Sears has another chance to avoid closing down • Hacker News Board

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#101

Post by LeftTurnSignal » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 5:16 PM UTC

Panino wrote: post #7

Sears is a macro-example of the phrase, "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." Seems like this company has been walking dead for years. When the October news hit that Sears was going out of business, my wife and I used up all our Sears points (kind of like airline miles) to get tons of free food from Kmart. Then Sears kept just giving her points so we kept getting free stuff. How on ea…

I had a friend who worked at Kmart during the Sears transition and stayed until it closed a few years ago (or so). He worked there for maybe 12 years total, and maybe 7 of that as a manager.

The first week after he started there, he started to wonder how they could stay in business. He said most of his time (in the 12 years) was spent walking around, cleaning, organizing or just watching TV just because there wasn't anything else to do, and no one coming in.

For years, it was a ghosttown in there. I would go after work (5-6pm), and still not see a single other customer. I know it was a smaller Kmart, but they still had some new items show up, and always had some employees around. Must have made enough to cover most of it's expenses, or been too small for Sears to notice.

/just looked it up. That Kmart closed in Jan of 2017.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#102

Post by billfruit » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 5:16 PM UTC

ams6110 wrote: post #37

Tsubasachan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those who are first will later be last for the times are changing... Is there anything people don't buy online these days?

There's a lot of stuff I don't buy online. Clothes -- I like to try them on first. Tools -- I like to see if they are well made and how they feel in my hand. Photos on a website don't provide this. Food -- I want to check produce and meat before I buy it. And it's easier to stop at shops I'm passing on my way home anyway. Household supplies -- I don't want to deal with disposing of shipping boxes, styrofoam peanuts a…

Isn't warranty provided by the manufacturer and not the retailer, and hence better to buy big ticket items online (likely cheaper since there is no local retailers markup).

Even for clothes, yes offline stores do give us the ability to ability to try, but online offers more choices, colours, fabrics, sizes and brands than any one physical clothes store could possibly offer, so I do think online has an edge.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#103

Post by philwelch » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 5:18 PM UTC

I wondered whatever happened to Sears.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#104

Post by baddox » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 5:18 PM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #77

RankingMember wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a good example to those that claim companies should pay employees liberally. Is it? Paying employees well isn't what killed Sears. Sears has been a ghost town for years, and anyone who's been in one in the past 20 years can probably tell you why. The customer experience simply sucks. Help is hard to find, checkout is slow, their warranties are garbage and a pain to exercise, and their once-great store brands h…

I should have wrote that it's just one factor, but at the end of the day, people opted for lower priced goods rather than the service that Sears offered, which I assume was partly due to the decent compensation they provided. Another example of a low wage industry where paying employees more doesn't work in the grand scheme are hotels. People like to stay in newer, renovated, upscale hotels. Well if one hotel pays mo…

> but at the end of the day, people opted for lower priced goods rather than the service that Sears offered, which I assume was partly due to the decent compensation they provided.

Huh? The parent commenter was just describing how poor the service was at Sears stores.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#105

Post by greglindahl » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 5:18 PM UTC

TimTheTinker wrote: post #65

ams6110 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being too early is as bad as being wrong.

Not if you’re big enough to create the necessary market effects for something to flourish. If Sears had stuck with it and had the the foresight to develop its technical chops like Amazon did, they could have done much better.

In an earlier era, Sears was the one with the technical chops.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#106

Post by Zelphyr » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 5:18 PM UTC

This is sad for such a well-known brand. I have such fond memories of their Wishbook catalog that came out around the holidays every year. I would flip to the toys section and dream. My grandparents even had a years old Wishbook in our toy box at their house that me and my cousins would look at every time we went over there, Christmas or not.

But everything dies. It must. It has to in order to clear the way for something else that will advance the species. That's one of the many reasons why "Too Big To Fail" is such a bad idea. Sure, letting all the banks fail at once was probably not the best course of action. But we needed to take a good look at how to structure them so that their inevitable death wouldn't take out the whole system.

Sears dying, thankfully, won't do that at least. And if anybody has a mid-1970's Wishbook they want to part with, hit me up.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#107

Post by kortilla » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 5:19 PM UTC

XMPPwocky wrote: post #61

hgq wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Paying employees more is supposed to work because it results in employees who do their job better. I'm sure above certain threshold, which is probably low, raising wages doesn't make employees do their job any better. In other words, unless you pay your workers literally peanuts, they will do the same job more or less.

So all executive salaries should be capped at, say, a low six-figure amount, and bonuses should be eliminated? Interesting proposal.

You have to pay the market rate for the people you want. The point is that going above that rate probably won’t get anything more out of them other than maybe retention.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#108

Post by encorekt » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 5:19 PM UTC

xigency wrote: post #96

wombatpm wrote: post #5

Sears had everything. Global supply chain, check. Top notch distribution operation, check. System and infrastructure to take orders and handling billing, check. Name recognition and established customer base, check. They threw it all away, ending catalog operations in 1993 a year before Amazon.com opened in 1994. They owned part of Prodigy in 1984! Yet somehow thought it was a better move to expand into bigger box re…

I thought this as well until I heard a counter-point [0] which was very convincing. The reason Amazon is successful is not because you can shop online (from a catalog) and receive items in the mail. The reason Amazon is successful is because you can do those things and receive your items within two days. Before Prime existed, Amazon had very quick fulfillment, and after Prime two-day it became even better. The Sears…

Yeah, I think you're completely on point. Sears has been on verge of folding for at least a decade, and they've done little to nothing to implement any innovation that would give them another swing. It left plenty of opportunity for smaller startups to swoop in and stay ahead of the market Sears lost out on.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#109

Post by Sahhaese » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 5:19 PM UTC

Sargos wrote: post #91

neurobashing wrote: post #25

My parents were young, and broke, and opened a Sears "charge card" to buy their wedding rings. "Craftsman, so it'll last forever!" I mean, intellectually, I get why Sears is going away, but it still kinda tugs at the ol' heartstrings a little, you know?

This makes me wonder... what happens if you open a Sears card (yesterday) and max it out with all kinds of fun stuff and then Sears goes out of business? Does someone come after you for money?

Your debt is an asset, it'll just be sold to someone else.

Debt gets bought and sold all the time, you don't typically notice because you don't have to change who you're paying directly.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#110

Post by hinkley » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 5:20 PM UTC

ArrayList wrote: post #74

Forbo wrote: post #17

Congratulations on driving a company into the ground! Have a golden parachute! https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sears-bankruptcy-court-oks-25-m...

I'll never, ever be able to comprehend this. It sickens me to the core.

They really need a clause that’s something like “not to exceed 5% of revenue/market cap/net worth/something else”

You burn it into the ground and you get 5% of nothing.