good, maybe in 2017-2018 when I was 24-25, I went back in one last time and saw those same ancient computers. I guess that could have been an indicator all the way back in 2010 that they weren't doing too well.
One big issue is that they stopped keeping the stores looking nice starting in 2005. I was working at Sears in 2005 and that was the last time I saw an appearance update in any Sears store. K-Mart is just as bad. When my local K-Mart closed early this year there was still a giant sign on the wall in the electronics department saying VCR. It's really sad, but once he got his hands on Sears and K-Mart Lampert just ran them right into the ground and then started digging.
The KMart in Franklin, PA closed in April 2018 or so. When I went in there in the last month or two, they had removed some shelving. The floor looked like the shelves had been there for a very long time.
For a long time, Sears' business model was to be a financial institution, masking itself as a department store. Their plan was to deal in expensive brands and products and hook you into buying them on [high interest] credit cards they'd sign you up for in the store.
Sears was already dying. Lampert is just feasting off the carcass. I'm sure that's why he's keeping all the assets "in house". He'll get paid, the stockholders get zip.
So obvious! conflict of interest since the beginning! Lampert is making a profit of all these sellings. He is a snake! Poor naive stakeholders and they thought he was helping them.
I'm only in my early 20s but I'm devastated by the death of Sears. The awfulness of Eddie, so many missed opportunities. My former Sears at my mall had the friendliest employees I'd ever met, and I always got what I needed with their selection. Clothes for work, tools, a coffee maker, and a four burner grill for dad's Christmas. It was very hard to watch them close. I could always see the former glory behind the gloom.
Sears was too expensive. It was priced for baby boomers with extra income. Once they began to retire. And I want to know more value for their money. Sears fell off. Sears also started to contract out their installation and services which were terrible.
I stopped shopping at sears due to the high price tag on their merchandise. What's the point in paying a premium, when I can get the same brand at Target, Amazon or Walmart for a better deal.
I remember starting to work with Sears in 1998. One of the first things out of my then bosses mouth was "Walmart is not our competition, we don't care for those types of customers". I knew there was going to be trouble in the next few years or decades. That attitude is what got them in trouble. Never ignore your competition even if you think they are beneath you.
Yeah, but they were NOT direct competitors. Yeah, they are both retail stores. But NOT catering to the same market. Kmart and Wal*Mart were direct competitors. Sears' direct competitor in reality was J.C. Penney's. (Both Penney's and Sears being a bit "upmarket" from Kmart and Wal*Mart). Even if it was not a LARGE difference, it was there. We were a Sears and Kmart family, our "good" clothes came from Sears our "play" clothes from Kmart. This is like comparing Buick and Ford. Buick competed in the upper middle domestic car market with "Mercury". In that case Buick won. (Mercury is gone). Ford competes with Chevrolet at the entry level domestic car market. Comparing Sears with Wal*Mart is almost like comparing Whole Foods with Aldi. Your boss wasn't actually wrong from a marketing perspective. The idea of putting Wal*Mart on the same level as Sears says a LOT of BAD SHIT about the overall economy. We now think of a discount store as being at the same level as a middle-class store. That's a REGRESSION of the standard of living we are now accustomed to.
Being born in 97, I always saw Sears as a store for home utilities, decorations and stuff for construction. My dad was a constructor and those were the only things we bought. They were very limited in trendy stuff, toys and video games. I always saw it as a store that sold overpriced junk
I am 53 years old. My dad worked for Sears for 46 years. Nearly everything we owned when I was a kid came from Sears. My dad's brother also worked for Sears for nearly 50 years. I currently own thousands of dollars worth of Craftsman tools. Sears was a huge deal. It makes me sick to see what's happened to it. There used to be a Sears store in my small hometown. In the 70s they closed it and many other small town stores to focus on shopping malls. They abandoned the rural customers that were a significant part of their original market. This, in my opinion, is the first in a long line of bad decisions that has led to bankruptcy. I agree with another poster that Sears blew it by not moving their catalog online in the early days of the internet. Amazon would not exist if they had. I told their clerks for years and any manager that I could corner that if they were losing me as a customer, they were on the way out of business. The combination of Sears and K-Mart was a mistake, too. K-Mart had a reputation for carrying cheap junk, while Sears had a reputation for quality. They didn't go together.
Sears used to put out a massive Christmas catalog filled with pages & pages of toys. My brothers and I would go through that and and make our wishlists all from that one book. It was basically a phone book sized collection of stuff!
I use to be an employee and was close with family friends at the corporate level who knew or had met Eddie. All of this was inevitable and only a matter of time. The guy was rarely at corporate (Chicago). He spent most of the year away at his home in Florida and only few in a couple times a year. The guy didn't give a crap.
It is a nice place. He just wasn't in to Sears. No merchandise or else stuff that had been there for so long. I feel bad for all the employees he screwed over.
My uncle in the Chicago area worked for Sears Roebuck as the senior Vice President until about 2014-2015 Eddie lampert in his eyes has no idea how to run a business
I'm in my late 40's and when my mama handed me that Sears catalog ("wish book") and an ink pen and told me to cirlcle what I wanted Santa to bring me, I knew the holiday season had begun. I never got all the things, but I wanted most of it. The presentation was lush. It made me want to spend money I didn't even have 😂😂😂.
YourHalfSister my brothers would vandalize the wish book catalogue in January. They would draw mustaches on people or write cartoon thought/speech bubbles of the people saying the worst stuff one could imagine. They came up with some drawings that are too foul to describe on UA-cam. But we all enjoyed looking at the stuff over the holidays.
Thanks for this post... it brought a smile to my face remembering my childhood. I completely forgot about this but we used to do this too. I can still remember the smell of those catalogs I spent so much time flipping through them in the months before Christmas.
I'm 59. As a child when we went to the mall ( new concept ) Sears was the store we parked by. Meaning if was the first store and last Store we walk through while visiting the mall. Now I do not even go to the mall.
So true. I haven't been to a mall in years, both of our local malls are long gone. Today my "mall" is my PC, I can shop 24/7 and in a few days my order is on my front porch. Too bad Sears didn't follow technology.
The decline of the shopping mall didn't do Sears any good, since it seems most of their stores were in malls. Malls are still around, just in much smaller numbers. It was the push out into the suburbs by retailers that started the death of malls. Sears tried to follow, but they were too little and too late.
I remember a few years ago I went to Sears to get my mom an extra Christmas gift since the one I got was nice but she would have to wait to be able to use it. I found it at Sears and I think at that moment I realized why I never went there. We had a Sears in our mall and most people passed thru it because there was a nice parking next to it and it was an easy access, but never actually felt the need to buy anything there. The first floor had a mix of fancy jewelery and perfumes presented in counters where the employee would be behind and discuss with the customers, but everything else around it was bright and bland just like a Walmart, so everything had that vibe of cheapness that made it feel worth less. I think one of the reasons Sears declined is because they couldn't make their minds on what kind of company they wanted to be like, which alienated their customers.
Minty Root We also had a Sears in our mall and did the same thing it had a nice parking lot and great access. It’s interesting to see other people do the same thing
Rain Man came out in 1988- "K-Mart sucks." I had a K-mart right next to my house. Wal-Mart or Target was 15-20 min away. Anytime I walked into the place, looking for the simplest things, they didn't have them. You'd settle for some similar but over priced item and walk to the register where there would be 4 or 5 workers running 1 or 2 checkout lines that were always backed up. Then when you finally got to the register you'd realize what took so long- "Do you have a membership card? What's your phone number? Do you want to donate to charity? Hold on- my computer from 1992 is on the fritz, we have to do all of this over again... Let me print out your receipt that has the entire patriot act on it, it should only be another 23 feet." The last time I was in that K-mart they were finally having their going out of business sale. Walking into that place, and Sears, always gave me some strange feeling that was a mix of nostalgia and sadness. The store was mostly empty with stained and cracked tile you knew was from the 80s. "Rhythm is a dancer" was playing over the store's loud speakers. It's like they never left that time, and that was the whole problem.
Exactly! The whole department store model has become a relic of the past. Wal-Mart and Target seem to getting by, I assume that has to do with them modernizing their stores, adding full grocery sections and self-check out areas etc. Sears and K-Mart have just refused to get with the times. Also, as someone pointed out above, if Sears Holdings had taken advantage of the internet when it was new, they could be one of the most successful companies of today. They could literally have been Amazon.
Man, you hit it right on the head! They never had exactly what you needed, something close but Walmart was 10 min away with options..they killed themselves
I hear that. I do work at one though and they have updated some things the problem most definitely is that they mesh modern retail tech with the 90s IBM registers... It really sucks I'm pretty sure had they updated both even if they were still 5 years behind would be more comparable to other retail chain tech. Another issue I see is that they carry an odd assortment of things that isn't modern it's more of stuff my parents know is there but the modern person doesn't expect to buy there, like we carry a bunch of stuff that is better left to home depot. Our refridgeration section if I remember right is a complete financial loss not %100 sure but I thought I heard something like that. Might as well chop that out and then sell the stuff that K-Mart and sears have been known for the last 40 years. Another issue I see is that they have the bonus cash to try and entice you to come back, that whole system doesn't work all that well there's a lot of * to it that's frustrating. Like receiving the money in 3x20 sums instead of $60 all in one chunk like was bolded on the sign. We have actually a lot of new mixed with the old. Our advertising and sinage and sales arw actually fairly fresh but I find the execution or meshing of it too costly or too bloated and difficult for the small amount of time to put it out. They have made some changes at mine like less old school electronics in favor of selling Serta mattresses which makes sense people tend to buy large items locally and ship small stuff. The location I work at sells stuff quick and gets too much of stuff we already have. If there we're a way to keep the stock more unique I know our location would be even more profitable.
My favorite sears products are my 1966 sears 8XL lawn tractor with a sears branded plow. wish i could have seen machines like that when they were new, back when products had usa built quality and solid construction and reliability.
@@paulaharrisbaca4851 - Back in the day, CRAFTSMAN was among the best, in tools... Quality Affordability Warranty I'm 60, and still have MANY Craftsman tools (among my other high-quality tools) Recently, I went to my local Sears to replace a ratchet handle that was stripped...... The kid working the cash register "overhauled" the ratchet head...... BIG disappointment!... I won't be buying any more Craftsman (especially knowing that SEARS might not be around, much longer)
g w I have a sears made .22 semi auto rifle and it needs a new part and the prices for the one part are usually double the original price of the gun itself
Sears has a lot of problems. Individual stores are badly managed, they underpay their employees, rely on gimmicks, the stores aren't customer-friendly but have an old and dirty appearance to them, and the selection is now worse than ever. At the exec level, the Sears Tower was unneeded spending that showed an arrogant attitude that the company couldn't afford. Lampert sold off all the items that drew in customers. People loved Land's End, but he sold it. People loved Craftsman tools, and he sold it. They loved Kenmore washers and dryers, and he sold those. What's left? Then Sears relied too much on sales instead of everyday low prices. Lampert did the OPPOSITE of what should have been done. It seems that he was out to enrich himself and his hedge fund. Not exactly like insider trading, but close. I honestly believe some attorney general ought to look at him for criminal charges.
Frodojack Selling assets of companies you own isn’t illegal. Also Sears was dying way before those assets were sold off. If they weren’t sold off they would have gone down with the ship and bought by others anyways.
Frodojack Just bought a beautiful Kenmore mini fridge on Amazon. Suck it Sears. The good people, the smart people, they’ll never let us run the show. It’s all about raping us while they suck off the next corporation for their own private gain.
You are being too kind to Lampert. The model is 1) buy company with good reputation/financials 2) load it with debt, 3) distribute unspent loan proceeds and other capital to yourself/new shareholders, 4) unsupportable debt wrecks company, 5) Blame China/unions/Regulators/whoever , 5a) Milk some subsidy/rescue , 6) walk off. Can name dozens
You could say Company Man doesn't know a thing or two and not much about this sort of scheme but if he does, why is he withholding this information from the video?
Whazzat. Preach it brother!! Corporate raiders like Lampert that wreck companies and spread financial misery to line stock holders pockets need to be imprisoned in general population in a state pen. Hang em' high I sez!
I worked for Sears for 12 years. It was a pleasure to go to work! It starting to change when they put Cashiers in middle of walkways. Cutting back on sales personnel. That was late 70s...downhill from there. I'm still thankful for all those good years. There was pride and respect to work for Sears!!
What I liked about Sears in the day (I'm 71 now) was what I like about Walmart now: 1. Convenient locations, in Sears' case, usually in malls where it could be part of a day's shopping loop. 2. Wide range of quality products. 3. Decent (though not low as Walmart) pricing. I especially went there for Craftsman tools; I have a whole toolbox + full of them. Last time, a couple of years ago, they replaced a worn screwdriver under their no-receipt lifetime guarantee. However they said it was the last time, as they dumped that policy. So for m,e Craftsman was no longer worth the premium price. Lambert just did the usual "raider" thing of using ruses to suck all the dough out of one or more companies, plus shuffle the deck chair subsidiaries for his own profit. I'd like to see his salary, perks & bonuses during his tenure there, plus on the ESL side. Carly Fiorina did the same thing at HP. I suspect enough people realized that to derail her run for Calif. senator. Meg Whitman did the same for eBay/PayPal. Luckily both got out or were ousted (with huge bonuses) so the co's were saved.
+KutWrite My day was about the same as your day. I remember when Sears was the place you went when you wanted to outfit your kids for school or needed new appliances. What turned me off Sears was snarky salespeople. Last time I shopped there I thought, "Why do I have to put up with this when I have alternate places to shop?"
I am part of the generation that grew up on Sears. Almost everything my family owned came from Sears. I bought many things from Sears, then for some unknown reason, I and many others just stopped shopping there. No real clue why, but seems as if everyone on earth one day started shopping elsewhere. In my neck of the woods, Sears went from alive and vibrant to near dead in less than a year. This happened about 15 years ago. Very puzzleing to say the least.
It just got sad. I remember in the late 80's early 90's that Sears had such a magical feeling to it around Christmas time. They really had great decor and good products. Then things just deteriorated. I think ending the catalog was asinine. Even if you did not place an order, just getting the catalog reminded you of all the things Sears had. Also, Target and Best Buy are usually in the same shopping center, and you don't have to go to the stupid mall to go to those stores. Target is cheaper and actually has better clothes.
Walmart or targets nearby opening up probably. I remember same thing as well. When I was a little kid I remember Sears at the mall was always as busy as other stores than boom never the same again
My great grandfather was CEO of Sears back in the late 50s early 60s. He took over following the retirement of General Wood. Sears was at that point the largest retailer in the world. He was considered the greatest mass merchandiser of his Era. He was a dollar man during ww2, economic advisor to Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower, chairman of the committee of economic development, radio free Europe, an author of a book named Big business and human values. He use to say that every business has a life cycle, its birth, life, and demise, and his job was to help keep it as healthy as possible for the next people that inherits it. He died in 1963, and probably rolling in his grave as to what has happened to such an iconic piece of American life. Oh, and Eddie Lambert is a pile of shit.
I wonder if he had any inside views or insights as to the degradation and demise of the Packard Motor Car Company (I think some Eisenhower admin. insiders had some control/input over Packard as it had been an important military contractor and was probably in competition with some other contractors who might have been potential employers for some of the Eisenhower appointees.
@@davidpowell3347 I don't know. But he did deal with the Kaiser-Frazer corporation to create the automobile the Allstate, which Sears sold for a few years .
I was a young child in the 1980's. Born in 1971. And I have to tell you that the Sears Christmas Wish Book was amazing. I mean, seriously. It was amazing. Every fall you would gladly run to the mailbox every day (without being told by mom or dad) in hopes of being the first to open the enormous tome. There is nothing provided by any retailer in today's marketplace that even remotely compares. It was enormous. It was the stuff of dreams. All the toys were in the back and that was the only part that mattered. I would literally sit for hours poring through the pages hoping for a Millennium Falcon or a slot car track or a Commodore 64 or an Intellivision... God, those were good times.
I remember being a small child in the mid 80's the Sears and JCPenney Christmas catalogs were exciting to look at. I could spend the whole day looking through them.
Sadly I never exp tht. But I did something similar with my local newspaper every sunday. Look through all the stores ad catalogs I was interested in to look at their toys and electronics. I dont do it much anymore but man those were some good times looking through it.
Keith McFarland It was around in the 1990s too (I'm 1991) and you are absolutely correct. It was hard not to read it, that holiday book was every kid's holiday dream.
I remember getting excited about the Sears and Penney's catalogs coming around late September-mid-October, too. But I think the catalog shows one of the things that was wrong with Sears, even when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s. They relied on their house brands for far too long. Kenmore and Craftsman were one thing. But did you really want to be the kid who got a Sears Tele-Games instead of the Atari? They were the same thing, but if you had the Sears version, it just felt like you were second-class. Same with some other Sears brands too. All retailers have their own house brands, but aside from Kenmore and Craftsman, having the Sears brand could be embarassing because teen years are when people, rightly or wrongly, fall into status symbols. Sony Walkman yes. Sears brand, no.
As a child in the 70's and 80's Montgomery Wards also had their store brands and like what another poster described, I wouldn't be caught dead owning a Montgomery Wards home stereo when the likes of Pioneer/Onkyo or Kenwood were better options. My only gripe is comparing Wal-Mart to Sears isn't a apples to apples comparison. Does Walmart sell Washers, Dryers or Stoves? Sears is a dinosaur and I'm surprised it has lasted as long as it did, compared to Montgomery Wards that went belly up many years ago.
