I thought this was really interesting. Just the history of SEARS. My mom lives near a few SEARS mail order homes, actually quite nice looking homes.




Link to original video: https://youtu.be/sG4z89WH0vs

Mom used to take us school clothes shopping every August at Sears. I still have an old pair of Toughskins jeans from 1980-ish somewhere in the attic. Sad to see what Sears has become.

The Sears Catalog was the Amazon of its day.

In the 60s growing up, we used to go to Sears on Friday nights just to browse, get a bag of popcorn, walk around, not really buying anything. The catalog was the most popular book in the house. We got everything there; tools, car parts, tires, furniture, clothes, etc. Back in the day when there was no WalMart, Target, etc. etc. Sears was basically it.

Growing up in the 80s, the Sears Wishbook was the thing we looked forward to getting in the mail every fall. That thing was massive!

When I was a teenager, Craftsman was still the gold standard for DIYers (before that was a thing) and I built quite the tool chest from whatever Sears had on sale at the time. There was always a great deal on something.

They crashed quickly, didn’t they? Very sad.

-Rob

quote:

Growing up in the 80s, the Sears Wishbook was the thing we looked forward to getting in the mail every fall. That thing was massive!

Yes. I remember there were 2 yearly catalogs. I think Spring and Winter.

Those catalogs did seem to have everything.

Growing up in the 1950s & 60s, Sears was the corner stone of our world. You could get anything there. A trip to Sears was an expedition into a world of wants and dreams. We bought our clothes there and washed them in a Kenmore machine. Homes were full of Sears furniture and appliances. You could get fine china or tires for your car. My first .22 rifle came from Sears. And if the store didn't have what you wanted, no problem. Just order it out of the catalog and pick it up at customer service in just a day or two.
42 years as a mechanic and my tool box was and is still full of Craftsman tools.
Hell, I've even wiped my butt with Sears catalog pages.
Its really a shame that corporate didn't keep up with the rest of the retail world. Going to Sears was a real experience. So many people today have missed out on that.

quote:

Originally posted by Grayfox54:
Hell, I've even wiped my butt with Sears catalog pages.

Now that’s dedication.

The softer side of Sears.

quote:

Originally posted by Grayfox54:
Its really a shame that corporate didn't keep up with the rest of the retail world. Going to Sears was a real experience. So many people today have missed out on that.

Don't look now, but the "rest of the retail world" isn't faring so well, either. In my relatively affluent neighborhood, we've seen recent closings of Nordstrom, Lord & Taylor, Kmart, and The Gap.

The truth is that the Internet is making mincemeat out of even large chains who don't have the logistical support that companies like Amazon and Walmart have.

The running store where I work part-time is constantly trying to stay one step ahead of the giants. Fortunately, it's a specialty niche, and people like to be educated and advised as to what running shoes and gear best suit their needs. Still, the Internet is always in the background, waiting for the store to falter...

quote:

Now that’s dedication.
The softer side of Sears.

Just remember: crumple, crumple, crumple!

I too grew up going to Sears and enjoying the catalog. Sears was a wonderland for me. It was truly heartbreaking to see it fail for decades before finally succumbing to the seemingly inevitable.
The store here in Lynchburg was wonderful, I had all our cars worked on there and loved hanging out and just seeing all that was in the store. it was amazing. I was truly sad when it closed.

When I lived in Texas (Waxahachie) there was the legend of a house by the railroad, it had been ordered out of a catalog, and was dropped off the train and built on the spot. (the link is for a similar house in celine, the one I refer to (iirc) was on W. Main St. in Waxahachie.)

I found this article to be interesting:

