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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

#531

Post by spiralx »

rhino369 wrote: post #100
Zigurd wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was an enormous Sears near where I grew up. It always felt shabby and badly run. They had lost the recipe even then, when they still had the catalog business. I get the impression from Sears and other big companies that lose their way that they become the playgrounds of big management egos that want to leave a mark and get written about in business publications, whether or not their ideas work.

My guess is that they got their lunch eaten by Wal-Mart and Target. Wal-Mart beat them on cost and margin. And you can't operate a mega-chain on premium customer service since the average customer shops on price or convenience. Department stores have been dying for a long time.

The dysfunctional Randian management model imposed by their CEO had more to do with their failure than any external woes:

https://outline.com/dnb2UK

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#532

Post by nielsole »

samstave wrote: post #520
3pt14159 wrote: post #472

Ahh, I came to this thread far too late, but hopefully this won't be missed. In 1980 The Yankee Group (a tech consultancy) reached out to my dad to help them understand how Sears could respond to the growing tech phenomenon. For reasons too long to get into, Gates and my pops (a Canadian) knew each other and were even both covered in The Intelligent Machines Journal out of Palo Alto in the same issue during the wanin…

My grandmother received an invite. We are a seattle-native family. Through people we knew at the time, they asked her to invest in their company and she could have 10% of the company if she gave them money. She discussed it with my grandfather and they both agreed: "Nobody is going to drink that much coffee." and rejected Starbuck's offer.

There was a good podcast about the founding period on NPRs how i built this. Worth checking out

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#533

Post by [deleted] »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #492
nirvdrum wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 le…

Mail order operations didn't collect sales tax either. Amazon didn't invent the interstate tax dodge. Sears did.

[deleted]

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#534

Post by nirvdrum »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #492
nirvdrum wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 le…

Mail order operations didn't collect sales tax either. Amazon didn't invent the interstate tax dodge. Sears did.

I've read your comment a few times and I can't really tell if you're trying to refute what I said or if you're agreeing with it. I don't think mail order operations ever amounted to more than a tiny fraction of what online purchases are today. They were certainly nowhere near as convenient.

Setting that aside, my point was Amazon had a built-in price advantage that brick & mortar retailers did not. Use tax really should have been the normalizing force there, but no one declares it and it's hard to enforce. So, all things being equal, consumers would shop where they could realize a price savings. The story of brick & mortar retailers transitioning to e-commerce is more nuanced than some titan resistant to change being taken out at the knees by some peppy up and comer. Amazon was quite aware of this and fought very hard against any change in rules regarding collection of sales tax.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#536

Post by paulie_a »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #456
filmgirlcw wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)

I rarely bought books until I attended the first few classes. Some classes had books on the list that were never even used. Literature professors were the worst: hey go buy this book for 20-40 dollars, you will need to read about 10 pages of it.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#537

Post by glenneroo »

Apocryphon wrote: post #352
bluGill wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How would this help eliminate any of the current issues? Why would giving them money and/or building a slimmed-down version reduce fake reviews, fake articles, ads as search results, et al?

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#538

Post by dingaling »

johnvanommen wrote: post #513
aswanson wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In hindsight, Bezos was playing chess while the retailers were playing Uno. I'm generally suspicious of a CEO making that much of a difference, but in this case, clearly, his vision was worth billions in business advantage.

> In hindsight, Bezos was playing chess while the retailers were playing Uno. Keep in mind, his long term goal is to put people on other planets. So he's definitely playing the long game. Blue Origin is a huge factor here.

That's a fairly recent mindset. When he launched Amazon his plan was to sell books online. That was it.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#539

Post by smileysteve »

flomo wrote: post #401
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.

Both Sears and K-Mart were crappy dumps 30 years ago. Not saying a competent manager couldn't have turned them around, but they've been on their way down for a long time.

> 30 years ago

I strongly disagree; 30 years ago, 1989. KMart had the popularity and store count in the SE that Walmart didn't. Sears was the top destination (and even still had its booming catalog business)

20-25 years ago seems more accurate.

Re: Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

#540

Post by bouncycastle »

bouncycastle wrote: post #457
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.

Can't edit, but for those who didn't understand that comment, see what it was referencing: https://www.quora.com/What-did-Marc-Andreessen-mean-when-he-...
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