Before I watch: Sears killed their catalogue and ALLOWED Amazon to fill the niche and then some using the internet. MASSIVE failure to utilize their own leverage in a market. EDIT: It reminds me of Blockbuster and Netflix which you've covered.
Like other retailers closing the problem is the internet, online shopping. People just do that now, it's cheaper. People have gotten lazy as well. Personally I like going to actual stores, but I do some shopping online not much though. Places like Walmart are another reason so many retailers are going out.
The CEO does own every single building Sears was and is in. It was part of the deal for him loaning them so much. I doubt he laundered money from the company. His leaning them money time and time again is what kept it open this long. He's the reason that haven't filed chapter 7 bankruptcy yet. He has lots of real estate to do something with. Because not only does he own every building Sears is in, but every building Kmart is in. Excluding some of the ones in malls, but not all. I wonder what he will do with them
Sears will always have a special place in my heart .Back in 1998 they were the second company ever to approve me for a credit card. Bought furniture, clothes, car batteries and tires there. Bought my first work shoes there. Last few years saw its decline. I’m sure someone will bring back the name brand down the road.
It's also they're karma coming back around. They paid us employees like crap. Everything in the inventory is overpriced. And refused to change with the times.
I will admit the pay was not the best. And I never understood why they had a cash register in every department. A lot of extra people for no good reason as best as I could tell. Guess it kept from long check out line all in one place? The main store was a totally different world then the auto center.
My friend told me about when he was trying to work for a sears retailer once. He said it was $9 an hour and just left after the (Unprofessional) interview.
This and that... It was from the days when they were BUSY... that's why there was a register at every dept. They were THE place to go in the 70s, like 'Acme' in the Warner Bros. cartoons.
Former employee of 9 years. Definitely was Lampert's leadership. The regional, district, and store managers were begging for fixes for the store from the start, even when the company was still profitable. He was determined it didnt matter, and around 2013 starting saying things like "if you want your stores fixed up, you need to sell more." The also slashes hours like crazy. When I was the Home Improvement manager, they cut the signing team to 4 hours... total... to be split among 3 people. Then they blamed be that not every sign was ready by store open. He's just positioning himself to make money off sold assets
I've had a similar experience with doing signs. We had so many signs to put up and not enough time to do it. We were still doing signs well into the morning which took our time away from servicing customers and doing department duties.
You need to stop looking at these as people trying to run a successful business and instead look at it as people trying to make as much money as quickly as possible, by any means necessary. He also probably funneled any profits made at Sears to his hedge fund so he could use the capital gains tax loophole and avoided paying millions in taxes.
Jazion Purnsky it’s income, right? And it’s income you didn’t have to work for, your money made money. Capital gains should only be used for angel investing.
@@fernandofernandez2677 It's not a payroll tax though. Saying it should be taxed at the same rate as individual income tax is like saying property taxes or estate taxes should be taxed at the same rate. Not all sources of revenue are the same. So they're taxed differently. The idea that you dont have to work to get your personal capital to generate revenue is very silly. With that point made obviously there are ways to have your capital generate revenue that are more ethical than others. But typically even the most unethical methods require planning and work to implement.
5:32 Finally I always wondered about how old is "Company Man", now some of the presentation of topics makes sense. He missed out on the "golden era" of retail and the pre-internet days. I still like the videos and content. It is very well presented given the short experience and time frame of his formative years.
@Keirnoth He's the same age as my younger brother, of which I'm two years older, and even I knew of Sears' importance. Indeed when I think of them, I think of Craftsman and appliances. I even did a large clothing haul at a Sears going out of business a few years back. I've known this to be a very long standing company. I'm not going to say his age is the main factor here, but just a personality quirk, maybe, as to why he doesn't care. While Sears wasn't impactful on my life, I would've wanted to cover this topic just because of its age.
The Woolworth's video hit home. I remember the lunch counters in some of them. I am in the age bracket where I straddle "era's" if you will and experienced (hard) the transition from purely physical and catalog (wait 4-6 weeks for delivery) access to products to almost an "on demand" delivery system. Sears was a physical Amazon that also includes services such as window and siding installation, tire service, and light auto repair. I want to be clear, his being a "millennial" does not dis-qualify him from talking in a well researched video, which this is.
This is where I sometimes have problems communicating with people about "how things used to be" affecting "the way things are now". Being from a rural area catalogs were like gold for sourcing things outside of the local 5 & Dime type stores. Industrial parts and supplies was a big thing to source, so JC Whitney, MSC or Grainger catalogs were almost as coveted as the Bible.
Thing is, they weren't as cheap as Walmart, they weren't as trendy as target, and they relied heavily on mall stores. They all had the same target audience- people who are looking for deals. They would have done better to try to be like Kohl's with a slightly richer audience.
The only time I entered Sears was for tools. That said, I enjoyed looking through the catalog. Speaking of catalogs. Does Cabela's still send them out?
Sears was in the business of selling hardware, yes they sold T.Vs and washing machines, but their bulk was craftsman tools and lawn products and so forth. Their tools were cheaper than buying a mac tool, and some of the other expensive tools.
"The older you are, the more Sears meant to you." I'm 58 and have the fondest memories of Sears. My uncle worked there for 30 years, and then collected a pension from them. (Imagine that with any other store!) When I was little, I LOVED the Sear Christmas Wish Catalogue (hard to believe it now, but they would mail those large, heavy catalogues to millions of people). When I was a little older, we moved into a house that had a Sears just down the street. Their toy department was amazing year-round, but at Christmas time it transformed into a magical place! They would increase the size of the toy department, and decorations and lights hung everywhere. Our Sears also had a staffed candy counter where you could order candy by weight. I would go there whenever I had a dime or quarter to spend on some candy! The three big stores here in Canada were Sears, the Bay, and Eaton's. The Bay and Eaton's were ok - but they were far more expensive and you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who worked there if you needed help. Sears, on the other hand, had good quality products that were well-priced. It was always easy to find someone who worked there. I remember one time (about 10 years ago), asking a staff person where something was located. Turns out it was on the opposite side of the (very large) store, and on another floor. She didn't tell me where it was, she actually showed me. She was busy and had work to do, but she happily took the time to help me. All of my Sears encounters were like that. The cheaper competition, such as Zellers and Kmart had poor quality products and a scarcity of staff. (Walmart didn't come to Canada until I was about 30, so they weren't part of the picture back then.) In my 50 years of being a Sears customer, I never once had bad service. How do you beat that?! They were a slice of my childhood, and they represented an old-fashioned part of life that doesn't really exist anymore. A clean, homey atmosphere with good quality products, lots of services, fair prices and wonderful staff. They were there my whole life, and now they're gone. All we have left are unkept stores where staff sprint to get away from you, where they sell cheap, low-quality junk. As crazy as it sounds, it really broke my heart when Sears closed. They were so intertwined with my childhood.
I remember being really hyped in the late 90s for the Sears Christmas catalogue, and I remember my aunt who lived far away ordering a pair of jeans for me that we picked up at our Sears distribution center. Kind of funny that looking back, although I never thought much about Sears (I was also born in '93, well after Sears' heyday) it was similiar to Amazon
I currently work for sears. Been there for 2 years. I am happy to say im finally leaving and won't miss that company what so ever. First off, I was a great employee. My focus was to the customers. I was Softlines/Hardlines associate. I worked the cash registers, clean the store, did other people lunches, put up ads, etc. Everyday I walked in to work I dreaded. Everyday the same thing, "We need credit, we need PA's (protection agreedments), our SYW precentage needs to be at 85+." They didn't care if you have a family to take care of or bills to pay. If you weren't hitting numbers. You were getting 3 hours of work in 2 WEEKS. Yes you heard me right. 2 WEEKS. You can do your job duties with perfection, but if you weren't getting credit and PAs they didn't care. I always told my supervisors and managers, "Why do they care so much over those things then sales?" Your stores are trash. Its like a blast from the past. All the people that walk in the building are elderly people. I call them sears loyals. I talk to them all the time and ask them "what do you think went wrong with sears?" And its always the same answer " I don't know what happen, Sears used to be the biggest thing. I grew up with sears and its catalog." I dont see anyone below the age of 20, I kid you not. Sears merchandise are over priced and wack. Me being 20 years old would never buy from there and never had. The company focused on the wrong things. They missed the biggest boat that is e-commerce and failed to invest in their stores and their merchandise. The company ex CEO Eddie lampert was just draining sears of its assets. Craftsman was sold and recently he wanted to buy Kenmore from sears. The store is far gone. No hope. The only thing they could do is just be an online retailer and use their stores as warehouses to fulfill orders for the old past generations that cling to sears for nostalgia and loyalty.
Jaime Former Sears employee here, too! I actually worked till the very end; I was scraping dirt off the stockroom floors and all that jazz 😂 I can’t help but completely agree with everything you said, from the “credit craze” to the overpriced and TACKY furniture. Don’t forget about the hell that was the SYW program...
I'm a Sears employee too, I work in the back. I've only been working there a few months and it's my first job and they started store liquidation before they filed for bankruptcy. I just have to ask... Is footwear just as much of a mess in your guy's stores or is it just us?
I hope you guys get jobs that deserve your hard earned work. I feel Sears treated not only the employees but also the customers poorly as well :(. Good luck in your ventures you guys ^^
I'm 64. I loved Sears & I truly miss it. I shopped there all my Life. I loved their clearance sales on their clothes the most. There will never be another storm that even comes close to Sears !!!!!
I know how you feel about Sears, I'm mostly indifferent. I have a slight nostalgia feeling from going there with my family as a kid, and looking through the catalogue at Christmas time. As an adult I rarely bought anything from Sears. Why, because my local store, which just closed a couple months ago, was on the other side of town. I have a Walmart, Home Depot, and other stores just a couple minutes from my house. There's no reason for a mini road trip when everything I need is in my neighborhood. Sorry Sears.
True most of the time, but sometimes I'm working on a project and need a tool or something that day. I'll run to the local store before I go across town to Sears.
I worked at sears and I have to say this, it's hard to keep a sinking ship afloat, you are expected to work miracles and meet quotas that are pretty hard to meet and be happy in a stressful environment. Quality was pretty bad and as the face of sears I got a lot of "this is why sears is going under" I blame the company not the employees, we worked with what we had. They wanted Rolls Royce when we had the parts to build pintos
I agree. I worked at sears this past year and it was just horrid how management and corporate treated their employees. We had to face customers with disfunctioning policies and malfunctioning tech. Customers that bring in money. They screw over orders out of laziness and management gets mad at employees not taking short cuts searching for the actual ordered product in their mess of a storage section. One time my store manager switched my time on while I was on the clock 10 minutes before I was off to make up for associates quitting on them and they not reworking their hours in a timely manner. Needless to say I looked her in the eye, clocked out, and went home.the whole backroom team quit because of poor management, including me. We were all younger and dont take work related abuse. Glad I quit when I did.
@cmtmj2006 that sounds about right. Our front end cashiers could not fathom doing thier job right. We were very under staffed in the backroom so when they would leave web order open for 2/3 hr window before the system would give the order to another store JUST to force us to do their jobs. We tried to be team players but on top of our own jobs and trying to fix years worth of a past senior employee not doing their job at all it was frustrating. I wonder if other companies have similar issues
Sounds to me like Lampert has long since realised that Sears is a hopeless case is has since simply been liquidating it's assets pre-bankruptcy by selling it to himself for way less than they're worth. All this so that when it actually goes belly up he's already siphoned off everything of value and he doesn't have to share it with the other creditors when Sear is liquidated by an actual liquidator. Finnish/Swedish forestry company StoraEnso did something slightly similar where it cooked the books to make it look like it was earning more than it actually was and paid those false earnings by liquidating some of it's assets while over-inflating it's other assets. This didn't lead to a scandal of the kind of proportions it should have because it was done at the behest of it's owners, chief among them the extremely wealthy Wallenberg family of Sweden (who for example used to own Saab).
Sears was going downhill over the years. Mr.Eddie just finish them off.. he didnʻt know what he was doing..but. he donʻt have to worry about money he is set.....these are my thoughts.
Actually he is stealing value from the shareholders. His moves siphons value from the company into companies owned by him so the shareholders get shorted in the sales of assets, hence the law suits.
Yes! The Sears wish book. How to describe it younger people? Imagine you live in a town where the best toy store is a CVS. Then, in the mail comes the sears wish book that contains everything you could ever imagine. A "treeware" version of the Internet/Amazon. www.wishbookweb.com/the-catalogs/. But on top of that, they had a tool department that was good and even car repairs. Pretty much everything at decent quality.
I always stared for hours at the enormous G.I. Joe aircraft carrier. I begged my parents to get me that for Christmas every year. I think it was $100. In 80s money, that was probably like $500 today. I never got it, we didn't have much money, but I loved staring at the pictures.
I used to go to Sears occasionally until it appeared there was nothing good I wanted to buy… and that there was only two employees in the entire store. Sears was dead long before it died.
Sears doomed itself when they dropped their catalog and did not replace it with online sales. If they had done this, and done it right, Amazon would not exist today. It's doubtful they could have managed it. Inefficiencies and poor accounting methods made their warehouse system a drain on profits because it was impossible to calculate the true cost of their big ticket items. They could sell a refrigerator for $1000, which they bought from Whirlpool for $600, and not know what the true profit margin was, because shipping, handling, inventory costs, etc, could not be determined.
Unless you work for NAPA, then you shouldn't be too worried. Auto parts stores are a dime per dozen these days. Pep Boys and O'Reilly will still be around to serve your auto supply needs, likely at a better value. NAPA doesn't even have a decent website napa.com/ in 2018!
Socialism won't bring back the quality parts you desire, but I am not willing to debate you on your personal beliefs online. There are only so many factories making these parts to begin with, and it is harder to distinguish one brand's supply from another's. NAPA may supply only the best parts in the industry, but that is almost meaningless when most people just want something that fits and works. NAPA will eventually have to stock the same stuff as other stores have or run a marketing campaign to convince everyone why their vastly superior premium parts are better than the average parts from generic cookie cutter corner stores. Manufacturers are not going to make the NAPA quality parts forever, if no one is going to buy them. You may not like the way capitalism works, but the choice is much less foggy when it is Trabant vs. Chevy. Socialism is putting inexperienced know-it-all politicians in charge of businesses. That does happen on rare occasions in capitalism, but it is never forced and does not usually last long. I've seen enough CSPAN to know it's a bad idea to put politicians directly in charge of pretty much anything. A choice like NAPA certainly would not exist under socialism.
It is hard to say whether it is by design. The recession caused a lot of corner cutting, and when this goes on for too long, no one remembers or cares what they were doing previously. Relays are important, and if the cost cutting measures aren't causing any significant returns or warranty replacements, then was the original relay technologically overkill? You or I might not be thinking or considering this, but some bean counter is certainly making a spreadsheet and putting together a CBA for decision makers to analyse. At a certain point, mediocrity becomes the gold standard. There are definitely some parallels between Sears, Walmart and now Amazon in the progression. Yuppie bean counters essentially started giving Sears a McDonald's and cheap diet. It did fine for a while, but then it developed heart disease. It attempted to manage that for a while, but then it was married to a less healthy spouse. Things started to appear better during the honeymoon phase, but it soon fizzled when they were both diagnosed with diabetes. They have lost a few limbs since then, and now they have a bad case of double pneumonia, both viral and bacterial. Is this going to be the end? I do fully agree with technology causing issues with things that used to be simple repairs. I have personally seen it where two pieces of machinery operated doing the same type of daily work would break down. The one that is around 33 years old is easily repaired and fully functional almost 2 hours after the mechanic arrives, and he never even had to pull out his laptop. The other one is just under 4 years old, and after about 10 minutes with his computer connected, he says it is basically a lost cause. The computer system wasn't working at all, and to replace it on the particular model wasn't even an economical feasibility. He checked out as many of the physical components as he could, and for as much as he could tell, he said they appeared to be in good condition. Industrial equipment and computer companies do not seem to work well with each other. As far as I can tell, there hasn't exactly been a push to standardise the computer systems in the prosumer mechanical industry. The required repair software is almost never included in the purchase. It should be stuck in the back of the manual by default. I don't trust these companies to know what they are doing, if they overlook and neglect simple things like this. The days are coming to an end for mechanics who can repair anything without being required to use a computer. I can even see mechanics needing a college degree someday with all the nonsense, companies put into their stuff. The easier technology makes something, the more companies overthink it and make it overly complicated.
If Sears had managed to put their catalog online, Bezos would find something else remarkable to do, because Sears would be Amazon. Bezos just looked crazy when he started selling books online. What he was really doing was working out the infrastructure of his robotic warehousing system. He started with books because books are nice geometric shapes and it's easy to calculate the weight. Once a warehouse robot could put a book on a shelf and then find it again, it could do it for anything.
Shopping at a Sears or KMart in 2018 feels pretty dang similar to how it did back in 1988. And while I could easily see Walmart feeling the same 20 years from now, Walmart's main draw is its pricing. I don't recall people shopping at Sears for the bottom line best price. In fact, Craftsman might be a good example (btw I didn't realize they had sold that off). Craftsman tools were never the cheapest or the best quality, but they had lifetime warranties on hand tools. That means if you break the damn thing by being stupid and putting a 4-foot breaker bar on the end of your ratchet handle, you just bring it back to the store and they give you a new one. That's a pretty big deal. I worked at a Sears Hardware when I was younger and when I saw how that worked I pretty much bought exclusively Craftsman hand tools, just in case I broke them (which I did fairly often... they're not *bad* really, but they're not Snap-On quality for sure). But that's the thing, when the store hasn't changed basically at all in 30 years, the pricing isn't spectacular, the selection isn't great, there's pretty much no reason to shop at that store. Here's the thing: if you want to buy an appliance, keep an eye on Best Buy because they have some insane deals. If you want to buy a TV, your best bet is Microcenter if there is one near you, or even Best Buy. If you want to buy clothes... come on, who buys clothes from Sears? Seriously, what does Sears do well? I would have said their hardware stores, but even those have gone down the toilet (our local one is now part of the main Sears location instead of being its own separate location). Their brand isn't a go-to anymore, and there's otherwise no compelling reason for new customers to get drawn in. And to think back in the 50's and 60's they actually had their own line of legendary products like their cheap amps and guitars which went on to be used by many musicians because, despite their low price, they were actually great, well-made products. Sears has no reason for existence anymore. It's only a matter of time before they're finally gone completely.
