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Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

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Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#331

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

bpicolo wrote: post #219
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be snarky, but there needs to be a name for selective amnesia when an idea that seems obvious in retrospect is ignored later on. In this case, the thing that made Amazon so great, before Prime existed, was that it had the "Things you might also like" section. AFAIK it was one of the first online stores that used machine learning to recommend new and related items you didn't realize you wanted and to have user…

Is that really a primary growth factor? I've never once acted on an Amazon recommendation, and it's always felt almost entirely useless - "you just bought a vacuum, here's 15 more vacuums just in case you're a vacuum-obsessed lunatic"

Their book recommendations were generally relevant to your interests. Much like early Netflix, once they had enough data on what you liked they could correlate that against other customers with similar tastes.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#332

Post by davidu »

rhacker wrote: post #244
bpicolo wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that really a primary growth factor? I've never once acted on an Amazon recommendation, and it's always felt almost entirely useless - "you just bought a vacuum, here's 15 more vacuums just in case you're a vacuum-obsessed lunatic"

That, and the ONLY analytics based feature I used was the "After viewing this item most people purchased" section WAS THE ABSOLUTE BEST for shoppers. It made me feel like I could look at a vacuum, but then be directed to the BEST one. It was like, I'm doing all this crazy research and stuff, but how could a billion other people's research help me here. It seems like they run experiments now where once in a blue moon…

This feature still shows up almost constantly for me... there are a few flavors (some of which appear contemporaneously on a single product page for me) including "after looking at this item people purchased..." and "similar items to this item..." and "people who bought this also bought..."

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#333

Post by kokokokoko »

rashomon wrote: post #141
ArrayList wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So the whole mechanism to these bonuses is for the banks/investors to keep the executives around long enough to not lose the institutional knowledge and to keep the company heading in a general direction during the bankruptcy chartering.

That is only valid when the plan of bankruptcy was to avoid liquidation. This buyout became a veiled liquidation in the late 00s early 10s[1]. They need to prop up Sears and K-Mart stores long enough to pay leases to support Seritage Growth Properties property conversions to be prepared to bring in new tenants[2][3]. I guess you need to pay those out to fool a bankruptcy court into selling you the assets in for less than they are worth to liquidators. Which you can then continue to liquidate in secret under the guise of improving efficiency.

Its nice to see bankruptcy courts wising up to these schemes, but I'm not sure this isn't something lawmakers or regulators need to adjust to avoid more of.

[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-sears-lampert...

From the linked article: "In 2015, Sears sold 235 stores, along with its stake in joint ventures involving 31 more properties, to real estate investment trust spinoff Seritage Growth Properties. Lampert is both a stakeholder in Seritage and its chairman."

[2] https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/08/01/heres-why-seritage... [3] https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/11/06/with-sears-on-the-...

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#334

Post by tracker1 »

gammateam wrote: post #155
tracker1 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, for the most part prosperity comes from work. After 40 hours a week of work, each extra 10% of time worked leads to something like 40% extra income. Those that do reach into upper management positions with larger corporations tend to have spent 15 years of 60-hour work weeks. I'm not saying that this is always the case, or that those are even the best priorities to have. But effort, success and wealth are defin…

Yes, but the upper class - which is who this story was guided by - exist because their rate of return exceeded their rate of labor. The only other commonality is that they distributed risk so that they dont have meanginful losses of money. The way this is done has nothing to do with prosperity in business, it is always value extraction, not a donation towards the nation’s jobs report. Understanding the set of rules t…

Most people will not be able to break into the upper class. That said, there are things you can definitely do to improve your children's chances of doing so.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#335

Post by ghaff »

filmgirlcw wrote: post #283
acdha wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a significant gap between Amazon launch and having two-day shipping — it took years of behind the scenes development before orders started arriving notably faster than other retails. Sears' numbers include regular postal delivery in both directions so switching to online ordering would have cut them in half with no other changes (and don't forget the efficiency wins from orders arriving as validated electro…

The pricing benefit really cannot be understated. Amazon was 40% less than list for books -- which was a massive amount, even if you lived in Barnes & Noble markets (and B&N wasn't as pervasive in 1996/1997 as your average mall bookstore was), where there were similar markdowns. And of course, you could get any book you wanted from Amazon. And then Amazon very quickly moved into media like CDs and DVDs. I used to ord…

>Amazon was 40% less than list for books

Furthermore, it's easy to forget just how hard it could be to track down even an in-print book and how long it could take to actually get your hands on it. Some big city bookstores were better but, in many cases, (assuming the bookstore would special order books at all), it would basically be put into the next batch order from a publisher which might be a month or two.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#336