It's been a couple of days since Sears's parent company declared bankruptcy. Most analyses seem to blame the collapse on chairman Eddie Lampert's attempt to turn Sears into an online Amazon competitor and his subsequent failure to upgrade the Sears and K-Mart "brick and mortar" stores.
That's mistaking the symptom for the cause, though.
In war, generals have a tendency to fight using tactics that worked in the last war. The same is true in business. Large, established companies usually wait until a business strategy has been market-tested before implementing it themselves, at which point it's too late.
A famous example of "fighting the last war" in business when Apple made the Macintosh architecture available to non-Apple hardware manufacturers, hoping to replicate the success of Windows. The experiment reduced Apple's revenue without increasing market share which is why Jobs terminated it immediately after rejoining Apple.
Lampert's attempted imitation of Amazon seems particularly clueless when considering that the big box bookstores had already attempted to fight Amazon on Amazon's territory and miserably failed, with one going out of business and the other forced to pursue a different strategy.
As traditional retailers have struggled against the Amazon juggernaut, a potentially successful strategy is gradually emerging that builds upon the one thing that Amazon lacks (or lacked... more about that in a second): a physical presence in the local community.
Tactical examples of attempted community-building in big box retail include Walmart's ubiquitous greeters, Costco's cheap but tasty food court, Barnes & Noble's ever-expanding coffee shops, and (especially) the Apple Store. I strongly suspect that Amazon bought Whole Foods as defensive move to ride this growing trend.
Community-based retailing is a potential game-changer because (as you may have noticed) people are becoming disenchanted with social media and evincing an increasing desire for a sense of belonging that's less ephemeral and more visceral. Because of this, the next retail war will probably be fought on the ground rather than online.
So back to Sears. With a brand that commands over a hundred years of nostalgic familiarity and a pre-existing physical presence in thousands of communities, Sears was ideally positioned to capture the hearts, minds, and feet of the nation's consumers. Same thing but to a lesser degree with K-
Lampert, however, clearly missed Sears's community-building potential. If he'd not been so blind to the obvious, he would have invested in the stores to make them places where people felt comfortable shopping and might even want to hang out.
Thus the question "why did Sears crash" is really "why was Lampert so blind?" The answer lies in the severe limitations of Lampert's outmoded business philosophy.
As my colleague Erik Sherman pointed out a few years ago, Lampert is a Ayn Rand fan. And that's problematice because Rand-ism is all about the supremacy of the brilliant individual. For Rand, community equals communitarianism, the evil power of the many to circumscribe the positive contributions of the few.
As a Rand disciple, Lampert was predisposed to be suspicious of the entire idea of community, especially when it consists of the hoi-polloi who might consider "hanging out at Sears" to be something worth doing. It was far easier for Lampert to gravitate to an online world that reduces everyone to infinitely measurable bits and bytes.
There are three lessons that entrepreneurs can learn from Lampert's failure to adapt:
Imitation is the sincerest form of failure. Unless you can massively outspend a competitor (like Kinko's taking on local copy shops), pursuing a competitor's successful strategy is destined to fail.
Position yourself to ride the backlash. The "online revolution" is now creating the inevitable backlash. For many companies, being a visible presence in the local community will far more valuable than having a great website.
Trash your old Ayn Rand books. You can't afford to make 21st century business decisions based upon obsolete polemics against the political concepts of the mid-20th century. Evolve your thinking to match today's reality.

_______________________________________
Not to disagree with the article, but I have always been of the opinion, the K-Marts, Sams, Home Depots etc. 'weakened' Sears. Then when the online craze hit, they were not strong enough to weather it. A few misteps and they went under. Had they survived, I think they would have returned to prominence. Just my opinion.

got my first real dose of Science RunAmuck with the 1953ish foot xray shoe size adviser.

First new store-bought bicycle 1957, the full race JC Higgens roadmaster, with belly tank, horn button,side-exhaust pipe graphic, rear fender package carrier.

Had seen many of the Big Stores from Spokane to Seattle to Sacramento. Finally on a business trip about 1983 actually did a floor by floor scout of the layout, of the Original Chicago Home Base. Decidedly old school construction, with major loss of display space going up each floor.

I still have a 'looks new' set of larger channel lock & regular pliers, I bought for a job in 1966.

Discouraged over the decades of their decline & fall, it was a known supplier of good quality & actual Customer Service. How could that go so wrong?

quote:

Originally posted by PowerSurge:
Sad to see what Sears has become.

Yes it is.
A good study on Marketing & Business though.
Unfortunately on what not to do.

quote:

Originally posted by fpuhan:
Don't look now, but the "rest of the retail world" isn't faring so well, either.

You can't lump everyone in there but the mechanics of business are changing ~ some for the good and some not so great.
It's easy to look backwards and say coulda shoulda woulda but having the insight to figure it out ahead of time is golden.
Of course just keeping up can let you survive.

quote:

Originally posted by fpuhan:
Don't look now, but the "rest of the retail world" isn't faring so well, either.