People still want those Danelecrto guitars because of their unique sound, and they can easily fetch about $500. Why Sears stopped selling them is beyond me.
"Craftsman tools were never the cheapest or the best quality". Agreed. What they *were* was well-positioned right at the point on the price/quality balance that worked best for a frequent home user. Paying extra for Snap-On was worthwhile for a construction worker or garage mechanic who's wrenching 40 hours a week, but would never reach the breakeven point for someone who maintained their own house and car.
I went into a Sears recently and it seemed like they still have a decent selection but man it’s nothing like what I remember from the early 2000’s. It was also close to desolate inside the store
Mr Unknown yeah but it's never busy. A lot of employees just sitting around usually. It's been about a year since I've been in there. I bought my fridge there last spring.
ESL is what's known as a vulture fund. Making money however they can as quickly as they can regardless of the long term ramifications. Eddie never cared about turning the companies around. His main focus was making as much money from all the assets they owned, however he needed to prolong the life of the companies in order to truly maximize his profits from the various sales of said assets. Hence the reason why they remained open until now. Both Sears and Kmart have outlived their usefulness and are probably a quarter away from closing. They'll probably remain open until Feb 2019, in which they'll do a last cash grab for the upcoming Christmas rush. It's a shame but Eddy probably never intended to turn around either companies from the start.
"Turning companies around" is generally a fool's errand. They do extend the lifecycles though; all those employees got an extra 5-10 years of work out of the vultures picking the carcass clean. And just like IRL vultures they serve a function.
@@mitchellhorton9382 yeah but its such a shame to see a once thriving company and American icon be reduced to bargain bin store on the verge of collapse due to management incompetence, lack of foresight, adaptability to changing conditions and greed.
@@mitchellhorton9382 Can you demonstrate the function of vultures in a economic sense? Because I don't buy it...at all. I would want to not only kill all these vultures, but salt the earth with a substance that prevents the dna of a vulture from ever being formed again. Maybe a targeted dna virus. All metaphorically speaking of course.
It doesn't "seem" like the older you are the more you care. This absolutely true. That's because we grew up when there wasn't an internet or online shopping. We remember being excited when the catalog arrived. Especially if you were a kid and Christmas was coming. We remember when buying craftsman tools mean top quality and a lifetime warrant.
Craftsman still has that warranty on manual tools like screwdrivers amd wrenches... it's their powertools that seem to suffer, mostly from poorly manufactured parts and bad wireing/solderings in the powertools
The Sears catalog was IT when I was a kid. I was to just look at all the stuff. Web surfing dead tree edition. Craftsman tools are what I know them for best now. Good hand tools.
Going there before Macy's was boring. I went looking for some cool stuff that wasn't just washing machines or the bathroom. I would usually find some displays of TVs and some game consoles like Xbox or PS3.
i feel ya, i didn't enjoy going to Sears when i was younger either. It was so boring, was glad when they finally closed. barely anyone shopped there anyways, it was more convenient driving an hour away to the nearest walmart
I worked for my local Sears and was kind of proud of being an electronics salesman. The day I received my benefits package, the store's closure was announced. I'm surprised Mr. Lampert hasn't been investigated by the S.E.C.
Little Caesars fell off, and was near non-existent in the 90's/ early 2000's. It has come back in the last 10-15 years. That's what I was curious about.
Sears has been circling the drain for more than a decade...if Eddie Lambert hadn’t Frankenstein-ed Kmart and Sears together in 2005, neither would’ve survived the 2008 recession, likely (Circuit City, anyone?)...so, this is just the slow end of a LONG slow cancer-like death....That said, Eddie Lambert is, basically, a vampire who has slowly been bleeding the corpse dry...For the record, I’m 50, so I DO remember when they were viable...and they kinda sucked back in the 80”s and 90’s too! I usually preferred JCPenney or Target
The problem is they needed to evolve to be more like in their heyday and start going online (Amazon style) making an online store that could match the feeling of the old catalogs. Buying KMart was the worst thing they could have done. I agree it looks like their new C.E.O. is a bloody money laundering scheme that has failed and is backfiring and started selling assets before it went bankrupt.
To me they were always the store that was too expensive, with a smaller selection of goods. The only attraction was Craftsman Tools, which were good quality and reasonable, with a great warranty. With Craftsman gone as an exclusive, no more reason to go there.
19 y.o. Mexican here Here on Mexico Sears it’s doing really good compared to the US and I think it’s mostly because technically Sears Mexico is not longer connected to Sears US since 1997 when the Carso group acquired 85% of the company on Mexico soil (currently 100%) We don’t have many stores (just 93 locations) but those locations are doing relatively okay
In the 1950's my Dad claimed, "If you can't get it at Sears, you probably can't get it at all!" Craftsman Tools were well regarded as the best. Kenmore appliances were well regarded. They owned Allstate Insurance for years. Back in the 1970's & 1980's they had an ad, "Sears is Where America Shops." And it was true! My ex-with started in their tools department., graduated to their shoe department and later to their electronics department. She was one of their top rated sales people. She worked at their Sears at the Staten Island Mall, their top grossing store for the whole East Coast. (My ex-wife graduated to Allstate, just before Sears spun it off as an independent company, in the early 1990's.) When I saw Sears closed most of the Staten Island store, and rented the space to Primark, I thought, "That's like cutting out your heart so your body can live! It's a terrible plan!" Yup, sure was a terrible plan.
I've been shopping at the store you reference for a good 30 years on my own, prior to that, as I mentioned in another post with my parents and grandparents. I might have dealt with your ex wife if she was there in the 1990s. My uncle's neighbor was a manager there through the 1970s and 1980s as well. Consequently, most of my tools are Sears Craftsman (new and used) as well as my lawn and garden equipment and I'm just about to replace the 1987 Kenmore (Whirlpool made) dishwasher my parents installed because the tub appears to have finally rotted out. I repaired that machine four times in those 32 years, all minor repairs: an inlet valve in 1994, a heater element in 2013 or so, two sets of door springs, once in 2005, and again in 2015. That's it. Everything else is as it was built in 1987. If I could fix it, I would do so and even "refresh it" a bit, but with a tub issue, it's not practical. I will likely replace it with another Kenmore (which is still WLP made). That store opened up in 1973. Prior to that it was located on Forest Ave and Castleton Ave(I forget which location was first, but I could point them both out to you). The current tool department manager/store manager is a lady and she's always been fair to me. Case in point: There was a USA made pliers set on clearance (missing one piece) being sold last year or the year before. I asked the clerk if the price could be reduced further as I was interested in buying it. He said no. I said, "Can you ask the manager over there to come over?" She did. I asked the same question. She said, "Give him 20% off of what it's tagged for now". I said to the clerk, "I'll take it, see how easy that was?". I bought a middle tool chest that was a floor display model, by asking the same thing. It's sitting about 10 feet from me.
i'm a tool guy. for decades, craftsman was a name you could trust, even to the point where professional mechanics would use their tools. over the years... their tools went to shit. biggest mistake they made was putting the craftsman name on foreign tools. the very day "made in china" was seen on a single craftsman product, thousands of people stopped buying craftsman all together. they previously were all made in USA. in tools, Germany and the US are top dogs with the rest of Europe and modern japan ('90s and newer) following very close behind. old japan and Taiwan is where the quality inexpensive is made. china is bottom of the barrel. has been that way for as long as i can remember.
They were getting trounced by the Home Depot, and thought that people wanted cheaper tools. That was the wrong assumption. They intrinsic strength of the Craftsman brand was they were made in the USA.
I was born in 2000 and I'm actually really attached to Sears. It was one of the few department stores that we actually bought stuff from because the prices were cheap
You've heard of Amazon Lockers over at Whole Foods? Guess where they got that idea. Sears! That's right, we used to order merchandise from the catalog, wait for a phone call when it arrived at the local Sears store, then go pick it up from a special counter. Was awesome!
The 25 year old ibm computer system is terrible. The computers crash and have 10sec lag between keystrokes. Let's not even talk about if your store servers lose power and how long it takes IBM to get them online again.
Now I will say one thing i forgot to mention, Sears Hometown is using POS from cgi that has their tech support in India. That makes it really hard to understand anything they say to you but they are way faster. Now with the IBM'S you at least had a native English speaker helping you.
@@03HemiCentralIN oh, the normal system wasn't any better. Not to mention the stupid credit card/shop your way stuff that slowed sales. I worked in hardware departments with appliances, sportswear, etc. I hated auto centers and hometown stores, due to them being separate entities. The whole store is a mess.
@@shinigamiryan5837 We were so understaffed we had to close most of our registers during the Christmas season. In order to staff the regesters they had to constantly pull employees from their departments. We had to continue to sell those damned credit cards and shop-your-way memberships all the while. You wouldn't believe the length of those lines. Most people just dropped their items on some random shelf and left.
Sears had the infrastructure and name recognition to compete with Amazon in this space. In retrospect, they should have gone back to focusing on distribution and closed all their shitty stores long ago.
At the mall near me, there was 4 big stores. Target, JC penny, Maceys, and Sears. But a few years ago sears closed, and that part of the mall has been closed every since.
I straddle gen x and millennial. As a kid Sears was where you went for dads Christmas present. We physically shopped for school clothes and we did wait 4-6 weeks when we ordered from a catalog. I sound old but I’m in my 30s I still remember pre-internet days the Sears wish book was what we kids would circle things we wanted. Toughskins jeans were durable for school and playground. I hate seeing it’s downfall. I live in a kit home that’s possibly a Sears brand built in 1921. Sears I actually will miss it
Yep! Sears was the store my family shopped at back in the 80's and my siblings and loved the Christmas catalog. I'm sad to see them go. Where I live we still have a very vibrant and successful mall and a few weeks ago, on a Saturday no less, I walked through Sears to exit to the parking lot. The store was almost completely devoid of customers. There were thousands of people in the mall and only a handful in Sears. Alas, how times have changed.
I was born only 2 years before Company Man and I remember Sears fondly. The catalogue of course was amazing and my first memory of the store is when my parents bought an Apple computer there in 1995. I remember the video game section was next to the kids clothing and it's the first time I saw Super Mario 64. We'd get our annual pictures taken at the studio there(my worst memories of Sears) and they were the go to store for appliances like vacuums and refrigerators. My city is one of the few Sears that refuses to close it even beat this latest round of closures! I visit about once a year just to check it out and it's amazing how the layout is exactly the same 25 years later!! I'm sure it was already a dated store back in the 90s, part of me feels this is a 60s/70s department store layout and it's kinda cool to see a retailer that doesn't feel like a huge soulless warehouse.
Also... 90s Kmart was my mom's store of choice over Target and Walmart! It was a cool store back then. Going there was an experience, eating popcorn and enjoying an ICEE drink running around the store. I noticed both stores turned to shit in 2003 when our Kmart closed for a while and was turned into a Big Kmart. That was when Kmart and Sears became obsolete and I don't even remember seeing my parents ever going there it was all Costco, Target and Walmart after that. Eddie has to be the reason for this shittyness! None of the stores feel modern even when I watch a video of a newer Kmart it just feels like a 90s store. I don't understand how it stayed open this long but our local one finally got the axe last week with the bankruptcy filling.
Yo i remember we as kids wanted our parents to shop at sears just to go play the new game consoles that had been out!that was a great strategy on there part.
its a little different now. one hedgefund doesnt own amazon. Also people who run newer companies know they can die at an time so they are constantly looking for an advantage. Walmart moved into the online space for this reason. Thing is though , one company that is big that will probably fall is apple. It will tkae a long time and people keep giving them money but man are they not putting out impressive products no more.
PHGamer Bezos has about a decade or so left at Amazon. After he leaves it’s anyone’s guess what will happen to Amazon. Apple has faired much better after Jobs than I thought they would. I didn’t think they would have a chance but iPhone chips are about a generation and a half better than Snapdragon and whatever else Samsung and Android are using.
apple is literally only a brand name. consumers will eat up anything they shit out. and iphones are so restrictive anyone who knows anything about tech stays away from them.
@@TheGbelcher there aren't that much stories about Jobs asking for performance, but there are many that talk about how neat picky he was in terms of design. Apple isn't doing bad at all (I mean, they're worth a fucking trillion dollars), but some of the design language they're pulling right now doesn't look as great as it did on the Jobs Era.
sears in the picture at 11:04 is still open, was just in there that store is closing on the 22 it was sad walking through there with all the empty shelfs and remembering all the memories I had in there as a kid
I was born in the late 50's and did most of my growing up in the 60's. Sears was a huge deal back then. They carried the highest quality goods that middle class wage earners could afford, and their catalog gave access to just about everything, no matter where you lived. In rural areas, they even had smaller stores where you could go in, look at things like appliances, pay for it, and in a couple of days, a truck would come out to your place with the item and install it for you. My family even bought a farm tractor that way. And when Dad announced we were going to the big Sears store in the city, we knew there was a major purchase in store. We even put on our "good clothes" to go there. This was one way people entertained themselves before we had the internet or mobile phones. And, not to put too fine a point on it, if an adolescent boy was going to see a girl or woman in her underwear in those days, it was going to be in the lingerie pages of the Sears catalog, because it damned sure wasn't going to be anywhere else.
And I can also well remember when, on a Saturday, my Dad would say he was going to Sears, I would rush to jump in the car, because I knew he was going to buy a Craftsman tool or tools of some sort, and I can't forget the one time we went, close to my 12th birthday, and he sent me to some other part of the store to look for something. I thought it was odd of him to do that, but he was buying me my very first Craftsman tool chest and set of tools as a combined birthday/Christmas present, and wanted to keep it a secret. If there was ever a special gift to be bought, or an appliance, or a TV set, which were things you did only every few years, you went to Sears. It was also the best place at the time to buy your first rifle or shotgun, or just about any other sporting good for that matter.
Both of my older sisters worked at Sears in the 60's, and we could use their employee discount on some things. A local TV personality for kids would make special appearances there and give autographs while they set up outside and gave away hot dogs to get you in the store. If you weren't alive back then, you can't possibly know what a big deal Sears was. That's why those of us who are left are bummed about their demise. Sadly, they changed, did not keep up with what was going on in retail, and for many years became less and less special so that there were few reasons to visit the store.
The last items I ever bought from Sears were in 1986 when I started one of my first businesses. I purchased a full-sized VHS video camera, and an HP Laser Printer for my office. I remember that combined they cost in excess of $2,500. Nowadays you can do the same thing with a cheap cell phone and a $99 all-in-one ink-jet printer. Times have changed and nothing lasts forever.
Thoroughly enjoyed reading your comment :) It's nice to know Sears held a special place in peoples memories.
Wow
My grandparents say the same. Many young families got their 1st anything at a Sears. It was Th e family store. Dad in tools mom in houseware & the kid up & down the toy isle. It was like the mall of the day. If in a small town it’s wheee u meet new kids from other small towns , the hangout
I really loved your story! U should write articles or something, you keep a person interested and could feel how you felt as a kid. Really good 😉
@@laurenmarie2511 thank you!
Sears is great because it's the emptiest parking lot area of the mall.
KibblesnBitts wait what you still got a sears at your mall? Mine was replaced two years ago with an ulta thats doing much better than sears ever did
The mall I go to still has a sears, but I saw the list and saw that the sears I go to will close down. Another mall nearby though which I also go to wasnt in the list, so I'm guessing that the sears at the other mall isn't going to close soon.
The sears in my mall is being replaced by Dave and busters 😂😂
Still got a Sears at my mall but it's so empty in there lmao
Devyn Janae Mine too! Lol
It boggles my mind that a company who’s claim to fame started with catalog sales could not jump into online selling with both feet and be Amazon before Amazon was a thing.
Yep... too shortsighted, and bet on the wrong horse... They had basically pioneered big catalog sales in the 19th and early 20th century, then as transport improved and automobiles improved and more people moved from rural areas to urban areas by mid-century, the big 'flagship store" department store model became their prevailing business... and they were uncontested until Walmart an Kmart basically took the low end of the business away from them with an "ultra-cheap little/no customer service thus lower cost/overhead" business model. if they'd stuck with high quality and high customer service/customer satisfaction models, they'd have held market share. Instead they tried to "race to the bottom" to "out-Wal-Mart" Walmart and lost their shirt.
At the same time, catalog sales had been dwindling for years, but suddenly with the advent of internet shopping, this was starting to turn around... the internet sales boom was poised to take off. At that very time, they decided to basically abandon that side of the business, when they already had an EXISTING transportation and distribution system and even delivery system in a lot of cases (direct to home furniture and appliance sales and delivery/installation) and of course a pre-existing order system for catalog sales... all they REALLY needed was to hire GOOD web developers to make a really cutting edge online shopping experience with easy to use, clear, and reliable webpages and online ordering system and integrate that with the already existing catalog and direct-to-home delivery system-- it was a HUGE advantage as they already had about 80% or more of what they needed to dominate early internet sales, but they TOTALLY dropped the ball and bet on the wrong horse, that internet sales were a temporary reprieve of an antiquated "catalog order" system that was dying, and the mega-mall end cap stores were the future of retail sales... They couldn't have been more wrong.
