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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.

#91

Post by DANmode »

potato3732842 wrote: post #78
b112 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My house, built in the 60s, is actually 4 Sears cabin kits. The guy bought them, and assembled them end to end, making a long house. Same guy dug the original ditch by driving back and forth with his jeep for an hour during spring rain. This gives a perspective on his can do attitude. But really, I'm living in the house still, so it can't be that bad.

You literally can't do that today in any jurisdiction with building code. It wouldn't be illegal, but the hoops you'd need to jump through (and they way they'd likely try and screw you at every turn) to string together a bunch of kit buildings and call it a "house" would make it so expensive that you'd be better off hiring professionals to build a house the normal way.

Have you tried living in a freer state?

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

#92

Post by DANmode »

kstrauser wrote: post #48
silisili wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally almost everything, up to and including entire houses. I've lived in two Sears houses, great quality stuff if not a bit small by modern tastes. When I was a kid it was normal for parents to let their kids read the huge yearly Sears catalog to get ideas or pick gifts. By then they'd stopped selling items like firearms and houses but had pretty much everything else. If they had the foresight, they should have…

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.

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

#93

Post by kazinator »

Here is a piece of history.

The company Danelectro made guitars and amplifiers in the 50's and 60's under the Silvertone brand name distributed through Sears.

Danelectro came up with the idea of packaging a guitar pickup in a chrome lipstick case. They used actual lipstick cases in the beginning.

We still have lipstick pickups today; they are a big part of the electric guitar world.

A company named GFS makes double coil lipstick humbuckers: https://www.guitarfetish.com/GFS-Pro-Tube-Lipstick-Humbucker...

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

#94

Post by BobbyTables2 »

potato3732842 wrote: post #78
b112 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My house, built in the 60s, is actually 4 Sears cabin kits. The guy bought them, and assembled them end to end, making a long house. Same guy dug the original ditch by driving back and forth with his jeep for an hour during spring rain. This gives a perspective on his can do attitude. But really, I'm living in the house still, so it can't be that bad.

You literally can't do that today in any jurisdiction with building code. It wouldn't be illegal, but the hoops you'd need to jump through (and they way they'd likely try and screw you at every turn) to string together a bunch of kit buildings and call it a "house" would make it so expensive that you'd be better off hiring professionals to build a house the normal way.

Are double-wide trailer homes and prefabricated housing all that different?

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

#95

Post by BobbyTables2 »

musicale wrote: post #86
rainsford wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 of storage and networking.

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

#96

Post by kirykl »

I tried to buy a vacuum from a Sears store once. The cashier couldn't price match against Sears' own website, which had a lower price. So while inside the store, I purchased the vacuum on my phone, and selected in store pickup, and showed it to the cashier. But they had a separate building for in store pickup I had to drive around to.

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

#97

Post by mopsi »

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…

Sony is perhaps a good example. Most of the product categories that they became known for, like radios, cassette players, analog TVs and VCRs, are gone, replaced by PCs, smartphones, Playstation and their media empire and industrial products like CMOS sensors that are everywhere. They've seen multiple times a major business segment sink beneath their feet, and survived.

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

#98

Post by tdeck »

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…

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.

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

#99

Post by CrimsonCape »

So how can I get control of one Sears store and through that one store, singlehandedly resurrect the brand? Surely they must be ready to field Skunkworks-like ideas from young talent willing to risk and win...

This hypothetical new Sears vision is to create an Ikea competitor, but an honest Ikea, where Sears squares off with their biggest showroom-based adversary.

Ikea is beautiful but hollow, as their showrooms are seductive dioramas, but the resulting money exchange of cash for particleboard is like buying sex instead of meeting you life partner.

Instead, Sears would be the interface between the customer and the American-made premise. Sears sells American made products and represents American makers. Fuck selling washers and dryers. The showroom is not there to stock imports in cardboard. It's there to show you a concept, what your life could be if you stop buying junk. It's there to demonstrate quality. It's not particleboard at the core; it's a chunk of USA.

It would shamelessly capitalize on nostalgia and quality. Instead of nordic spartan whites and blands, it would have dioramas of pine wood wall panelling, cast iron wood stoves, chrome magnificence, Tiffany glass. Want a new desk? $5k. Made of US oak. Want the pine walls? The boardfeet are in the back, milled 5 miles away, how much square feet you need?

Even better, each store is fucking exclusive. Find local makers and concentrate their products in the geographically local store. Make people rabid and giddy to travel to each store even if they need to go five states away. Visiting is a unforgettable experience, like a museum that you can buy stuff.

Stage 2 is to use the Sears branded products like Ycombinator for machine shops. Sears injects some startup capital and now Sears cabinet pulls are turned on a machine lathe in a startup machine shop in Ohio. Furniture ateliers are like franchise Chick-fil-as.

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

#100

Post by jonway »

metalman wrote: post #38
b112 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought a riding lawnmower used, 17 years ago. The mower was very well maintained, engine was good, and already 25 to 30 years old when I bought it. I wanted the manual. Sears parts still existed, and they shipped me a complete copy of the manual(photocopied) for 10 bucks. Manual listed all parts, breakdown, etc. I was able to confidently order parts, keep it running for a decade. That was one reason Sears was so li…

I will detail the evil anti machine from sears, combo washer dryer, drop the lid and it breaks the switch, the switch trigger is on the lid with a very long prong, dropped gently it works, fast it breaks, $150 plus service call, where it turns out the prong can be snapped off, leaving a stub that still triggers the switch, but wont break it. Next, the waterpump sits on three bosses, with spring clips, if it ingests a…

Yeah they didn’t manufacture anything so they did get stuck with this crap especially after their influence waned on their suppliers.

Washing machines used to be better and much more reliable in my experience (if less efficient) for ex my parent have a high end Samsung and WOW is it SLOW! The drying is much worse(slow) too.

Probably much more efficient though.

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