Yeah, but it's always going to be a head-scratcher how the store that was, in retail terms, the internet before there was the internet didn't manage to do a better job of becoming a part of the current internet-heavy economy. Hell, you could order out of the catalogue from Latin America and Asia back in the '70s.

When I was in Valencia Spain for a conference (Science City to be exact, and no, Thor was not there) We went to this super store, I swear it was 8 stories tall. It had everything for everybody.

It took a minute but I actually found it:

El Corte Ingles Valencia Spain.

So how can these guys pull it off but Sears couldn't?

quote:

Originally posted by smschulz:

quote:

Originally posted by PowerSurge:
Sad to see what Sears has become.

Yes it is.
A good study on Marketing & Business though.
Unfortunately on what not to do.

quote:

Originally posted by fpuhan:
Don't look now, but the "rest of the retail world" isn't faring so well, either.

You can't lump everyone in there but the mechanics of business are changing ~ some for the good and some not so great.
It's easy to look backwards and say coulda shoulda woulda but having the insight to figure it out ahead of time is golden.
Of course just keeping up can let you survive.

What hurt Sears more than anything was the Great Recession. The last year Sears turned a profit was 2010, right in the middle of it. People’s buying habits have changed and now it’s more about the lowest possible price. Brick and mortar will never be able compete with online-only retailers on that factor.

some of the info in the OP video:

an interesting Sears history:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com...all-sears-180964181/

The company was founded as a modest mail-order retailer of watches in the 1880s by Richard W. Sears and Alvah C. Roebuck.

Julius Rosenwald, a Chicago clothing merchant who became a partner in the firm in 1895, directed its rapid growth, expanding into new products and ever-broader territory.

Mail-order firms like Sears were able to penetrate underserved rural areas by leaning on new infrastructure, such as the railroads that linked far-flung regions of the country. Government regulation also aided the company's growth, with the Rural Free Delivery Act of 1896 underwriting its distribution chain by expanding mail routes in rural areas.

more at link

quote:

Originally posted by redstone:
When I was in Valencia Spain for a conference (Science City to be exact, and no, Thor was not there) We went to this super store, I swear it was 8 stories tall. It had everything for everybody.

It took a minute but I actually found it:

El Corte Ingles Valencia Spain.

So how can these guys pull it off but Sears couldn't?

Corte Ingles is the last of its kind in Spain and really, for the rest of Europe as department stores are dying off left and right. The location in Madrid was pretty overwhelming, kindof an upscale Walmart offering dentistry, optometry, travel services, along with just about every home item you could think of. Its restaurant and bar scene up on the roof was pretty solid.

The problems at Sears started before Lampert. Go back to the late 1980's, that is when the decline started.

They got away from being "Where America Shops For Value" and tried to become a trendy place to go. Quasi-luxury purchasing was not normally done at Sears but they tried to go in that direction.

Brand Central, instead of focusing on the house brand of Kenmore they expanded into other brands usually at a price disadvantage.

Sears Auto Center, well there were several actions against them for deceptive practices, after that they curtailed much of the jobs that they previously did.

Sears replaced their seasoned career commissioned sales staff with hourly "kids" in the late 1990's. Now you have people there that only cared about the hours they put in and knew nothing about the items they sold. Lawn and Garden and Appliance Sales were strongly affected by this.

The maintenance agreements/service contracts they sold originally were pretty solid, repair or replacement if they could not fix it within a certain time frame. By the mid 1990's the only way to get a problem resolved when (not if) they could not fix an appliance was to complain repeatedly to store management and corporate headquarters.

Craftsman Tools, well the Tool Department fell into a similar pit. No longer would you get a new ratchet as a replacement but a "reconditioned" one. That was fine until they tried to give you one that had clear signs that it was previously used as a hammer. Or when I took a power tool in that was recalled. Despite signs all over the department stating that this particular sander was a fire hazard the person I took that exact tool for replacement refused to exchange it as the recall notice stated. He plugged it in and pronounced "It works,it's fine!" That took a call to the store manager to rectify that matter and even he was not too concerned.

Once Sears and K Mart merged I felt it was the death rattle for both. Two sinking ships, both crews rearranging deck chairs and swabbing the decks.

When I had a Sears credit card at the bottom was the year that your card was issued, mine said 1974. I actually started buying tools at Sears ten years before when I was 12.

I just had the district manager order me a replacement sliding t-handle, 3/8 harddriver.

Convoluted story of receipt, but I finally received the tool.