SO they squandered their advantages in their preexisting catalog systems that could have been adapted for internet sales with a modest investment, and their "race to the bottom" to try and get back marketshare from Walmart and the other low-end competitors went nowhere, so now they're sunk... Later! OL J R :)
@@lukestrawwalker
Can you record the audio book Version
One thing that's important though is that Amazon didn't make any money for its first 9 years in business.
Amazon is a very different business model. The problem is that online sales took away what was special about them. They went from having a monopoly to being one of many very quick
This is also going back to a time in which we had literally NO IDEA the impact the internet and computers would have on our lives
My grandpa worked in America in the 80s &90s. He brought home a lot of craftsman tools he bought in Sears. I still have these tools as I'm now a mechanic. I'm from the Philippines and never been into a Sears but I was saddened by the news because my grandpa really loved those stores and always tells me stories when I was younger.
As a former Sears employee you're right we didnt care about the customers, the morale in the stores was so low everyone felt like the company didnt care about us so why should we care about them or their business, we were always understaffed with broken and outdated equipment I was only there cause I needed the money but I hated working there
I worked at Sears in the 90s and I saw the moves being made back then away from full time employees and less customer service. I agree with the statement made in this video about “Sears speaking to the older generation “. These days the service is horrible and the employees do not know anything about the products.
I had a blast working there and I am sentimental about the Tulsa store closing but man, they have been an institution.
Also props to any company that sold my dad a pet monkey in the 60s via the catalog. For that alone, they will always rock in my book!
I started at Sears in 2001, fresh out of school with no idea what to do with my life. Sears was hiring, so I took the job. The pay started at $9.15/hr, good money in those days for a single guy with no mortgage, no student loans, no family to support.
That was 2001. I remember the time years later, I think it was 2009, when the decision was made to start all new hourly employees at minimum wage -- $7.00/hr. I remember thinking that things would deteriorate quickly, and they did. The company's expectations were not commensurate with the compensation offered. Why get minimum wage at Sears, when you can get minimum wage at Taco Bell -- without all the stress and the unreasonably high expectations?
@L K I didn't get fired lol I stayed in the company till my store closed in 2017 also I'm not talking about caring like my mother I'm taling about understanding human limitations like seeing that we are understaffed and expecting me to do the job of four people, like I was expected to be in the merchandise pick up area while at the same time processing online orders and packaging the ups orders on a busy day like holidays that just wasnt possible, even on a regular day it could get overwhelming plus like I said our equipment broke often
@@mikemira-cx1xf I had coworkers who had been there for 15 years and they stopped getting raises like in 2008 eventually with minimum wage raising we were all making the same amount so I who had only been there 2 years was making as much as someone who was there for 15
@L K lmao
I was a manager at Sears before and during the time Sears acquired K-Mart. Sears was loosing focus. They still had the strongest sales at the time in appliances and tools, but they were loosing ground everywhere else. They did a survey and asked us were we would like to see the company go. We all screamed the internet, AND to distance ourselves from Walmart by bringing in high end, quality brands. You see, Sears USE to be about high end brands, quality brands at a reasonable price, with a guarantee of satisfaction, or your money back and they'd ship it straight to your door. Exactly like Amazon right now. Walmart is about the price, but they did not offer the best, the top of the line but they did offer a guarantee. Both Amazon and Walmart adopted successful practices from Sears, not the other way around. Sears forgot that. They acquired K-mart in order to compete with Walmart, introduced shopping carts, stuffed the isles so full of product shoppers complained about not being able to move around, and got pissy about returns. I left before it got THAT bad because I knew Walmart would win that fight. Sears didn't have a chance. I'm just surprised at how long they held on.
Imho, you're spot on. The difference between Sears and Kmart and Walmart was, Sears provided a much better quality product than the cheap garbage plastic Chinese junk the both Walmart and Kmart specialize in. Sears used to stand for Quality Above All Else. That is where the other two companies fail big time. I always look forward to going into Sears with their popcorn and chocolates. I despise going into any Walmart and Kmart to.
My dad worked as Sears for 20 years at the auto center. When he started Sears was doing fine but he says that when Sears stoped the catalog in 1993 that is when Sears messed up and should have gone online LONG before amazon got big. However all Sears was worried about was getting traffic in stores. However Eddie Lambert wasn’t the first CEO of Sears Holdings. Then he forced the former SEARS CEO out of his position. However I don’t know why Sears or KMART is still in business. That don’t advertise at all anymore and didn’t get a shit for online or other ways to keep Sears truly alive.
Robert Marcotte Sear, Kmart, and Walmart*
Sears didn't "acquire" K-mart...it was the other way around.
leschatsmusicale Kmart actually was strong after bankruptcy in 2002 but they blew through all their money they were making to acquire Sears in 2004 and it just wasn’t good at all for both a few years after the merger.
I was born in the 1950's and remember a time when Sears was jammed with shoppers on any given weekend, especially during the holiday season. I can still remember the smell of popcorn when we would first enter the store (they used to offer it free of charge to shoppers).
As I remember it, Sears was the store that catered to mostly middle class folks and families. They were not the least expensive stores, but they offered nice, friendly and helpful customer service with a wide variety of useful items and of course offered the warranty on a good number of products. They were not among the higher end stores either like Neiman-Marcus, Macy's, The Broadway or May Co. On a moderate wage, a person could afford your everyday household products, hardware, appliances and clothing and then finance bigger ticket items like refrigerators or washers and dryers, etc. Sears would even deliver and set up items like that as well. Sears was kind of the store for the common man.
Things were so vastly different then. Not better or worse, just different. There was more of the social status involved with some shoppers. We didn't have Best Buy, Target or Wal-Mart stores. They didn't exist until much later at least where i lived in the west coast. Choices were much more limited. We had more time, less money and fewer options.
As time progressed, Sears and that whole type of shopping experience literally grew obsolete, I believe. With the tightening of budgets and the cost of living so frightfully high, one looks more for products on sale and is more apt to bargain hunt. The internet has changed everything drastically of course. In a strange sort of way, you could say we have come full circle. Rural Americans started shopping from home through the "Sears Catalog" many decades ago and now many Americans have returned to shopping from home through online catalogs!!
These are just.my memories. Perhaps someone else can either elaborate or present a different experience.
William I remember going to the sears in Durham NC in the mid to late 70s, before wal mart etc..and the place always had a lot of people and most importantly as a kid remember the pop corn candy island right smack in the middle of the aisle going to the mall...miss those days.
Back around 1970 when I was 12 or so my Dad would let me drive his car in the Sears parking lot on Sundays as they were closed and it was empty. The store and catalog was a part of my life in those pre-internet days. Wore a lot of Sears jeans before I finally caved in a wore Levis and Cords when I got into jr. high.
I was born in the early 70s, and I whole-heartedly agree with your sentiment. When you needed an appliance, your choices were Montgomery Ward or Sears. There was always the local appliance store, but you would pay extra for it. Kenmore stood for quality, they had the selection, and, most importantly for many people, they offered financing. My mother would talk about the first item she ever bought on credit was a typewriter at Sears in the early 60s. I still have it.
Do Sears Appliance stores still exist? I can remember small towns having one where a full size Sears wouldn't be viable. And if you needed something else, there was the catalog.
I was so excited when I bought my first Craftsman tool set in 1990. This was the big time, made in America, guaranteed forever. Now, made in China. You might as well buy Kobalt or Husky and save some money.
This last Sunday my car battery was going dead. Sears is close to my house, so I thought I would run over there. The auto department has a hand drawn sign they are closed today. A plastic chain is pulled across the area, so you can't even look at the merchandise.
Who had my battery, was open, and was $20 cheaper for the same item? Walmart.
Perfectly spot on when talking about today’s consumers’ budget. I’m a millennial who turned 18 right before the 2008 economic crisis. My whole adult hood had been being as frugal as humanly possible and solely surviving. I can’t afford to rent a one bedroom apartment/house on my own, let alone finance a fridge and washer and dryer for it. Sears’ prices and types of brands that they sell didn’t change to reflect a financial crisis and a growing lack of a middle class and I think that’s what started to hurt them so much. I see stores like Sears, Macy’s, J.C. Penny, Montgomery Wards, etc. as a shopping experience for the baby boomer generation (not a bad thing; just a lot of financial differences between boomers and millennials). But millennials are a huge generation at the moment and we are at the peak age of our consumerism, so companies that can’t adapt and cater to us will undoubtedly fail.
Not often a youtube comment reads like a pleasant editorial, +1
As an 8-year old kid, my father always took my mother and I out to dinner on Friday nights. This was around 1974, and I fondly remember Dad taking us to Sears after dinner; they had the Pong game, and I can remember Dad and I standing in line for our chance to play table tennis on a TV! After a few weeks of this, he eventually broke down and purchased a Pong game for our home. Back in those days, Sears was a destination retailer.
I also remember the excitement when the Sears Christmas Wish Book would arrive in the mail. This was their big Christmas catalog, full of all of their products, and all available from either shipping or ordering and pick up at the store. We used to spend hours going through it, looking at all the stuff and always listing way more things than we could possibly expect to receive from Santa.
Like with Kmart, it's really sad to see what has become of Sears.
I'm 23, but I have a sense of sadness with the fall of Sears. My grandpa worked as an appliance salesman there from the 60's until the mid-2000's or so when he retired. I always loved going to see him at work, dressed up in his suit and tie, back when he still had a full head of dark hair. If I was at his house before he went to work, he would let me pick his tie for the day (usually I picked the one with Mickey Mouse on it). Makes me sad that the era of being able to make a real career out of retail seems to have gone away. He took pride in his job, everyone at the store did. They were paid well, and they were able to retire comfortably. It seems to me that when taking care of your employees is no longer a priority, you lose good, hardworking people and end up hiring people who don't give a single shit. Because hey, it's just retail.
I'm 25, and pretty sad about the Sears. I remember going shopping there with my grandparents. I mean, it was a great place. It sucks what is happening. I am glad you have good memories with your grandfather though!
Fantastic story, by the way. Absolutely spot on . The first sign a company is struggling is how they treat their staff. Since labor is usually the biggest expense, that is the first line to get the chopping block. What usually follows is pretty predictable, and Sears is a great example of it. But you can look at other businesses that were primarily customer facing, and the same thing happened before their demise: You treat staff like shit, they quit, you hire lower cost employees who do not care. Customers notice, they stop coming back. It's a death spiral of service, and any service based industry should see it coming a mile away.
Lauren Kelso felt on that
I remember even 11 years ago when i was a lil kid, that place was so cool and i bought all my clothes there and my parents bought most of their appliances too but then they changed. No one ever goes there anymore unless they're poor or nostalgic. The one in my local mall is so goddamn empty and sad and the music is so low. Its depressing and the people working there just have a vibe of dread drenched around them. They don't even greet you anymore when you go in
My Grandma had a similar career at Eaton's (a Canadian equivalent to Sears). She worked there until they went bankrupt in the 90's. A 30 year career and a pension, all for working retail. Completely unheard of today. She cared deeply about her job, and worked hard, because her employer cared about her.
Im still working in Sears, tomorrow my shift starts at 9 and I’m here watching this video lmao
you still work at Sears?
@@robertoXCX lol
Update
Poor ass fu k
I work at sears too! But they are closing my store 😭😭😭
I just picked up a part time at sears as a temporary transition. The place is legitimately stuck in the early 2000s.
Not wrong lmao. Im at the St. charles maryland store
@Ronald McFondle wow!
You still working there?
@@kodiiayyeee256 Nah I found a full time job in my degree shortly after.
@@Wildchildinc That's great to hear! Keep doing well, and stay safe my friend!
Lampert's goal was obtaining assets below market rate, and getting interest payments to his hedge fund investors at a higher than market rate. It's quite simple. The longer he strung Sears along, the more interest he would make for his investors, and the longer than the real estate appreciates. He gladly injected capital into the company, so it would continue operating longer and thus making more interest payments to ESL investments. In order to continue making payments on the debt to Lampert, Sears had to keep selling assets. Who bought them? Lampert and ESL investments, at below market rates. Then Lampert would rent the real estate back to Sears. Then when a store closed, he found another tenant (Cheesecake Factory went into the Sears near me). Once Cheesecake Factory was in place, he did a cash out refinance on the property due to the increased appreciation, thus earning even more for his ESL investors. This was the plan all along and why he bought Sears - for the assets. The show BIllions has a season dedicated to this.
I'm glad someone said it. That cocksucker Lampert was definitely responsible for the constant issues that sears has. He's purposely running it into the ground to buy up the assets on the cheap
He sucks
Its not a tragedy…it was a murder.
I noticed for years before Sears closed down, they had a negative net worth. I wondered how in the world are they still in business? And what kind of a leader is Lampert, running a business that is going bankrupt? Then I find out he was the primary creditor on all that debt. He effectively pulled a Carl Ichan.
The Sears in Landmark mall in Alexandra Virginia became a Amazon distribution center
As someone who worked at Sears during it's bankruptcy I can say this: most "members" feel entitled and they would say "mY faMIly hAs beEN sHoPpiNG hErE 4EveR WHaT dO U meEn I kaNT haVE tHiS 4 fReE?" Then go about screaming at us for not having in stock what Sears sold 20 years ago. I even had a hammer thrown at me in the tool department.
Hopefully it was after all the tools went to shit
Yup, I spent 22 great years at Sears #2270 and some of the customers could be very nasty. And your right....they used as an excuse, the slogan "Satisfaction Guaranteed or your Money Back" And expect it for free. One customer bought a battery for his car, and it didn't work, probably because something else was wrong with the car. But the customer told the salesman to stick that battery up his rear....and without any hesitation, the salesman said the battery wouldn't fit cause he had four tires up there from the last customer. I was standing there, and the customer left the battery and turned and walked away. Most of the employee's were older, and treated customers real good, but on the other hand we didn't put up with their crap either.
Retail Heroes
@@jimenz6548 that salesman had a good comeback LOL!
@@jimenz6548 I strive to be like that salesman. What a brilliant comeback 🤣
I'm 46 and I can answer your last question. My parents were Sears loyalists. The main reason was because of the "warranty agreement." Anything bought from them they would send out a tech to fix and if they couldn't you were able to pick another no matter the price for free. My mom's home is full of Craftsman and Kenmore appliances. This year her lawnmower went out and she called them to fix it. She got the run around for 3 months and told her that she had to take it to a 3rd party repair company. When she did they told her would call her if it could be fix. Long story short she had to call them and they told her they could not fix it and to go pick another. Gor to the store and they told her she had 30 days after dropping it off to come back. It was the 31st day. She cancelled all her warranties that day. Like you said, they didn't care. She had been a customer for over 40 years
1963Iota I bought a craftsman lawnmower this summer at Sears (my original lasted 20 years). I didn’t like the bells and whistles on it so I called them and they let me bring it back (opened product) and pick a different model and they credited the difference.
I totally get that Sears customer service is outdated, but I think they get a bad rap as people just want to pile on sometimes. I’m not saying you’re lying as I’m sure it happened, but let’s not pretend every retailer is perfect. I have my stories with Best Buy, Amazon, PC Richards, but it’s too easy to crap on Sears.
@@chrisolivo6591 ....not crapping on Sears at all. They have been good to my family for years. I just hated to see what they did to my mother after years of loyalty to them.
Ha we bought a washer from Sears and it broke literally the day after the warranty expired. Oh how my mother was livid.
Best to buy Speed Queen Washer / Dryer they are commercial but they hold up and the parts are easy to get and repairing them is also easy. Also commercial might seem like they cost $$$$ but no you can pick up a washer for like $600 plus being "commercial" they don't have to use less water so you actually get better cleaned cloths like the old days.
I'm 61 and took a broken wrench in for replacement. They checked the number stamped in the wrench and said it was too old, the life expectancy of a wrench is 15 years. I read the Lifetime Warranty from a large poster above the cash register in the tool department. Aloud. No part of it says "Guaranteed for the life of the tool". I bought that wrench new and I'm not dead yet. They no longer replace ratchets, they give you a repair kit. If it's an old one, they don't have a kit. Also, a torque wrench is not considered a hand tool.
It would seem that Eddie Lampert didn’t buy Sears to run Sears, but bought it to lower its value and sell off its assets to himself at a lower resulting price. To put it in terms of cars, he bought a car not to drive it, but to sell it for parts
Aaron Landry I agree
I suspect the parts he's really eyeing is the real estate. I believe Sears owned much of their stores. All those closings opens up some really nice properties in valuable locations.
Like the downtown Santa Monica location that's a block away from one of the most popular malls in the LA area? Or the other one in the recently gentrified Boyle Heights? Nah.
I don't blame him. That was the only thing to do.
Exactly!! plus making a profit for himself. I wonder how the stakeholders feel about this.
I'm 58. Sears was Craftsman tools, Kenmore appliances, etc. They were GOOD QUALITY products at reasonable prices. As other commenters mentioned, going to Sears was a "Family Event" that happened a few times a year. The biggest memories for me, were getting clothes for back-to-school in the late 60's thru 70's. Also Christmas... and if we needed tools (my Dad was always a handyman) it was Craftsman or bust! Also, appliances. Kenmore was reliable and reasonably priced. So, I do have some deep roots into Sears, and was genuinely saddened by the demise. :( I saw the condition of our local store before it "died" and was really bothered by it. "The death of an icon". Sigh. :'( RIP Sears. You were great in your day.
58 also.
