The article has been updated and the current title is 'Court allows Chairman Eddie Lampert another chance to buy Sears, pushing off decision to shut stores'.
Sears has another chance to avoid closing down
351–360 of 568 posts
Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is "The Amazon experience"? Ads being served as the first few rows of results? A review system that cannot be trusted? The same item listed multiple times by different sellers? Extreme price variance when choosing different colors and sizes?
The experience today is not what made them great in the past. 10 years ago the negatives you list didn't exist.
Perhaps all of these too big to be good utility services- Amazon, Google, Facebook, even Apple should just offer “classic” slimmed down versions of their previous offerings, for a paid subscription in the case of the online services.
Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
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..."
Wouldn't it be nice if you could just choose what information to get, unless of this dice-rolling and analytics and cookies approach?
Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down
#354Sears 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…
This is true. Sears is easy to pick on, but the truth is that Amazon is seemingly the only company that was early to understand ecommerce and how to effectively gain market share by continually innovating and creating customer-centric practices like free shipping on all orders over $25, which was unheard of before that. Just having a lot of money and knowing the internet would be big was table stakes to start an ecommerce site, but certainly not sufficient to guarantee success. If it were Amazon wouldn't be what it is today.
Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down
#355Earlier 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…
I don't remember that big of a price advantage, but they definitely had a HUGE selection advantage compared to the book stores in my city.
To a certain extent the price didn't matter much because it was the only way to buy a lot of books.
Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
One way Amazon was able to compete on price was by not having nexus in most of the country. Consequently, Amazon didn't collect sales tax on behalf of states and consumers, on the whole, never declare use tax. I still see that mentioned on most deal-hunter sites: "tax kills the deal" or "order from X and you don't have to pay tax." It's tax-free in the same sense that all tax evasion is tax-free. But, sales tax is levied at the state level and states don't have the resources to audit everyone.
That's not to say that Amazon didn't execute well. And their selection was excellent. It's just really easy to compete on price when your checkout total is 5+% cheaper than an in-state competitor even when the items were priced the same. Of course, this only applies to states that levy a sales tax, but that's still a large portion of the US.
Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of Sears remaining valuable assets, though, is the real estate left over from its standalone stores. That's one of the bones that the creditors are salivating over.
No, this was true when Sears was viable retailer. They owned very valuable properties in malls. But the process of destroying the retail portion of the company to extract value from the real estate actually devalued the property. Sears was the anchor that made a lot of that property valuable in the first place.
Stores don't own locations in malls. The mall owners lease that space to stores.
Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
With sufficiently stable social circles (also not available to everyone, but at least not an identical requirement) you could replace storage with distribution.
Sure, but the poor are less likely to have stable social circles for shared purchases and distribution as well as less able to afford storage.
Certainly. I'd meant to imply as much.
Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down
#359Congratulations on driving a company into the ground! Have a golden parachute! https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sears-bankruptcy-court-oks-25-m...
Matt Levine (of Bloomberg) would tell you to see it more as a golden incentive to stop being the CEO, if that makes you feel better
That doesn’t apply in this case as the entire company is shutting down.
“Please go away money” isn’t needed when the whole company is going away.
Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down
#360Yet another industry killed by millenials...