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Only 5 Sears stores remain in the U.S.

nytimes.com

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Re: Only 5 Sears stores remain in the U.S.

#111

Post by anthonypasq »

rainsford wrote: post #60
brushfoot wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of the kinds of people who vie for leadership roles at established companies like Sears was at the time. Those people aren't innovators and creators. They're management types, MBAs, bureaucrats. And fair enough: When the ship is that big and there are that many people on board, you often don't want to "move fast and break things," because the downstream effects can be extreme. Now you've just broken a company t…

I'm even struggling to come up with counter examples where a major established company is able to successfully pivot when the business model that brought them success is no long as viable as it once was. Maybe IBM counts in that they still exist, although I'd argue they aren't nearly the omnipresent force they were back in the day. You could also count widely diversified companies, but I probably wouldn't because the…

Google is attempting to do this as we speak

Re: Only 5 Sears stores remain in the U.S.

#112

Post by phil21 »

DANmode wrote: post #92
kstrauser wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that Amazon absolutely mastered was fast logistics. Sears thrived in a time where TV ads would sell things with an asterisk saying “allow 4-6 weeks for delivery”. They had 100+ years to bring their timelines down, yet Sears Prime with free rush delivery wasn’t a thing. I don’t know what it would have taken to revamp their supply lines to make that possible. And neither, I suspect, did they.

A VP willing to risk their bonus.

You mean a board willing to risk everything and operate at a loss for a decade or more.

I doubt such a board would have lasted more than a few years at best.

Not to mention trying to change 100 plus years of technical and organizational debt while in-flight.

I don’t think Amazon could have come to be outside of the tech sector plus be a greenfield play. I could be wrong, but HN and techie folks in general seem to underestimate how hard it is to change existing organizations. It’s rarely a technical problem.

Re: Only 5 Sears stores remain in the U.S.

#113

Post by OkayPhysicist »

tdeck wrote: post #98
musicale wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost tells you that there is something wrong with the business incentives in the US; or perhaps sequences of activities like starting with a leveraged buyout, saddling the new company with debt, and subsequently gutting the company to make the huge interest payments, usually to the principals of the deal, are considered gross mismanagement, conflicts of interest, and breaches of fiduciary duty rather than good ways…

I think in the case of the two companies I mentioned, they were managed very differently in the other countries. K-Mart, for example, had fallen out of favor with shoppers well before it was bought by private equity.

IMO, saying something is was killed by private equity is almost always misattribution. Thriving companies rarely sell out to corporate vultures (the particular brand of PE that people tend to mean when they say "killed by private equity"). Instead, the company has something fundamentally wrong (sometimes it's the company's fault, sometimes the market has shifted, sometimes there are deeper issues in the economics), and it sells out to someone willing to make a buck driving the business into the ground.

Examples include: Family Dining (Red Lobster, Applebee's, etc) was a dying market segment. Millennials and younger tend to put less value on table service than their parents did, preferring food quality over table service when forced to choose. Fast-Casual took over the entire price segment, so the companies either pivoted (see Chili's takeout expansion), or sold out to PE to decompose.

Local Dentistry is getting bought out by PE because the economic conditions that traditionally granted junior dentists the capital to buy out their retiring seniors' practices have ceased. Now, in order to retire, dentists are forced to sell their practices to PE firms.

Re: Only 5 Sears stores remain in the U.S.

#114

Post by b112 »

jonway wrote: post #103
b112 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if those networks had a hard time filling ad orders, so Sears ended up with a massive discount? If those ads were pennies compared to other spots, it could be deemed worth it. Parents often are nearby when kids are watching TV.

Hell no! TV ads were Goliath! Radio still stays relevant, too. Late night is where it dried up. (nowadays it’s podcast spot and insta bullshit? Eh.)

No, the cartoon networks.

There was a mass explosion of cable channels, and ad rates plunged. Some networks had a hard time filling all ad space.

Re: Only 5 Sears stores remain in the U.S.

#115

Post by [deleted] »

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #95
musicale wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple: suffered from Windows PC competition in the 1990s but came roaring back under Steve Jobs. They doubled down on high-quality design, user experience, and vertical integration, and even switched from PowerPC to x86 and ARM, and from classic macOS to BSD-based OS X. HP(E): after stumbling with itanium, replaced its proprietary Unix server business with x86 and Linux.

HP(E) managed to survive but I wouldn’t say they’re a roaring success. They went from 300k employees to a small fraction. They went from designing graphics cards in-house to practically rebranding white box servers. (Yes, they still make their own servers, too much of the design and manufacturing work being done by outside firms). They’ve also thrown away a mind boggling amount of talent and institutional knowledge o…

[deleted]

Re: Only 5 Sears stores remain in the U.S.

#117

Post by UltraSane »

musicale wrote: post #85
tdeck wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting fact. It reminds me of how K-Mart is apparently big in Australia despite having died a slow and pathetic death in the US. Or how Yahoo is still a thing in Japan.

Almost tells you that there is something wrong with the business incentives in the US; or perhaps sequences of activities like starting with a leveraged buyout, saddling the new company with debt, and subsequently gutting the company to make the huge interest payments, usually to the principals of the deal, are considered gross mismanagement, conflicts of interest, and breaches of fiduciary duty rather than good ways…

The main thing wrong with US capitalism is the fact that it is legal to buy a company with borrowed money and then put that debt on the company's books and force it to pay it.

Re: Only 5 Sears stores remain in the U.S.

#118

Post by dragonwriter »

lumost wrote: post #42
nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is talking like creating Amazon was some kind of low hanging citrus to be picked from the tree.

People are talking about putting a mail order catalog store online. Presumably, sears already had the catalog, shipping infrastructure - so it really should have been about digital payments, and an online storefront. How significant their shipping catalog was in the 1990s I do not know, scaling the online storefront would have required Amazon scale investments which a dividend maximizing company was unlikely to do.

> People are talking about putting a mail order catalog store online. Presumably, sears already had the catalog, shipping infrastructure - so it really should have been about digital payments, and an online storefront. [...]

> How significant their shipping catalog was in the 1990s I do not know

Sears discontinued its general mail order catalog (which had declined in relevance for years) in 1993, the same year NCSA Mosaic was released, while the web had about 0 public penetration and no commercial use.

So, it wouldn't have been a matter of adapting the catalog business to the web, it would have been rebuilding it from scratch.

Re: Only 5 Sears stores remain in the U.S.

#119

Post by magneticnorth »

If you're like me and wanted to know where the last 5 stores actually are:

- Coral Gables, Florida

- Orlando, Florida

- Braintree, Massachusetts

- Concord, California

- El Paso, Texas

According to another article I found (https://www.costar.com/article/1406528706/once-giant-sears-c...)

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