Yes I remember that Sears Craftsman tools always had a lifetime warranty and and the tool quality was top notch.
Can confirm, I actually bought my first craftsman tool box at sears.
By the way, kenmore isn’t a manufacturer. It’s a private label. It’s goods were manufactured by brands like whirlpool, Electrolux, LG etc
The saddest part is that Sears had the infrastructure and supply chain needed to become what Amazon is today already in place decades ago. Essentially, Amazon is the 21st century version of the Sears catalog. If only someone at Sears corporate had the vision to see the internet for what it was back at the turn of the millennium.
That's an interesting observation.
Yup, i look at that as the old man mentality at a company. "it works so why change". Then at a certain point it just doesn't work anymore. I'm into motorcycles, modern brands know that it's not races that sell bikes but hell the brand I'm on GasGas they still believe in the "what wins on the weekend sells on Monday"...um no I have never bought a bike like this nor have my friends. UA-cam reviews sells products, dealers having the product sells products. *shrug* Some companies are stuck in the past and won't move forward with what they don't know or understand.
I agree. These companies could’ve survived had they seen that their methods were about to become outdated due to technological advancement. In my opinion, Netflix handled it the best. They could’ve kept to their dvd rentals and been buried next to blockbuster, but they realized that the internet and streaming was the way forward, making a change to keep their company afloat long term.
I agree. Sears was there with the internet shopping in the 90s before Amazon. They also did the "shop online" and pick up your product at the store. This is something that brick and mortar stores are still in the pioneer stage or about to just get a grasp of today.
"He is a really bad businessman?" No, he's a hedgefund manager. What he did to Sears was INTENTIONAL.
Karma's a Bitch. I honestly believe the Blood of Little Adam Walsh has haunted SEARS for over 30 years. They NEVER owned up to it, tried to BRIBE John Walsh and his Wife Reve, and DESTROYED documents to cover their own asses.
Tornado1994 Nothing to do with that. This current CEO/owner has been slowly milking off the real estate values of all the Sears properties and name brands since 2005. He intended this to be a quicker sell off but I’m sure it took time while the real estate values of the storefronts increased over the years. He killed Kmart and now Sears is about to die off.
@@dolfan29 it does seem like he's assist stripping Sears, and intentionally putting them a company he holds majority stake or close to it into major debt to another company that he owns outright and to a 3rd company he owns stake in, plus he kind of loaned money to himself. But then again I'm only using common sense observations
This is just a variation of the old corporate raider trick, buying up a company to make money from selling off it's assets.
Sear's was domed period
Speaking as an older viewer of this channel, Sears really was the Amazon of long ago. They were the go-to store for just about everything in your house... and even the house itself. Yes, you could order a house from Sears at one time. I drive by one often, and you would not know it by driving by it. I have been in it and it is a quality pre-fab home.
When I was a kid, we went to Sears for just about everything. My first credit card was Sears. My first record player was a Sears Silvertone. I slept on a Sears mattress. I wore Sears clothing. Today the appliances in my house are nearly all Kenmore from Sears. HOWEVER, they did not adjust to on-line ordering. What made them so good long ago (ordering from the catalog for home delivery or store pickup) is exactly what they bungled when the Internet became a way of shopping.
They could have kept going. Like what JCPenney and Kohls is doing today to try and stay alive, they could have had a significant on-line presence and offered key must-have items in the store. They missed the boat, and that boat has sailed too far from the harbor to get it back.
has it tho? One problem with keeping companies alive is to try to be like in the heyday instead of shrinking and then trying to grow again. I don't know. I'm not a business person. But they didn't start off with stores. And some stores are still going. Some comments mention smaller stores with more precise merchandise. That's an option like best buy. Or going cheaper but slightly better quality than walmart. That can't be hard to do. Sears has a recognizable name. They need time to low key build up their reputation more than enough.
Think you are pretty much spot on. I was born in '49. Remember well the Christmas catalogs when we were kids. Thing for me was back in the 70's all I had was credit to buy with (yea, I know). Was shopping for Christmas presents and all I had was a Visa card, but Sears only took there own card. So I went elsewhere. Really have not bought much there since..the experience soured me. Wonder how many folk were "soured" over the years. They had plenty of opportunities to do it wrong, or right, in the customers eyes. Then there are the Mall stores, never have really liked going to Malls in fact have not gone in years, like 20 years! But then I find getting a quart of oil on one side of Walmart and getting groceries on the other a less than satisfying shopping experience. Too far to walk. And no I do not shop as I walk so that old store setup mantra does not work. Online shopping with no or low price shipping is the way I go now. Wonder how long Walmart will make it now?
"Sears has a recognizable name."
Yeah, but not in a good way to everyone. A lot of people recognize Sears as "overpriced junk I could get from Amazon or Walmart for cheaper". Older people might recognize Sears for something else, but for the younger people? Might as well retire the Sears name, because a lot of people don't give a fuck about that name.
How do you know the house you drive by often is a Sears home?
Does it have a Sears logo on it?
He said he's been in it.
I was born in 1988, and honestly one of my strongest childhood memories was browsing the Christmas Sears catalogue and making up a Christmas gift list to give to my parents, just to inevitably not get a thing from that list. Lol.
Must be broke democRATS
@@joedirte716 unnecessarily bringing up politics in a comment not even relevant to it 🤡
@@alexs.818 well illinois is a broke democRAT state that hates business. Explain that ome
1983 here and It was the most exciting fun thing to do every yr always a few things I wanted bad
Sears catalog used to be awesome
My grandpa once pointed to a small small house while we were driving through the countryside and said: You see that house there?
Me: Yeah, what about it?
GP: that house was sold out of the Sears catalog in the 1930s.
Needless to say i was shocled that something like that was possible especially back then, so seeing Sears in such a rough state right now is quite sad
@2Coop 4U lol it indeed was a very shocling experience
Some Guy quite a shocl
Ya they're all over rural areas.
There's a Sears House Ct near where I grew up, so named because up until a couple decades ago it was the site of an old Sears mail-order home. Now it's just a collection of cookie-cutter single-family homes.
There's a documentary about sears homes on yt.
They would sell either all the pieces, like a big Lego set, and the buyer would usually just build it themselves with the help of a local carpenter.
Sears would give the option of using their own carpenters but usually most wouldn't take their services.
Sears Bankruptcy - Bigger Than You Know
Lmao
The Flagged UA-camr II Savage.
I'm 41 years old. When their catalog got thinner, I knew it was over. As anyone around my age will tell you, the back of that thick Sears Christmas catalog meant EVERYTHING to us 80's kids!
Wis Dom my brothers used to draw in/vandalize the Sears catalogue after the holidays (the one that came in the mail).
I am a bit younger than you, but one of my fondest memories was a Sears catalog from 1987 or 1988.
I remember looking at their toy displays; especially the one they had set up for Ghostbusters toys.
I know what you mean about the catalogs. I couldn't wait to see the catalogs for Sears and also JCPenneys. Especially their Christmas versions 😍💕. It always felt like a dream look at the things I would put on my holiday list!!
LOL SEARS catalog, As a child, I would look thru and decorate my future house. At 28, my 3 yr old had his SEARS bedroom. My Mom and Nana burst out laughing when they saw the pictures!!! Also, once I became said parent, I realized their little boys' clothes did not wear out at the knees. And yes, those Christmas Catalogs from any major department store were our Everything around this time of the Year!!
Was so happy when it came
The only time I've ever been in Sears is when I would park by their doors in order to access the mall faster, especially if it was raining. I'd fire thru Sears really fast and then shop at the rest of the stores. It was never anything more than an entrance/exit.
Great comment, true words I’m impressed by your comments hope we can be friends if that’s okay with you??
As a young kid growing up in the early 60's you could not wait to get your hands on the yearly Christmas catalog. They were also the go to place for appliances and tools. Sad, but they just didn't keep up with the changing retail climate.
basically only really old people would care about it, i was borne in early 80s i didn't give a shit about Sears, it was far to expensive, best thing was Catalog but we never really bought anything from them, we just used book for gift ideas or stuff we needed in house hold and my family went out buy similar or same thing from another company which was much cheaper.
There was a time when Sears and other retail stores (Penney's, etc) paid their sales associates decent wages and commissions. These associates became experts in their areas and were motivated to sell. Now, almost every brick and mortar seems to treat their sales associates as just someone to ring up the sale. My experience has been that I have to find what I'm looking for, no one around to ask questions (or upsell me). Very disappointing. I loved Sears growing up.
You are right about the sales associates not being proficient due to a lack of respect from the retailer. I worked at Guitar Center for a short time. When I started the commission formula yielded 12-18% for the salesperson. After a few months of making a decent living, the formula was modified to yield 7-12%. It wasn't long after that I left. Additionally, I was scheduled to close one day and after my housekeeping was completed I found that the doors were locked and I could not leave. I found the manager on duty and he told me that we were doing inventory and I had to stay until that was completed. There was no mention of this until that moment. I had a gig that night and I needed to leave to make it on time. His answer was "too bad." I demanded that he let me leave and pointed out that refusal to open the door was illegal. False imprisonment. He laughed and I called the police. after over 30 minutes the police arrived and he denied keeping us there against our will and then decided to unlock the door. I pretty much thought that I was fired. They called the next day to ask why I wasn't there for my shift. I went in and the GM wanted to speak with me. He was writing me up. I refused to sign it and told him that the next time they lock me in the store I will not call the police, I will call a lawyer. I worked there for about another two weeks before taking a much better job. No two weeks notice for these clowns. I no-showed and when they called I told them I was on my way, without any intention of going there. The idiots called me two more times! The last call they got rude so I laughed and hung up. I buy gear online now. So does just about everyone else.
@@jameslovell405 And now they filed for bankruptcy. I used to mess with the slimey workers there that were salesman and didn't know anything. Not to the cool ones tho, of which there were few. They bought out the well run musicians friend store, and turned it into Walmart of music. Good for you for moving on. Of course you had to make that gig, there was faces that needed melting. 🤘
Your right Roger, I worked many years at Sears, and we had an older store with many employees that started there in the 1940's just after the war. Dedicated people that taught new employees how to treat a customer. I loved the store with people that ended up being one big family. I was the last hired as full time, and at 65 am now the youngest of the lot. I head up/help with yearly retirement get togethers and every year we lose one or two. I truly loved all those people
I worked with. I'm a Sears guy to the end. 22 years for me, my son 24 years, my girlfriend 27 years. I only left because of the corporate management had zero common sense. Such a great company, with such poor upper management. There is a book you need to read, "The Big Store"....its dead accurate.
TRUE AS HELL! I have worked in retail for 25 years and both penneys and sears got really cheap with their employees in the early 2000s. well see how well that has worked out for them. both used to offer pension plans to their employees, thats right a PENSION plan. When i worked at JCPENNEY I quit 5 months too soon before I would have recieved a pension today at age 55. HOwever im not sure how that would have played out as they have since declared bankruptcy, but they RARELY talked about the pension plan. maybe because not many stayed there for a long period of time???
Amazon's success is a BIT more than just throwing up a web page. Sears *did* and *does* have a web site selling their goods, but Bezos knew what he was doing, and the Sears Mgmt did not.
When I was a little girl, 50 years ago, the Sears Christmas catalogue was everything! My sibling and I would spend hours looking thru the pages at all the “stuff” you could buy dreaming about what Santa might bring. We didn’t have as many toys as kids do today.
It was like a mall in a store
Barbie Dueck That was such a major part of Chrstmas every year.
Me too! I was born in 1959 and probably around 1963 I first remembered getting one and the moment it came in the mail I'd steal it and take it up to my bedroom and circle everything I wanted with a red crayon. A good Christmas was one that I got 10% of those items. Eventually I got to where I numbered them in order of priority. When my little brother was old enough he got the green crayon and my sister got the pink one and my color changed to blue. Then we would leave it out in the living room and Dad would tear out the toy section and send it to the north pole. I think we got it every fall but I don't remember the month. Maybe September or October. We were unaware of any other source of toys. The way we thought it worked was Santa sent us the catalog and we would pick out what we wanted and then he would bring us toys based on our requests and how good we were that year. That's also when I found out that poor kids weren't every good and rich kids were very good. But I digress.
I was born in 1978 and the sears catalog was still a big deal in the 80’s…
Wow 😯 well I’m impressed by your comment actually you have a point can we be friends if you don’t mind??
I agree the x-mas catalogue was full of dreams for us kids and dread for the parents
My grandma's favorite store was sears. As a kid I hated shopping there because their clothes were always out of touch with the fashion of the time, plus they never seemed to last. Then I got my first job there at 17 years old (2010) and remember being incredibly frustrated with their ancient computer system for the cash registers that oftentimes froze completely until it was rebooted. Right before the sears closed down for good, maybe in 2017-2018 when I was 24-25, I went back in one last time and saw those same ancient computers. I guess that could have been an indicator all the way back in 2010 that they weren't doing too well.
One big issue is that they stopped keeping the stores looking nice starting in 2005. I was working at Sears in 2005 and that was the last time I saw an appearance update in any Sears store. K-Mart is just as bad. When my local K-Mart closed early this year there was still a giant sign on the wall in the electronics department saying VCR. It's really sad, but once he got his hands on Sears and K-Mart Lampert just ran them right into the ground and then started digging.
Exactly, Lampert should have his ass thrown in jail.
The KMart in Franklin, PA closed in April 2018 or so. When I went in there in the last month or two, they had removed some shelving. The floor looked like the shelves had been there for a very long time.
Crazy, I had no idea Sears started the Discover Card...
Yep. I member'.
Back in the 80's, my (ex)wife & I used to bank with SEARS SAVINGS BANK, whom subsequently got bought-out by CitiBank.
Yea when I worked they they pushed them things hard
For a long time, Sears' business model was to be a financial institution, masking itself as a department store. Their plan was to deal in expensive brands and products and hook you into buying them on [high interest] credit cards they'd sign you up for in the store.
badfeminist your name is epic lol
Sears didnt die, it was murdered by Lampert.
Sears was already dying, Lampert just stuck the knife in for the coup de grace...
Sears was already dying. Lampert is just feasting off the carcass. I'm sure that's why he's keeping all the assets "in house". He'll get paid, the stockholders get zip.
So obvious! conflict of interest since the beginning! Lampert is making a profit of all these sellings. He is a snake! Poor naive stakeholders and they thought he was helping them.
Sears killed its self. I am glad to see them go.
I find it hard to believe that it Eddie killed Sears
I'm only in my early 20s but I'm devastated by the death of Sears. The awfulness of Eddie, so many missed opportunities. My former Sears at my mall had the friendliest employees I'd ever met, and I always got what I needed with their selection. Clothes for work, tools, a coffee maker, and a four burner grill for dad's Christmas. It was very hard to watch them close. I could always see the former glory behind the gloom.
Sears was too expensive. It was priced for baby boomers with extra income. Once they began to retire. And I want to know more value for their money. Sears fell off. Sears also started to contract out their installation and services which were terrible.
I stopped shopping at sears due to the high price tag on their merchandise. What's the point in paying a premium, when I can get the same brand at Target, Amazon or Walmart for a better deal.
Their premium was service, and they forgot how to sell it.
Sears is literally the cheapest retailer. If you are a SYW member and paying more for something at Sears you’re doing something seriously wrong.
If you buy something cheap, It won’t last you.
That’s not true, you just have to shop smarter...
@@yrly59e In most cases it was. You could get the same TV at walmart for a cheaper price compared to if you bought it at Sears.
I remember starting to work with Sears in 1998. One of the first things out of my then bosses mouth was "Walmart is not our competition, we don't care for those types of customers". I knew there was going to be trouble in the next few years or decades. That attitude is what got them in trouble. Never ignore your competition even if you think they are beneath you.
Yeah, but they were NOT direct competitors. Yeah, they are both retail stores. But NOT catering to the same market. Kmart and Wal*Mart were direct competitors. Sears' direct competitor in reality was J.C. Penney's. (Both Penney's and Sears being a bit "upmarket" from Kmart and Wal*Mart). Even if it was not a LARGE difference, it was there. We were a Sears and Kmart family, our "good" clothes came from Sears our "play" clothes from Kmart. This is like comparing Buick and Ford. Buick competed in the upper middle domestic car market with "Mercury". In that case Buick won. (Mercury is gone). Ford competes with Chevrolet at the entry level domestic car market. Comparing Sears with Wal*Mart is almost like comparing Whole Foods with Aldi. Your boss wasn't actually wrong from a marketing perspective. The idea of putting Wal*Mart on the same level as Sears says a LOT of BAD SHIT about the overall economy. We now think of a discount store as being at the same level as a middle-class store. That's a REGRESSION of the standard of living we are now accustomed to.
Being born in 97, I always saw Sears as a store for home utilities, decorations and stuff for construction. My dad was a constructor and those were the only things we bought. They were very limited in trendy stuff, toys and video games. I always saw it as a store that sold overpriced junk
I am 53 years old. My dad worked for Sears for 46 years. Nearly everything we owned when I was a kid came from Sears. My dad's brother also worked for Sears for nearly 50 years. I currently own thousands of dollars worth of Craftsman tools. Sears was a huge deal. It makes me sick to see what's happened to it. There used to be a Sears store in my small hometown. In the 70s they closed it and many other small town stores to focus on shopping malls. They abandoned the rural customers that were a significant part of their original market. This, in my opinion, is the first in a long line of bad decisions that has led to bankruptcy. I agree with another poster that Sears blew it by not moving their catalog online in the early days of the internet. Amazon would not exist if they had. I told their clerks for years and any manager that I could corner that if they were losing me as a customer, they were on the way out of business. The combination of Sears and K-Mart was a mistake, too. K-Mart had a reputation for carrying cheap junk, while Sears had a reputation for quality. They didn't go together.
