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

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#451

Post by sixothree » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 11:57 PM UTC

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…

Sears is where I got my Pong game as a child that started me down this path.

To be specific it was a Coleco Telstar Marksman.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#452

Post by ohples » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 11:59 PM UTC

csydas wrote: post #275

emiliobumachar wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For a very long time, due to custom printing, you could get semi-permanent Sears URLs to rather vulgar images on shirts, pillows, blankets, etc. I'm not sure I understand that, could you please elaborate? Are you saying that they provided custom printing, then some users printed vulgar images, and could pass on URLs for others to print another batch?

Exactly. You could upload an image for custom printing, with no sanity check as to what the image was, and it would be available for others to access as well, resulting in a semi-permanent link to hentai, porn, and extreme profanity. I imagine the justification behind it was that in order to do the custom print at the lower price, Sears had to buy a larger order, but I have no idea.

Like it would show up in the search results for other users? Or would it be a just a url you could send to people?

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#453

Post by jimpudar » Wed, Jan 09, 2019, 12:00 AM UTC

Fricken wrote: post #435

I last went to Sears a couple years ago for some vacuum cleaner bags. I hadn't been to Sears in years, but something was telling me that Sears was the place to go for vacuum cleaner bags. The vacuum cleaner salesman looked like he belonged in the waiting room in Beetlejuice, but he was very helpful, and he sold me an 8 pack of vacuum cleaner bags. He knew what type of vaccuum cleaner bag I needed before I had a chanc…

You might want to change your vacuum bags more often!

I'm certain if you search online you will be able to find bags for your vacuum.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#454

Post by xsmasher » Wed, Jan 09, 2019, 12:01 AM UTC

alexhutcheson wrote: post #24

Neil Saunders wrote a good Twitter thread last week about how mid-scale US department stores don't execute the basics of retail very well: https://twitter.com/NeilRetail/status/1079785924966445058 Others have pointed out that Target seems to do a much better job with organization, presentation, and flow. Not coincidentally, it seems to be performing much better than legacy department stores that historically targeted…

Re: flow, I wonder how much Sears and Pennys were hamstrung by the layout of their locations. Target, with their big loop and registers up front, has a "visit the whole store" flow that encourages you to keep shopping (and get a cart) even when you've gotten what you came for.

Classic Sears and Pennys both had multiple entrances, sometimes on multiple floors, and registers scattered around the retail space. Once you get what you came for you look for the closest line, check out, and you're done; there's no opportunity for a "grab a DVD on the way out" up-sell.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#455

Post by sixothree » Wed, Jan 09, 2019, 12:02 AM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #193

ams6110 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, but people can and do buy these things online as well, and some of these are well-suited for a hybrid approach. With clothes, for example, once I find my preferred SKU of trousers or shoes or whatever, I will just buy replacements online rather than return to the store where I bought my first pair, because they're a mass-produced product.

What's more is that more and more people do buy these things online. Clothes and tools especially.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#456

Post by NikolaNovak » Wed, Jan 09, 2019, 12:07 AM UTC

filmgirlcw wrote: post #422

ghaff wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Yup -- I remember in college (in the early 2000s) how slow it could be for a bookstore to get a book in that a professor required for class (there was a book of poetry I literally could not find in the state of Georgia and my professor let me photocopy the work she had assigned until I could get my copy from Amazon b/c she recognized that I had literally called every single major and minor bookseller in Atlanta and t…

Which brings an unrelated point of how much understanding a typical university professor has for the idea that their course may not be the be-all-and-end-all of student's life. Making an unavailable book a requirement for a course? Ahh how much I don't miss those days of being at the mercy of every university prof or bureaucrat's whims :-)

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#457

Post by bouncycastle » Wed, Jan 09, 2019, 12:08 AM UTC

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…

The difference is at the heart:

Amazon is really a software company.

Sears was not.

Software is eating the world.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#458

Post by hermitdev » Wed, Jan 09, 2019, 12:13 AM UTC

mjevans wrote: post #442

rossdavidh wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truth. I think that might be a reason why none of the retail incumbents, not even the ones with a by-mail background, did well. If you were an upstart, by-mail-only internet company, you didn't need to know how to run a bricks-and-mortar retail chain (of large size). It is probably relevant to consider Amazon's (limited) forays into bricks-and-mortar establishments. They have had about as much impact as the online ve…

I remember that what became NewEgg opened a brick and mortar store for (mostly) software and such (some hardware) in the suburb of Seattle that I lived in at the time, then a year or two later shifted entirely to online. They pivoted //hard// and made it work. I don't think Sears could have done quite that, but keeping the catalog and 'order to the store for free (long time) shipping' / 'delivery to home with paid sh…

Tiger Direct did the same. They had a brick & mortar in the Western Chicago Suburbs - Naperville or Aurora, I think. Never stepped foot in there, despite being a easy weekend drive from them. Everything I ever bought from them was online.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#459

Post by jackfoxy » Wed, Jan 09, 2019, 12:17 AM UTC

Kenmore appliances and Craftsman tools. Maybe the appliance quality suffered recently. I don't know because our 30 year old washer and dryer still work. Appliances were also built to be repaired, and there was a full catalog of parts you could order through Sears. Craftsman tools were near-professional quality. I'm sure lots of "pros" actually had some in their toolboxes.

I see the Craftsman brand has been controlled by Stanley Black & Decker for almost 2 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craftsman_(tools)

Kenmore is controlled by a subsidiary of Sears...wonder what will happen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenmore_(brand)

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#460

Post by hermitdev » Wed, Jan 09, 2019, 12:19 AM UTC

MetalGuru wrote: post #277

tw04 wrote: post #82

Sears died because of Lampert, that's the beginning and end of the story. While they were far from perfect, post-Kmart "acquisition" both the service and stores became garbage and he used Sears as a personal slush fund.

So instead of investing in actually making Sears better (like Target and Walmart did), he thought it was a good idea to spent nearly all of Sears' cash reserves buying back its shares (at prices as high as $170)? Now shares are $0.33. Is he just an incompetent buffoon, or did this strategy line his pockets? For example, was he buying shares owned by ESL with Sears' money? If so, that's highly unethical. Seems par for…

I don't know about the rest of the country, but they had spent the last 2 years rebuilding their flagship store in Oak Brook Center west of Chicago. Last I was in the mall last fall, it was still under reconstruction.

Probably far too little, far too late...