Post by TimTheTinker »

greglindahl wrote: post #105
TimTheTinker wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let those who are currently on top take warning.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#337

Post by 1123581321 »

ben1040 wrote: post #98
reaperducer wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name recognition This can't be understated, and is something a lot of new companies don't understand. If people know your brand and trust your company, they will hand you money. Anecdata: My parents were massive Sears loyalists. When they bought an appliance, my father researched the various GE models, then bought the Kenmore version. When he wanted a video game console, he researched and decided he wanted an Atari 2…

>If Sears had a lumber yard In a way, they did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Catalog_Home

I own one of these. It was built in 1935 and unlike Sears, it has a good chance of surviving another century because it’s made of solid brick. It’s a Craftsman-style Bungalow that apparently was build extra wide (or at least wider than other homes in our neighborhood), so the upper bedrooms are more spacious than it might appear from the outside.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#338

Post by Nelson69 »

ghaff wrote: post #57
csydas wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sears also just wasn't able to get how to move its catalog online. My parents purchased a house that was mostly built with Sears appliances and furniture (cabinets, counters, etc). Ordering replacement parts from Sears was a chore; you were constantly moved around to tons of different domains, some of which weren't even made human readable; their inventory system was terrible, making it impossible to find the parts b…

Sears is arguably a good example of how execution (and culture) often trump strategy. They were online. They invested in Prodigy. But their heart never really seemed to be in it and they never really changed the way they operated based on online.

I would spin culture the other way too. Sears was a more premium company. They had commission salesmen working the floors. (I think it was as recently as like 2010ish, I walked in to one and looked too long at something was was swarmed) You didn't go there for the "lowest price" you went there for good stuff and when you bought something big they helped you figure it out, they'd show you a dozen fridges, maybe with features you'd never seen before, and by the end of the day try to talk you in to a stove and dishwasher to go with the one you landed on and then have someone bring it over, install it and take your old stuff away. They had house brands: Craftsman, Diehard, Kenmore that were legit and made legit stuff; it wasn't the highest end stuff but it wasn't just the cheapest stuff they could label. I don't think it was possible for them to compete for low margins like Walmart or Amazon, it just wasn't "Sears." Prodigy was expensive, the few things you could order there had extra costs associated with it, I don't fully remember but I think you had to actually pay a premium for the experience to order it on prodigy and then you paid shipping costs and everything. It's not simply just buying and selling stuff online and it shows up, price matters and people buy big stuff differently than they did 40 years ago, they know way more about it before they go to the store now because of the internet.

I'm sure there will be plenty of books about it all when it's said and done and I'm sure there is a list of mistakes that is unimaginably long. I doubt Sears could have been saved though, it wouldn't have been "Sears" any more.

It is odd, at least to me, Sears is this nostalgia thing. Looking at the catalog as a child, playing with Prodigy way way back when. I've read maybe a dozen articles on the place here on HN over the last decade. I haven't been in one in nearly as long. I think I've known they were totally doomed for as long but in some part of my brain it was impossible for it to unfold exactly as it has. It's just been a train wreck in ultra-slow-motion. They seemed to have had so many resources they could have used to try things, they just couldn't actually try them.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#339

Post by lallysingh »

filmgirlcw wrote: post #283
acdha wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a significant gap between Amazon launch and having two-day shipping — it took years of behind the scenes development before orders started arriving notably faster than other retails. Sears' numbers include regular postal delivery in both directions so switching to online ordering would have cut them in half with no other changes (and don't forget the efficiency wins from orders arriving as validated electro…

The pricing benefit really cannot be understated. Amazon was 40% less than list for books -- which was a massive amount, even if you lived in Barnes & Noble markets (and B&N wasn't as pervasive in 1996/1997 as your average mall bookstore was), where there were similar markdowns. And of course, you could get any book you wanted from Amazon. And then Amazon very quickly moved into media like CDs and DVDs. I used to ord…

Don't forget the reviews! Buying the right one is often more important than buying one today.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#340

Post by ineedasername »

This is really a shame. They made missteps in the mid-late 90's, but might have remained viable had they not had a CEO these past years that was engaged in a process of self-dealing to his other personal financial interests at the expense of Sears [0][1][2]

[0]https://prospect.org/article/how-sears-was-gutted-its-own-ce...

[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/sears-ceo-will-pay-40-millio...

[2]https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/04/24/sears-holdin...

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