Ronald Schoolcraft yeah, that's about right
Ronald Schoolcraft Good for them :) U can’t imagine working for same company for 50years... different era.
Sears used to put out a massive Christmas catalog filled with pages & pages of toys. My brothers and I would go through that and and make our wishlists all from that one book. It was basically a phone book sized collection of stuff!
I use to be an employee and was close with family friends at the corporate level who knew or had met Eddie. All of this was inevitable and only a matter of time. The guy was rarely at corporate (Chicago). He spent most of the year away at his home in Florida and only few in a couple times a year. The guy didn't give a crap.
Well dang.
It is a nice place. He just wasn't in to Sears. No merchandise or else stuff that had been there for so long.
I feel bad for all the employees he screwed over.
My uncle in the Chicago area worked for Sears Roebuck as the senior Vice President until about 2014-2015 Eddie lampert in his eyes has no idea how to run a business
Sounds like a chicago democRAT. Sounds like a slave driver
I'm in my late 40's and when my mama handed me that Sears catalog ("wish book") and an ink pen and told me to cirlcle what I wanted Santa to bring me, I knew the holiday season had begun. I never got all the things, but I wanted most of it. The presentation was lush. It made me want to spend money I didn't even have 😂😂😂.
YourHalfSister my brothers would vandalize the wish book catalogue in January. They would draw mustaches on people or write cartoon thought/speech bubbles of the people saying the worst stuff one could imagine. They came up with some drawings that are too foul to describe on UA-cam. But we all enjoyed looking at the stuff over the holidays.
Thanks for this post... it brought a smile to my face remembering my childhood. I completely forgot about this but we used to do this too. I can still remember the smell of those catalogs I spent so much time flipping through them in the months before Christmas.
I'm 59. As a child when we went to the mall ( new concept ) Sears was the store we parked by. Meaning if was the first store and last Store we walk through while visiting the mall.
Now I do not even go to the mall.
You're lucky if you can even find a mall.
So true. I haven't been to a mall in years, both of our local malls are long gone. Today my "mall" is my PC, I can shop 24/7 and in a few days my order is on my front porch. Too bad Sears didn't follow technology.
The decline of the shopping mall didn't do Sears any good, since it seems most of their stores were in malls. Malls are still around, just in much smaller numbers. It was the push out into the suburbs by retailers that started the death of malls. Sears tried to follow, but they were too little and too late.
That’s my exact story just a bit younger than you. Enter mall through sears and exit at the end
mmiller21157 and one that actually has people in it
Going to be honest, I just now realized that the Sears tower was named after Sears the retail company.
I remember a few years ago I went to Sears to get my mom an extra Christmas gift since the one I got was nice but she would have to wait to be able to use it. I found it at Sears and I think at that moment I realized why I never went there.
We had a Sears in our mall and most people passed thru it because there was a nice parking next to it and it was an easy access, but never actually felt the need to buy anything there.
The first floor had a mix of fancy jewelery and perfumes presented in counters where the employee would be behind and discuss with the customers, but everything else around it was bright and bland just like a Walmart, so everything had that vibe of cheapness that made it feel worth less.
I think one of the reasons Sears declined is because they couldn't make their minds on what kind of company they wanted to be like, which alienated their customers.
Minty Root We also had a Sears in our mall and did the same thing it had a nice parking lot and great access. It’s interesting to see other people do the same thing
Great comment, true words I’m impressed by your comments hope we can be friends if that’s okay with you??
Rain Man came out in 1988- "K-Mart sucks." I had a K-mart right next to my house. Wal-Mart or Target was 15-20 min away. Anytime I walked into the place, looking for the simplest things, they didn't have them. You'd settle for some similar but over priced item and walk to the register where there would be 4 or 5 workers running 1 or 2 checkout lines that were always backed up. Then when you finally got to the register you'd realize what took so long- "Do you have a membership card? What's your phone number? Do you want to donate to charity? Hold on- my computer from 1992 is on the fritz, we have to do all of this over again... Let me print out your receipt that has the entire patriot act on it, it should only be another 23 feet."
The last time I was in that K-mart they were finally having their going out of business sale. Walking into that place, and Sears, always gave me some strange feeling that was a mix of nostalgia and sadness. The store was mostly empty with stained and cracked tile you knew was from the 80s. "Rhythm is a dancer" was playing over the store's loud speakers. It's like they never left that time, and that was the whole problem.
Exactly! The whole department store model has become a relic of the past. Wal-Mart and Target seem to getting by, I assume that has to do with them modernizing their stores, adding full grocery sections and self-check out areas etc. Sears and K-Mart have just refused to get with the times. Also, as someone pointed out above, if Sears Holdings had taken advantage of the internet when it was new, they could be one of the most successful companies of today. They could literally have been Amazon.
Man, you hit it right on the head! They never had exactly what you needed, something close but Walmart was 10 min away with options..they killed themselves
I hear that. I do work at one though and they have updated some things the problem most definitely is that they mesh modern retail tech with the 90s IBM registers... It really sucks I'm pretty sure had they updated both even if they were still 5 years behind would be more comparable to other retail chain tech. Another issue I see is that they carry an odd assortment of things that isn't modern it's more of stuff my parents know is there but the modern person doesn't expect to buy there, like we carry a bunch of stuff that is better left to home depot. Our refridgeration section if I remember right is a complete financial loss not %100 sure but I thought I heard something like that. Might as well chop that out and then sell the stuff that K-Mart and sears have been known for the last 40 years. Another issue I see is that they have the bonus cash to try and entice you to come back, that whole system doesn't work all that well there's a lot of * to it that's frustrating. Like receiving the money in 3x20 sums instead of $60 all in one chunk like was bolded on the sign. We have actually a lot of new mixed with the old. Our advertising and sinage and sales arw actually fairly fresh but I find the execution or meshing of it too costly or too bloated and difficult for the small amount of time to put it out. They have made some changes at mine like less old school electronics in favor of selling Serta mattresses which makes sense people tend to buy large items locally and ship small stuff. The location I work at sells stuff quick and gets too much of stuff we already have. If there we're a way to keep the stock more unique I know our location would be even more profitable.
mr5elfde5truct 🤣🤣 you said it best. The depressing feeling of a failing business.I got that same feeling in Jcpennys and Kmart
I used to work for kmart in 2013 lmao. This man is not lying. All of this is facts
Sears once sold the best made in the USA hand tools. These sell used on eBay for 3-4 times original cost.
Yes , every guy I know went to Sears to buy Craftsman tools. Every single guy I know who’s worthy to be called a “real man”.
My favorite sears products are my 1966 sears 8XL lawn tractor with a sears branded plow. wish i could have seen machines like that when they were new, back when products had usa built quality and solid construction and reliability.
@@paulaharrisbaca4851 - Back in the day, CRAFTSMAN was among the best, in tools...
Quality
Affordability
Warranty
I'm 60, and still have MANY Craftsman tools (among my other high-quality tools)
Recently, I went to my local Sears to replace a ratchet handle that was stripped...... The kid working the cash register "overhauled" the ratchet head...... BIG disappointment!... I won't be buying any more Craftsman
(especially knowing that SEARS might not be around, much longer)
g w I have a sears made .22 semi auto rifle and it needs a new part and the prices for the one part are usually double the original price of the gun itself
Robert P at least Lowe’s is keeping the warranty so they’re still easy to replace
Nobody messes with the company man! We protect him with our lives! ❤
Sears has a lot of problems. Individual stores are badly managed, they underpay their employees, rely on gimmicks, the stores aren't customer-friendly but have an old and dirty appearance to them, and the selection is now worse than ever. At the exec level, the Sears Tower was unneeded spending that showed an arrogant attitude that the company couldn't afford. Lampert sold off all the items that drew in customers. People loved Land's End, but he sold it. People loved Craftsman tools, and he sold it. They loved Kenmore washers and dryers, and he sold those. What's left? Then Sears relied too much on sales instead of everyday low prices. Lampert did the OPPOSITE of what should have been done. It seems that he was out to enrich himself and his hedge fund. Not exactly like insider trading, but close. I honestly believe some attorney general ought to look at him for criminal charges.
They probably make money off him, so good luck there. lol
thing is he sold it to himself in many cases, shows his loyalties, don't trust him with your company, that's for sure.
Frodojack Selling assets of companies you own isn’t illegal.
Also Sears was dying way before those assets were sold off. If they weren’t sold off they would have gone down with the ship
and bought by others anyways.
Frodojack Just bought a beautiful Kenmore mini fridge on Amazon. Suck it Sears. The good people, the smart people, they’ll never let us run the show. It’s all about raping us while they suck off the next corporation for their own private gain.
Yep pretty much what I was thinking.
I can remember when sears was a big deal. It was sears and jc penney when i was a kid. I miss it.
Yup. Those Christmas catalogs were magical times as a kid.
@Darth Vader Filed for bankruptcy. 😔
It was great just walking around in the store.
@@Schrankerle people like YOU are the problem. To cheap to buy anything
@@joedirte716 Right. You haven't seen my Craftsman tool collection.
You are being too kind to Lampert.
The model is 1) buy company with good reputation/financials 2) load it with debt, 3) distribute unspent loan proceeds and other capital to yourself/new shareholders, 4) unsupportable debt wrecks company, 5) Blame China/unions/Regulators/whoever , 5a) Milk some subsidy/rescue , 6) walk off. Can name dozens
You could say Company Man doesn't know a thing or two and not much about this sort of scheme but if he does, why is he withholding this information from the video?
@@Novusod
Along with tRump.
Yep was going to say this. Happens all over the world.
Whazzat. Preach it brother!! Corporate raiders like Lampert that wreck companies and spread financial misery to line stock holders pockets need to be imprisoned in general population in a state pen. Hang em' high I sez!
If you start hanging 'em, where do you stop?
I've worked for several small (
I worked for Sears for 12 years. It was a pleasure to go to work! It starting to change when they put Cashiers in middle of walkways. Cutting back on sales personnel. That was late 70s...downhill from there. I'm still thankful for all those good years. There was pride and respect to work for Sears!!
Wow 😯 well I’m impressed by your comment actually you have a point can we be friends if you don’t mind??
And JC Penney did the same thing. Penney's also put cashwraps in the middle of walkways.
What I liked about Sears in the day (I'm 71 now) was what I like about Walmart now:
1. Convenient locations, in Sears' case, usually in malls where it could be part of a day's shopping loop.
2. Wide range of quality products.
3. Decent (though not low as Walmart) pricing.
I especially went there for Craftsman tools; I have a whole toolbox + full of them. Last time, a couple of years ago, they replaced a worn screwdriver under their no-receipt lifetime guarantee. However they said it was the last time, as they dumped that policy. So for m,e Craftsman was no longer worth the premium price.
Lambert just did the usual "raider" thing of using ruses to suck all the dough out of one or more companies, plus shuffle the deck chair subsidiaries for his own profit. I'd like to see his salary, perks & bonuses during his tenure there, plus on the ESL side.
Carly Fiorina did the same thing at HP. I suspect enough people realized that to derail her run for Calif. senator. Meg Whitman did the same for eBay/PayPal. Luckily both got out or were ousted (with huge bonuses) so the co's were saved.
+KutWrite My day was about the same as your day. I remember when Sears was the place you went when you wanted to outfit your kids for school or needed new appliances. What turned me off Sears was snarky salespeople. Last time I shopped there I thought, "Why do I have to put up with this when I have alternate places to shop?"
And every baby boomer studied that Christmas catalog, we spent hours looking at the new season of Christmas toys.
Lol "Quality products" and Walmart should not be used in the same thought.
@@Unclejake Not just baby boomers. I'm the offspring of a baby boomer and I too spent much time looking over the catalogs.
What about wage slavery for Chinese workers? You like that part about Walmart?
You forgot that sears even sold houses, I one I live in is an old sears house
Yea, back when they made stuff to last.
Did you build it with John Marston and uncle?
@@michaelkeller5927 no the house was built in 1908 but the ordered it from a Sears catalog
@@ViperLemondemon so you built it one year after john uncle and charles built theirs
I think there’s some society looking to find all Sears houses and make them historical sites.
I am part of the generation that grew up on Sears. Almost everything my family owned came from Sears. I bought many things from Sears, then for some unknown reason, I and many others just stopped shopping there. No real clue why, but seems as if everyone on earth one day started shopping elsewhere. In my neck of the woods, Sears went from alive and vibrant to near dead in less than a year. This happened about 15 years ago. Very puzzleing to say the least.
It just got sad. I remember in the late 80's early 90's that Sears had such a magical feeling to it around Christmas time. They really had great decor and good products. Then things just deteriorated. I think ending the catalog was asinine. Even if you did not place an order, just getting the catalog reminded you of all the things Sears had. Also, Target and Best Buy are usually in the same shopping center, and you don't have to go to the stupid mall to go to those stores. Target is cheaper and actually has better clothes.
Walmart or targets nearby opening up probably. I remember same thing as well. When I was a little kid I remember Sears at the mall was always as busy as other stores than boom never the same again
My great grandfather was CEO of Sears back in the late 50s early 60s. He took over following the retirement of General Wood. Sears was at that point the largest retailer in the world. He was considered the greatest mass merchandiser of his Era. He was a dollar man during ww2, economic advisor to Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower, chairman of the committee of economic development, radio free Europe, an author of a book named Big business and human values. He use to say that every business has a life cycle, its birth, life, and demise, and his job was to help keep it as healthy as possible for the next people that inherits it. He died in 1963, and probably rolling in his grave as to what has happened to such an iconic piece of American life. Oh, and Eddie Lambert is a pile of shit.
I'm gonna need to see some ID buddy ✋
I wonder if he had any inside views or insights as to the degradation and demise of the Packard Motor Car Company (I think some Eisenhower admin. insiders had some control/input over Packard as it had been an important military contractor and was probably in competition with some other contractors who might have been potential employers for some of the Eisenhower appointees.
@@davidpowell3347 I don't know. But he did deal with the Kaiser-Frazer corporation to create the automobile the Allstate, which Sears sold for a few years .
I was a young child in the 1980's. Born in 1971. And I have to tell you that the Sears Christmas Wish Book was amazing. I mean, seriously. It was amazing. Every fall you would gladly run to the mailbox every day (without being told by mom or dad) in hopes of being the first to open the enormous tome. There is nothing provided by any retailer in today's marketplace that even remotely compares. It was enormous. It was the stuff of dreams. All the toys were in the back and that was the only part that mattered. I would literally sit for hours poring through the pages hoping for a Millennium Falcon or a slot car track or a Commodore 64 or an Intellivision... God, those were good times.
I remember being a small child in the mid 80's the Sears and JCPenney Christmas catalogs were exciting to look at. I could spend the whole day looking through them.
Sadly I never exp tht. But I did something similar with my local newspaper every sunday. Look through all the stores ad catalogs I was interested in to look at their toys and electronics. I dont do it much anymore but man those were some good times looking through it.
Keith McFarland
It was around in the 1990s too (I'm 1991) and you are absolutely correct. It was hard not to read it, that holiday book was every kid's holiday dream.
I remember getting excited about the Sears and Penney's catalogs coming around late September-mid-October, too. But I think the catalog shows one of the things that was wrong with Sears, even when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s. They relied on their house brands for far too long. Kenmore and Craftsman were one thing. But did you really want to be the kid who got a Sears Tele-Games instead of the Atari? They were the same thing, but if you had the Sears version, it just felt like you were second-class. Same with some other Sears brands too. All retailers have their own house brands, but aside from Kenmore and Craftsman, having the Sears brand could be embarassing because teen years are when people, rightly or wrongly, fall into status symbols. Sony Walkman yes. Sears brand, no.
As a child in the 70's and 80's Montgomery Wards also had their store brands and like what another poster described, I wouldn't be caught dead owning a Montgomery Wards home stereo when the likes of Pioneer/Onkyo or Kenwood were better options. My only gripe is comparing Wal-Mart to Sears isn't a apples to apples comparison. Does Walmart sell Washers, Dryers or Stoves? Sears is a dinosaur and I'm surprised it has lasted as long as it did, compared to Montgomery Wards that went belly up many years ago.
Before I watch: Sears killed their catalogue and ALLOWED Amazon to fill the niche and then some using the internet. MASSIVE failure to utilize their own leverage in a market.
EDIT: It reminds me of Blockbuster and Netflix which you've covered.
@Benjamin Gavrin you fucker I fucking hatr you
Money laundering sounds like the reason to me.
This guy not likely
Or tax evasion?
Like other retailers closing the problem is the internet, online shopping. People just do that now, it's cheaper. People have gotten lazy as well. Personally I like going to actual stores, but I do some shopping online not much though. Places like Walmart are another reason so many retailers are going out.
The CEO does own every single building Sears was and is in. It was part of the deal for him loaning them so much. I doubt he laundered money from the company. His leaning them money time and time again is what kept it open this long. He's the reason that haven't filed chapter 7 bankruptcy yet. He has lots of real estate to do something with. Because not only does he own every building Sears is in, but every building Kmart is in. Excluding some of the ones in malls, but not all. I wonder what he will do with them
@@RebelJew777 can you hand write this comment and mail it to me you lazy fuck
Sears will always have a special place in my heart .Back in 1998 they were the second company ever to approve me for a credit card. Bought furniture, clothes, car batteries and tires there. Bought my first work shoes there. Last few years saw its decline. I’m sure someone will bring back the name brand down the road.
It's also they're karma coming back around. They paid us employees like crap. Everything in the inventory is overpriced. And refused to change with the times.
