Sears has so much potential - Vent

[Deleted]

I was supporting you until you decided that they should fire the old and ugly cashiers, does it matter what someone looks like if you are out to buy a TV or phone? As long as they are clean and well groomed (should be a standard for all white collar jobs) their age and appearance should not be an issue, give me a fat man in his 40's that knows electronics rather than a bimbo that memorised the list of features.

[Elegiac]

I don't like Sears because they have incompetent management.

The reason that the only thing they advertise are tools and junk is because they had the brilliant idea of making their departments compete with each other and give prime advertisement slots to the department with the highest sales. Guess which department won?

They're shooting themselves in the foot, just like Hostess and Lehman Brothers.

[Tradewind]

I haven't been to a Sears in over 8 years and it was just because I needed a multitool and they were the closest place to where I was. It's not even a Sears branded one or w/e, it's a Stanley.

[jugzilla]

I really like Sears, i take my car there for service, which is open 7 days a week until like 8PM, and get to walk around the mall while I wait. Sure beats hanging around a service station or a car dealership.

[Digglett]

Now that you mention it, stepping into Sears does really feel like you stepped 20 years back in time. It just doesn't even feel like the present their items in a very appealing manner either.

[Masark]

I think sears was kind of like the Wal-Mart of its time. Where else can you find tools, plumbing supplies and polo shirts?

Wal-mart schmal-mart. Johnny-come-lately posers. Would Wal-Mart sell you a house?

[Milchshake]

Eddie Lampert, the legendary hedge fund manager, was once hailed as the “Steve Jobs of the investment world” and the second coming of Warren Buffett.
Lampert the distillation of the fervent market worship and wrong-headed economic approaches that came to dominate the U.S. in the 1980s and have yet to run their fatal course. He adores Ayn Rand, and is reported to have given out copies of Atlas Shrugged during an ESL annual dinner. Lampert is also a fan of Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian economist beloved by conservatives and libertarians.

At Sears, Lampert set out to create the Ayn Rand model of a giant firm. The company got a radical restructuring. It was something that had been tried at giant industrial conglomerates like GE, but never with a retailer.

First, Lampert broke the company into over 30 individual units, each with its own management, and each measured separately for profit and loss. Acting in their individual self-interest, they would be forced to compete with each other and thereby generate higher profits.

What actually happened is that units began to behave something like the cutthroat city-states of Italy around the time Machiavelli was penning his guide to rule-by-selfishness. As Mina Kimes has reported in Bloomberg Businessweek, they went to war with each other.

[OzoAndIndi]

Well, you could always hire the guy who dragged my former employer - JCPenney - through the mud. I mean if you need big changes he'd prob be the guy to do it. Just don't expect it to go over all that well. Point being...don't expect big changes to go over all that well. If the place still has enough customers to continue to exist then it has enough to rage if massive changes are made in an effort to get people who aren't already showing up. Seems anymore that big stores like them, Penney's, etc., can't win.

Though maybe that jackass who did more harm than good to Penneys would have been better off at Sears in the first place, given that Sears actually has the electronics stuff so his inspiration might have been better suited to a place like that.

[vindicatorx]

they'd rather pay their shareholders and CEO that just came in more money than actually making the company better. the company went under several years ago, used to be decent for middle class people. there's also some issues with other companies pushing the LCD further and the economy tightening up on the middle class.

Yeah perhaps if they had not paid the CEO $7.5 million in total compensation they would be able to make shit a little nicer for the store employees.

[Wells]

Yeah perhaps if they had not paid the CEO $7.5 million in total compensation they would be able to make shit a little nicer for the store employees.

Its not even just the employees. Sears spends significantly less on their stores than their competitors and it shows.

[Afrospinach]

his was probably the main reason why i quit working at sears. I felt like my "hard work" was based on the number of credit cards i sold. Yes, this is a sales job.., but tricking old ladies or foreigners into a shitty credit card is not very honorable work in my opinion...

You are probably right. That may well have been your most productive activity there. That is why these rants and what have you often fall on deaf ears because they are probably missing the point of the business model. For example when I used to work at a gas station many many years ago, it was made very clear to me I am not there to pump gas or anything first and foremost, I am there to ask anyone and everyone if they want to buy whatever confectionery is on special that week. I was the only person who actually did ask everyone, and my conversion rate was nearly 40%. It worked way better than I though it ever could, and that is what made the gas station money, not selling gas. Everything else just had to be "good enough".

That right there is probably a sore point for many people to look at. "Good enough" can really irk a lot of perfectionists who see a business as being the best you can be, but maybe that is not really as economically viable as people think it is. Maybe that is not sears' deal, but I bet they make a killing on those in house credit card vs anything else they do hence the focus.