I will admit the pay was not the best. And I never understood why they had a cash register in every department. A lot of extra people for no good reason as best as I could tell. Guess it kept from long check out line all in one place? The main store was a totally different world then the auto center.
My friend told me about when he was trying to work for a sears retailer once. He said it was $9 an hour and just left after the (Unprofessional) interview.
This and that... It was from the days when they were BUSY... that's why there was a register at every dept. They were THE place to go in the 70s, like 'Acme' in the Warner Bros. cartoons.
@JaMaMaa1 Karma doesn't exist, block me too dipshit.
@@Ne1170 i love the comment section
Former employee of 9 years. Definitely was Lampert's leadership. The regional, district, and store managers were begging for fixes for the store from the start, even when the company was still profitable. He was determined it didnt matter, and around 2013 starting saying things like "if you want your stores fixed up, you need to sell more." The also slashes hours like crazy. When I was the Home Improvement manager, they cut the signing team to 4 hours... total... to be split among 3 people. Then they blamed be that not every sign was ready by store open. He's just positioning himself to make money off sold assets
I've had a similar experience with doing signs. We had so many signs to put up and not enough time to do it. We were still doing signs well into the morning which took our time away from servicing customers and doing department duties.
You need to stop looking at these as people trying to run a successful business and instead look at it as people trying to make as much money as quickly as possible, by any means necessary.
He also probably funneled any profits made at Sears to his hedge fund so he could use the capital gains tax loophole and avoided paying millions in taxes.
Capital gain tax is paid when it's realized.
@@Antiyoukai yeah, but it's paid at a much lower tax rate than if it were strait income.
@@fernandofernandez2677 So you issue is that Capital gains tax is a different rate than income tax? Seems a little strange.
Jazion Purnsky it’s income, right? And it’s income you didn’t have to work for, your money made money.
Capital gains should only be used for angel investing.
@@fernandofernandez2677 It's not a payroll tax though. Saying it should be taxed at the same rate as individual income tax is like saying property taxes or estate taxes should be taxed at the same rate. Not all sources of revenue are the same. So they're taxed differently. The idea that you dont have to work to get your personal capital to generate revenue is very silly.
With that point made obviously there are ways to have your capital generate revenue that are more ethical than others. But typically even the most unethical methods require planning and work to implement.
Holy cow! I've been to the Sears at 7:25! Where did you get that picture? That's not in Chicago or somewhere; it's Marion, IL!
5:32 Finally I always wondered about how old is "Company Man", now some of the presentation of topics makes sense. He missed out on the "golden era" of retail and the pre-internet days. I still like the videos and content. It is very well presented given the short experience and time frame of his formative years.
@Keirnoth He's the same age as my younger brother, of which I'm two years older, and even I knew of Sears' importance. Indeed when I think of them, I think of Craftsman and appliances. I even did a large clothing haul at a Sears going out of business a few years back. I've known this to be a very long standing company. I'm not going to say his age is the main factor here, but just a personality quirk, maybe, as to why he doesn't care. While Sears wasn't impactful on my life, I would've wanted to cover this topic just because of its age.
Yes, company man can't see to understand what it was like without an internet. I guess It's hard to expect him to understand, either.
Not really because I'm a kinda young guy and I don't fucking care for Sears and I went to retail stores none stop
The Woolworth's video hit home. I remember the lunch counters in some of them. I am in the age bracket where I straddle "era's" if you will and experienced (hard) the transition from purely physical and catalog (wait 4-6 weeks for delivery) access to products to almost an "on demand" delivery system. Sears was a physical Amazon that also includes services such as window and siding installation, tire service, and light auto repair. I want to be clear, his being a "millennial" does not dis-qualify him from talking in a well researched video, which this is.
This is where I sometimes have problems communicating with people about "how things used to be" affecting "the way things are now". Being from a rural area catalogs were like gold for sourcing things outside of the local 5 & Dime type stores. Industrial parts and supplies was a big thing to source, so JC Whitney, MSC or Grainger catalogs were almost as coveted as the Bible.
Thing is, they weren't as cheap as Walmart, they weren't as trendy as target, and they relied heavily on mall stores. They all had the same target audience- people who are looking for deals. They would have done better to try to be like Kohl's with a slightly richer audience.
The only time I entered Sears was for tools. That said, I enjoyed looking through the catalog. Speaking of catalogs. Does Cabela's still send them out?
Sears was in the business of selling hardware, yes they sold T.Vs and washing machines, but their bulk was craftsman tools and lawn products and so forth. Their tools were cheaper than buying a mac tool, and some of the other expensive tools.
Strangely enough, Amazon is sending out a toy catalog for Christmas
walmart is the dirt cheap option, next level up is a place like kohls, which isn't "high class" either
My first crush was a model from the Sears catalog, June 1993 edition
ua-cam.com/video/iQGwrK_yDEg/v-deo.html
That reminds me of this...
musta been a very sticky page
@@fireshorts5789 OOOOOF
"...you gotta really want it because the sears catalog is just big girl panties and lawn mowers"
Uz 33 i used to jack off to a pair of jeans.
"The older you are, the more Sears meant to you." I'm 58 and have the fondest memories of Sears. My uncle worked there for 30 years, and then collected a pension from them. (Imagine that with any other store!) When I was little, I LOVED the Sear Christmas Wish Catalogue (hard to believe it now, but they would mail those large, heavy catalogues to millions of people). When I was a little older, we moved into a house that had a Sears just down the street. Their toy department was amazing year-round, but at Christmas time it transformed into a magical place! They would increase the size of the toy department, and decorations and lights hung everywhere. Our Sears also had a staffed candy counter where you could order candy by weight. I would go there whenever I had a dime or quarter to spend on some candy! The three big stores here in Canada were Sears, the Bay, and Eaton's. The Bay and Eaton's were ok - but they were far more expensive and you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who worked there if you needed help. Sears, on the other hand, had good quality products that were well-priced. It was always easy to find someone who worked there. I remember one time (about 10 years ago), asking a staff person where something was located. Turns out it was on the opposite side of the (very large) store, and on another floor. She didn't tell me where it was, she actually showed me. She was busy and had work to do, but she happily took the time to help me. All of my Sears encounters were like that. The cheaper competition, such as Zellers and Kmart had poor quality products and a scarcity of staff. (Walmart didn't come to Canada until I was about 30, so they weren't part of the picture back then.) In my 50 years of being a Sears customer, I never once had bad service. How do you beat that?! They were a slice of my childhood, and they represented an old-fashioned part of life that doesn't really exist anymore. A clean, homey atmosphere with good quality products, lots of services, fair prices and wonderful staff. They were there my whole life, and now they're gone. All we have left are unkept stores where staff sprint to get away from you, where they sell cheap, low-quality junk. As crazy as it sounds, it really broke my heart when Sears closed. They were so intertwined with my childhood.
I remember being really hyped in the late 90s for the Sears Christmas catalogue, and I remember my aunt who lived far away ordering a pair of jeans for me that we picked up at our Sears distribution center. Kind of funny that looking back, although I never thought much about Sears (I was also born in '93, well after Sears' heyday) it was similiar to Amazon
That could be the "elevator pitch" for Amazon: Sears Catalogue, just add internet.
Wow, that reminded me of picking out Super Nintendo games and other things I wanted for Christmas from their catalog.
Yes!
The "Wish Books."
Kind of miss them all.
Never thought i see you here
Sears and the JC Penney catalog as well.
I currently work for sears. Been there for 2 years. I am happy to say im finally leaving and won't miss that company what so ever. First off, I was a great employee. My focus was to the customers. I was Softlines/Hardlines associate. I worked the cash registers, clean the store, did other people lunches, put up ads, etc. Everyday I walked in to work I dreaded. Everyday the same thing, "We need credit, we need PA's (protection agreedments), our SYW precentage needs to be at 85+." They didn't care if you have a family to take care of or bills to pay. If you weren't hitting numbers. You were getting 3 hours of work in 2 WEEKS. Yes you heard me right. 2 WEEKS. You can do your job duties with perfection, but if you weren't getting credit and PAs they didn't care. I always told my supervisors and managers, "Why do they care so much over those things then sales?" Your stores are trash. Its like a blast from the past.
All the people that walk in the building are elderly people. I call them sears loyals. I talk to them all the time and ask them "what do you think went wrong with sears?" And its always the same answer " I don't know what happen, Sears used to be the biggest thing. I grew up with sears and its catalog." I dont see anyone below the age of 20, I kid you not. Sears merchandise are over priced and wack. Me being 20 years old would never buy from there and never had. The company focused on the wrong things. They missed the biggest boat that is e-commerce and failed to invest in their stores and their merchandise.
The company ex CEO Eddie lampert was just draining sears of its assets. Craftsman was sold and recently he wanted to buy Kenmore from sears.
The store is far gone. No hope. The only thing they could do is just be an online retailer and use their stores as warehouses to fulfill orders for the old past generations that cling to sears for nostalgia and loyalty.
Jaime Former Sears employee here, too! I actually worked till the very end; I was scraping dirt off the stockroom floors and all that jazz 😂 I can’t help but completely agree with everything you said, from the “credit craze” to the overpriced and TACKY furniture. Don’t forget about the hell that was the SYW program...
Correction: meant to say “merchandise” instead of “furniture”!
Nice story to share, thanks.
I'm a Sears employee too, I work in the back. I've only been working there a few months and it's my first job and they started store liquidation before they filed for bankruptcy. I just have to ask... Is footwear just as much of a mess in your guy's stores or is it just us?
I hope you guys get jobs that deserve your hard earned work. I feel Sears treated not only the employees but also the customers poorly as well :(. Good luck in your ventures you guys ^^
Lampert is a corporate raider; he is selling things off piece by piece to make money for himself.
Vulture Capitalist.
They must love ialdabot
capitalism as usual.
He brought Kmart and Sears for the assets....
@@turbomustang8417 that's the very definition of corporate raider.
I'm 64. I loved Sears & I truly miss it.
I shopped there all my Life.
I loved their clearance sales on their clothes the most.
There will never be another storm that even comes close to Sears !!!!!
I know how you feel about Sears, I'm mostly indifferent. I have a slight nostalgia feeling from going there with my family as a kid, and looking through the catalogue at Christmas time. As an adult I rarely bought anything from Sears. Why, because my local store, which just closed a couple months ago, was on the other side of town. I have a Walmart, Home Depot, and other stores just a couple minutes from my house. There's no reason for a mini road trip when everything I need is in my neighborhood. Sorry Sears.
no need to leave the house with amazon.
True most of the time, but sometimes I'm working on a project and need a tool or something that day. I'll run to the local store before I go across town to Sears.
Sometimes Amazon is priced too high and when you want something the same day you gotta move your butt to a store.
The millennials have little sense of personal attachment or nostalgia. Their formative years have bern spent in front of a screen.
I worked at sears and I have to say this, it's hard to keep a sinking ship afloat, you are expected to work miracles and meet quotas that are pretty hard to meet and be happy in a stressful environment. Quality was pretty bad and as the face of sears I got a lot of "this is why sears is going under" I blame the company not the employees, we worked with what we had. They wanted Rolls Royce when we had the parts to build pintos
excellent analogy.
I agree. I worked at sears this past year and it was just horrid how management and corporate treated their employees. We had to face customers with disfunctioning policies and malfunctioning tech. Customers that bring in money. They screw over orders out of laziness and management gets mad at employees not taking short cuts searching for the actual ordered product in their mess of a storage section. One time my store manager switched my time on while I was on the clock 10 minutes before I was off to make up for associates quitting on them and they not reworking their hours in a timely manner. Needless to say I looked her in the eye, clocked out, and went home.the whole backroom team quit because of poor management, including me. We were all younger and dont take work related abuse. Glad I quit when I did.
You sound like an entitled Princess.
@cmtmj2006 that sounds about right. Our front end cashiers could not fathom doing thier job right. We were very under staffed in the backroom so when they would leave web order open for 2/3 hr window before the system would give the order to another store JUST to force us to do their jobs. We tried to be team players but on top of our own jobs and trying to fix years worth of a past senior employee not doing their job at all it was frustrating. I wonder if other companies have similar issues
Sounds to me like Lampert has long since realised that Sears is a hopeless case is has since simply been liquidating it's assets pre-bankruptcy by selling it to himself for way less than they're worth. All this so that when it actually goes belly up he's already siphoned off everything of value and he doesn't have to share it with the other creditors when Sear is liquidated by an actual liquidator.
Finnish/Swedish forestry company StoraEnso did something slightly similar where it cooked the books to make it look like it was earning more than it actually was and paid those false earnings by liquidating some of it's assets while over-inflating it's other assets. This didn't lead to a scandal of the kind of proportions it should have because it was done at the behest of it's owners, chief among them the extremely wealthy Wallenberg family of Sweden (who for example used to own Saab).
L_A_G
Sounds to me like it was premeditated for his own gain from jump. Lets not get delusional here.
There is currently only 13 Sears stores in the US.
Damn, there's going to be a lot of empty mall anchors now.
there are going to be a lot of empty malls too
there already are, bon ton closed up 100% too
I'm 55 ... you're right... they did and they do suck, bigtime. Ugh the wife used to drag me to the mall, hated every minute of it.
Mr.Pat so many across the Midwest already! In fact I don’t remember the last time I saw a SEARS anchor that was operational!
Sears was going downhill over the years. Mr.Eddie just finish them off.. he didnʻt know what he was doing..but. he donʻt have to worry about money he is set.....these are my thoughts.
Actually he is stealing value from the shareholders. His moves siphons value from the company into companies owned by him so the shareholders get shorted in the sales of assets, hence the law suits.
Nobody ever matched sears regarding the Christmas catalog... as a child it was all your dreams in the book.
in the 1980s that sears catalog coming in the mail was a HUGE deal...i tried telling my 12 year old nephew and he doesnt understand..
Same thing here, in Canada. We just could not wait to get the Sears Christmas catalog to look at the toys, some of them exclusive to Sears.
I was also lucky to be a kid in the era of the Sears Christmas catalog. It was magic.
Yes! The Sears wish book. How to describe it younger people? Imagine you live in a town where the best toy store is a CVS. Then, in the mail comes the sears wish book that contains everything you could ever imagine. A "treeware" version of the Internet/Amazon. www.wishbookweb.com/the-catalogs/. But on top of that, they had a tool department that was good and even car repairs. Pretty much everything at decent quality.
I always stared for hours at the enormous G.I. Joe aircraft carrier. I begged my parents to get me that for Christmas every year. I think it was $100. In 80s money, that was probably like $500 today. I never got it, we didn't have much money, but I loved staring at the pictures.
I used to go to Sears occasionally until it appeared there was nothing good I wanted to buy… and that there was only two employees in the entire store. Sears was dead long before it died.
Sears was Murdered
Sears doomed itself when they dropped their catalog and did not replace it with online sales. If they had done this, and done it right, Amazon would not exist today. It's doubtful they could have managed it. Inefficiencies and poor accounting methods made their warehouse system a drain on profits because it was impossible to calculate the true cost of their big ticket items. They could sell a refrigerator for $1000, which they bought from Whirlpool for $600, and not know what the true profit margin was, because shipping, handling, inventory costs, etc, could not be determined.
Unless you work for NAPA, then you shouldn't be too worried. Auto parts stores are a dime per dozen these days. Pep Boys and O'Reilly will still be around to serve your auto supply needs, likely at a better value. NAPA doesn't even have a decent website napa.com/ in 2018!
Socialism won't bring back the quality parts you desire, but I am not willing to debate you on your personal beliefs online.
There are only so many factories making these parts to begin with, and it is harder to distinguish one brand's supply from another's. NAPA may supply only the best parts in the industry, but that is almost meaningless when most people just want something that fits and works. NAPA will eventually have to stock the same stuff as other stores have or run a marketing campaign to convince everyone why their vastly superior premium parts are better than the average parts from generic cookie cutter corner stores. Manufacturers are not going to make the NAPA quality parts forever, if no one is going to buy them.
You may not like the way capitalism works, but the choice is much less foggy when it is Trabant vs. Chevy. Socialism is putting inexperienced know-it-all politicians in charge of businesses. That does happen on rare occasions in capitalism, but it is never forced and does not usually last long. I've seen enough CSPAN to know it's a bad idea to put politicians directly in charge of pretty much anything. A choice like NAPA certainly would not exist under socialism.
It is hard to say whether it is by design. The recession caused a lot of corner cutting, and when this goes on for too long, no one remembers or cares what they were doing previously. Relays are important, and if the cost cutting measures aren't causing any significant returns or warranty replacements, then was the original relay technologically overkill? You or I might not be thinking or considering this, but some bean counter is certainly making a spreadsheet and putting together a CBA for decision makers to analyse. At a certain point, mediocrity becomes the gold standard.
There are definitely some parallels between Sears, Walmart and now Amazon in the progression.
Yuppie bean counters essentially started giving Sears a McDonald's and cheap diet. It did fine for a while, but then it developed heart disease. It attempted to manage that for a while, but then it was married to a less healthy spouse. Things started to appear better during the honeymoon phase, but it soon fizzled when they were both diagnosed with diabetes. They have lost a few limbs since then, and now they have a bad case of double pneumonia, both viral and bacterial. Is this going to be the end?
I do fully agree with technology causing issues with things that used to be simple repairs. I have personally seen it where two pieces of machinery operated doing the same type of daily work would break down. The one that is around 33 years old is easily repaired and fully functional almost 2 hours after the mechanic arrives, and he never even had to pull out his laptop. The other one is just under 4 years old, and after about 10 minutes with his computer connected, he says it is basically a lost cause. The computer system wasn't working at all, and to replace it on the particular model wasn't even an economical feasibility. He checked out as many of the physical components as he could, and for as much as he could tell, he said they appeared to be in good condition.
Industrial equipment and computer companies do not seem to work well with each other. As far as I can tell, there hasn't exactly been a push to standardise the computer systems in the prosumer mechanical industry. The required repair software is almost never included in the purchase. It should be stuck in the back of the manual by default. I don't trust these companies to know what they are doing, if they overlook and neglect simple things like this.
The days are coming to an end for mechanics who can repair anything without being required to use a computer. I can even see mechanics needing a college degree someday with all the nonsense, companies put into their stuff. The easier technology makes something, the more companies overthink it and make it overly complicated.
If Sears had managed to put their catalog online, Bezos would find something else remarkable to do, because Sears would be Amazon. Bezos just looked crazy when he started selling books online. What he was really doing was working out the infrastructure of his robotic warehousing system. He started with books because books are nice geometric shapes and it's easy to calculate the weight. Once a warehouse robot could put a book on a shelf and then find it again, it could do it for anything.
Amazon would still exist but maybe be less popular state side compared to the rest of the world...
Shopping at a Sears or KMart in 2018 feels pretty dang similar to how it did back in 1988. And while I could easily see Walmart feeling the same 20 years from now, Walmart's main draw is its pricing. I don't recall people shopping at Sears for the bottom line best price. In fact, Craftsman might be a good example (btw I didn't realize they had sold that off). Craftsman tools were never the cheapest or the best quality, but they had lifetime warranties on hand tools. That means if you break the damn thing by being stupid and putting a 4-foot breaker bar on the end of your ratchet handle, you just bring it back to the store and they give you a new one. That's a pretty big deal. I worked at a Sears Hardware when I was younger and when I saw how that worked I pretty much bought exclusively Craftsman hand tools, just in case I broke them (which I did fairly often... they're not *bad* really, but they're not Snap-On quality for sure).
But that's the thing, when the store hasn't changed basically at all in 30 years, the pricing isn't spectacular, the selection isn't great, there's pretty much no reason to shop at that store. Here's the thing: if you want to buy an appliance, keep an eye on Best Buy because they have some insane deals. If you want to buy a TV, your best bet is Microcenter if there is one near you, or even Best Buy. If you want to buy clothes... come on, who buys clothes from Sears?
Seriously, what does Sears do well? I would have said their hardware stores, but even those have gone down the toilet (our local one is now part of the main Sears location instead of being its own separate location). Their brand isn't a go-to anymore, and there's otherwise no compelling reason for new customers to get drawn in.
And to think back in the 50's and 60's they actually had their own line of legendary products like their cheap amps and guitars which went on to be used by many musicians because, despite their low price, they were actually great, well-made products. Sears has no reason for existence anymore. It's only a matter of time before they're finally gone completely.
I would say that Best Buy isn't that good of a deal. Going online is still a better deal, or microcenter.
People still want those Danelecrto guitars because of their unique sound, and they can easily fetch about $500. Why Sears stopped selling them is beyond me.
MySpace or yahoo. Plz company man
True Electroblade, but Best Buy WILL match others prices.
"Craftsman tools were never the cheapest or the best quality". Agreed. What they *were* was well-positioned right at the point on the price/quality balance that worked best for a frequent home user. Paying extra for Snap-On was worthwhile for a construction worker or garage mechanic who's wrenching 40 hours a week, but would never reach the breakeven point for someone who maintained their own house and car.
"Sorry we only have sizes 1,3 and 5; But you could always try Sears."
*Ruins 69 likes*
I understood that reference 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
I don’t get it
@@milanimacc3939 it’s a movie reference
Swirl Mapping oh ok thanks 😊
I went into a Sears recently and it seemed like they still have a decent selection but man it’s nothing like what I remember from the early 2000’s. It was also close to desolate inside the store
11:00 that has to be one of the saddest pictures to see with the "We're Open" sign hanging above the entrance.
That's my Sears! They tore down the mall that it anchored and people just assumed it was closed lol
Brian McKinney do ppl still go?
Mr Unknown yeah but it's never busy. A lot of employees just sitting around usually. It's been about a year since I've been in there. I bought my fridge there last spring.
ESL is what's known as a vulture fund. Making money however they can as quickly as they can regardless of the long term ramifications. Eddie never cared about turning the companies around. His main focus was making as much money from all the assets they owned, however he needed to prolong the life of the companies in order to truly maximize his profits from the various sales of said assets. Hence the reason why they remained open until now. Both Sears and Kmart have outlived their usefulness and are probably a quarter away from closing. They'll probably remain open until Feb 2019, in which they'll do a last cash grab for the upcoming Christmas rush. It's a shame but Eddy probably never intended to turn around either companies from the start.
Sad, but true.
"Turning companies around" is generally a fool's errand.
They do extend the lifecycles though; all those employees got an extra 5-10 years of work out of the vultures picking the carcass clean.
And just like IRL vultures they serve a function.
@@mitchellhorton9382 yeah but its such a shame to see a once thriving company and American icon be reduced to bargain bin store on the verge of collapse due to management incompetence, lack of foresight, adaptability to changing conditions and greed.
yeah but it's not the vulture's fault. They're just picking the carcass.
Blame the management from 1985 to 2000 if you want to blame someone.
@@mitchellhorton9382 Can you demonstrate the function of vultures in a economic sense?
Because I don't buy it...at all.
I would want to not only kill all these vultures, but salt the earth with a substance that prevents the dna of a vulture from ever being formed again. Maybe a targeted dna virus.
All metaphorically speaking of course.
It doesn't "seem" like the older you are the more you care. This absolutely true. That's because we grew up when there wasn't an internet or online shopping. We remember being excited when the catalog arrived. Especially if you were a kid and Christmas was coming. We remember when buying craftsman tools mean top quality and a lifetime warrant.
Craftsman still has that warranty on manual tools like screwdrivers amd wrenches... it's their powertools that seem to suffer, mostly from poorly manufactured parts and bad wireing/solderings in the powertools
The Sears catalog was IT when I was a kid. I was to just look at all the stuff. Web surfing dead tree edition. Craftsman tools are what I know them for best now. Good hand tools.
I remember the catalog, but I never bought anything from them
As a 2000s child, when my parents entered a Sears, I knew it was going to be "hours" of boredom
Sounds like hell
Going there before Macy's was boring. I went looking for some cool stuff that wasn't just washing machines or the bathroom. I would usually find some displays of TVs and some game consoles like Xbox or PS3.
i feel ya, i didn't enjoy going to Sears when i was younger either. It was so boring, was glad when they finally closed. barely anyone shopped there anyways, it was more convenient driving an hour away to the nearest walmart
I worked for my local Sears and was kind of proud of being an electronics salesman. The day I received my benefits package, the store's closure was announced.
I'm surprised Mr. Lampert hasn't been investigated by the S.E.C.
Can you do the rise and fall and rise again of Little Caesars Pizza?
malkamusik this.
As a Michigan resident, I say no.
yuh, my whole neighborhood eats Little Caesars lol
Little Caesars fell off, and was near non-existent in the 90's/ early 2000's. It has come back in the last 10-15 years. That's what I was curious about.
$5 Hot N Ready
Sears has been circling the drain for more than a decade...if Eddie Lambert hadn’t Frankenstein-ed Kmart and Sears together in 2005, neither would’ve survived the 2008 recession, likely (Circuit City, anyone?)...so, this is just the slow end of a LONG slow cancer-like death....That said, Eddie Lambert is, basically, a vampire who has slowly been bleeding the corpse dry...For the record, I’m 50, so I DO remember when they were viable...and they kinda sucked back in the 80”s and 90’s too! I usually preferred JCPenney or Target
The problem is they needed to evolve to be more like in their heyday and start going online (Amazon style) making an online store that could match the feeling of the old catalogs. Buying KMart was the worst thing they could have done. I agree it looks like their new C.E.O. is a bloody money laundering scheme that has failed and is backfiring and started selling assets before it went bankrupt.
To me they were always the store that was too expensive, with a smaller selection of goods. The only attraction was Craftsman Tools, which were good quality and reasonable, with a great warranty. With Craftsman gone as an exclusive, no more reason to go there.
Someone posted a comment on a different article or video or whatever that they did go online. Way ahead of everyone else. Before AOL even.
Agreed. Worst CEO EVER!
edvaira6891 this is a good comment. UA-cam needs more old fogies (us 40 and over folk) for intelligent measured statements.
19 y.o. Mexican here
Here on Mexico Sears it’s doing really good compared to the US and I think it’s mostly because technically Sears Mexico is not longer connected to Sears US since 1997 when the Carso group acquired 85% of the company on Mexico soil (currently 100%)
We don’t have many stores (just 93 locations) but those locations are doing relatively okay
Dude your the new kings of the world
Sí
In the 1950's my Dad claimed, "If you can't get it at Sears, you probably can't get it at all!" Craftsman Tools were well regarded as the best. Kenmore appliances were well regarded. They owned Allstate Insurance for years. Back in the 1970's & 1980's they had an ad, "Sears is Where America Shops." And it was true! My ex-with started in their tools department., graduated to their shoe department and later to their electronics department. She was one of their top rated sales people. She worked at their Sears at the Staten Island Mall, their top grossing store for the whole East Coast. (My ex-wife graduated to Allstate, just before Sears spun it off as an independent company, in the early 1990's.) When I saw Sears closed most of the Staten Island store, and rented the space to Primark, I thought, "That's like cutting out your heart so your body can live! It's a terrible plan!" Yup, sure was a terrible plan.
I've been shopping at the store you reference for a good 30 years on my own, prior to that, as I mentioned in another post with my parents and grandparents. I might have dealt with your ex wife if she was there in the 1990s. My uncle's neighbor was a manager there through the 1970s and 1980s as well. Consequently, most of my tools are Sears Craftsman (new and used) as well as my lawn and garden equipment and I'm just about to replace the 1987 Kenmore (Whirlpool made) dishwasher my parents installed because the tub appears to have finally rotted out. I repaired that machine four times in those 32 years, all minor repairs: an inlet valve in 1994, a heater element in 2013 or so, two sets of door springs, once in 2005, and again in 2015. That's it. Everything else is as it was built in 1987. If I could fix it, I would do so and even "refresh it" a bit, but with a tub issue, it's not practical. I will likely replace it with another Kenmore (which is still WLP made). That store opened up in 1973. Prior to that it was located on Forest Ave and Castleton Ave(I forget which location was first, but I could point them both out to you). The current tool department manager/store manager is a lady and she's always been fair to me. Case in point: There was a USA made pliers set on clearance (missing one piece) being sold last year or the year before. I asked the clerk if the price could be reduced further as I was interested in buying it. He said no. I said, "Can you ask the manager over there to come over?" She did. I asked the same question. She said, "Give him 20% off of what it's tagged for now". I said to the clerk, "I'll take it, see how easy that was?". I bought a middle tool chest that was a floor display model, by asking the same thing. It's sitting about 10 feet from me.
Are you Bill Keck who started Sienna-Francis in Omaha, NE?
i'm a tool guy. for decades, craftsman was a name you could trust, even to the point where professional mechanics would use their tools. over the years... their tools went to shit. biggest mistake they made was putting the craftsman name on foreign tools. the very day "made in china" was seen on a single craftsman product, thousands of people stopped buying craftsman all together. they previously were all made in USA. in tools, Germany and the US are top dogs with the rest of Europe and modern japan ('90s and newer) following very close behind. old japan and Taiwan is where the quality inexpensive is made. china is bottom of the barrel. has been that way for as long as i can remember.
They were getting trounced by the Home Depot, and thought that people wanted cheaper tools. That was the wrong assumption. They intrinsic strength of the Craftsman brand was they were made in the USA.
I was born in 2000 and I'm actually really attached to Sears. It was one of the few department stores that we actually bought stuff from because the prices were cheap
Same here...
John Cervantes yup I was also born in 2000 I liked going there to buy tools
4:06 is not a picture of the first Sears store, which was opened in Evansville Indiana in 1925.
You've heard of Amazon Lockers over at Whole Foods? Guess where they got that idea. Sears! That's right, we used to order merchandise from the catalog, wait for a phone call when it arrived at the local Sears store, then go pick it up from a special counter. Was awesome!
I've worked in a Sears in the past few years and my god, I don't think I've ever been more confused how anything works in such a company.
The 25 year old ibm computer system is terrible. The computers crash and have 10sec lag between keystrokes. Let's not even talk about if your store servers lose power and how long it takes IBM to get them online again.
Now I will say one thing i forgot to mention, Sears Hometown is using POS from cgi that has their tech support in India. That makes it really hard to understand anything they say to you but they are way faster. Now with the IBM'S you at least had a native English speaker helping you.
@@03HemiCentralIN oh, the normal system wasn't any better. Not to mention the stupid credit card/shop your way stuff that slowed sales. I worked in hardware departments with appliances, sportswear, etc. I hated auto centers and hometown stores, due to them being separate entities. The whole store is a mess.
@@shinigamiryan5837 We were so understaffed we had to close most of our registers during the Christmas season. In order to staff the regesters they had to constantly pull employees from their departments. We had to continue to sell those damned credit cards and shop-your-way memberships all the while. You wouldn't believe the length of those lines. Most people just dropped their items on some random shelf and left.
@@Cerulean0987 Been a long time for me, but I can picture it still.
When they scrapped their catalog and failed to get into the on line sales business that marked the end of sears
Exactly.
Sears had the infrastructure and name recognition to compete with Amazon in this space. In retrospect, they should have gone back to focusing on distribution and closed all their shitty stores long ago.
At the mall near me, there was 4 big stores. Target, JC penny, Maceys, and Sears. But a few years ago sears closed, and that part of the mall has been closed every since.
I straddle gen x and millennial. As a kid Sears was where you went for dads Christmas present. We physically shopped for school clothes and we did wait 4-6 weeks when we ordered from a catalog.
I sound old but I’m in my 30s I still remember pre-internet days the Sears wish book was what we kids would circle things we wanted. Toughskins jeans were durable for school and playground. I hate seeing it’s downfall. I live in a kit home that’s possibly a Sears brand built in 1921. Sears I actually will miss it
Beth 1986 well said! I was born in 84 so I know what you're saying.
I’m 41, and my experience was the same
Yep! Sears was the store my family shopped at back in the 80's and my siblings and loved the Christmas catalog. I'm sad to see them go. Where I live we still have a very vibrant and successful mall and a few weeks ago, on a Saturday no less, I walked through Sears to exit to the parking lot. The store was almost completely devoid of customers. There were thousands of people in the mall and only a handful in Sears. Alas, how times have changed.
"Dads christmas present" feels spot on. It became a special shop for special purchases. That doesnt work as a model for a goliath.
Your comment is awesome and I agree with you I will like us be friends if that’s okay with you?
I was born only 2 years before Company Man and I remember Sears fondly. The catalogue of course was amazing and my first memory of the store is when my parents bought an Apple computer there in 1995. I remember the video game section was next to the kids clothing and it's the first time I saw Super Mario 64. We'd get our annual pictures taken at the studio there(my worst memories of Sears) and they were the go to store for appliances like vacuums and refrigerators. My city is one of the few Sears that refuses to close it even beat this latest round of closures! I visit about once a year just to check it out and it's amazing how the layout is exactly the same 25 years later!! I'm sure it was already a dated store back in the 90s, part of me feels this is a 60s/70s department store layout and it's kinda cool to see a retailer that doesn't feel like a huge soulless warehouse.
Also... 90s Kmart was my mom's store of choice over Target and Walmart! It was a cool store back then. Going there was an experience, eating popcorn and enjoying an ICEE drink running around the store. I noticed both stores turned to shit in 2003 when our Kmart closed for a while and was turned into a Big Kmart. That was when Kmart and Sears became obsolete and I don't even remember seeing my parents ever going there it was all Costco, Target and Walmart after that. Eddie has to be the reason for this shittyness! None of the stores feel modern even when I watch a video of a newer Kmart it just feels like a 90s store. I don't understand how it stayed open this long but our local one finally got the axe last week with the bankruptcy filling.
Yo i remember we as kids wanted our parents to shop at sears just to go play the new game consoles that had been out!that was a great strategy on there part.
2018-The downfall of sears
2034-Amazon files for chapter 11 bankrupsy
2035-Craftsmen Electronics,Bigger than you know
its a little different now. one hedgefund doesnt own amazon. Also people who run newer companies know they can die at an time so they are constantly looking for an advantage. Walmart moved into the online space for this reason. Thing is though , one company that is big that will probably fall is apple. It will tkae a long time and people keep giving them money but man are they not putting out impressive products no more.
PHGamer Bezos has about a decade or so left at Amazon. After he leaves it’s anyone’s guess what will happen to Amazon. Apple has faired much better after Jobs than I thought they would. I didn’t think they would have a chance but iPhone chips are about a generation and a half better than Snapdragon and whatever else Samsung and Android are using.
apple is literally only a brand name. consumers will eat up anything they shit out. and iphones are so restrictive anyone who knows anything about tech stays away from them.
Greg Belcher Apple?.......
yea,no thanks
@@TheGbelcher there aren't that much stories about Jobs asking for performance, but there are many that talk about how neat picky he was in terms of design.
Apple isn't doing bad at all (I mean, they're worth a fucking trillion dollars), but some of the design language they're pulling right now doesn't look as great as it did on the Jobs Era.
sears in the picture at 11:04 is still open, was just in there that store is closing on the 22 it was sad walking through there with all the empty shelfs and remembering all the memories I had in there as a kid