What went wrong?

>>1038658
Complacency.
Sears had the resources and a huge catalog to jump into online marketing and be Amazon but way before Amazon came out.

>>1038658
Ty Pennington took advantage of Sears' generosity...

Brand became stale

Thinking about SEARS makes me cringe. It's decline has been so slow and so steady. They literally had decades to turn shit around, but continue to make bad decision after bad decision.

I think generally companies have shortcomings that they can't easily fix so if they don't keep on top of it eventually they see diminishing returns and they start penny pinching. I think McDonalds is similar

Read about their CEO problems.

The company failing has nothing to do with business. Their problems are solely due to greedy upper management.

Like the guy above said, they could have easily become the first Amazon.

There's a reason it's Sears Holdings now. Retail isn't the primary focus, they're steadily reorganizing into REIT's and other investments. Don't know if it will work but they do still have the capital. And some pretty good looking real estate parcels that are worth money if and when development comes to the neighborhoods they're in. There's one in North Hollywood I'm thinking of off the top of my head. You just can't think of them as Sears Roebuck or Kmart anymore, that's not the company.

File: 1383861915452.jpg (804KB, 1200x870px) Image search: [Google]

804KB, 1200x870px

>>1038660
This.

Going into the stores now is a flashback to late 80s/early 90s. Same style; same flooring; same shelving; same logos; etc.

>>1038735

Sounds like Frys Electronics.

>>1038862

Not sure why they'd destroy a household name like that.

>>1039153
Fry's Electronics only operates like 14 stores or something. I love them, every store has a cool theme to it. I remember when the one in Tempe AZ used to be an Incredible Universe.

>>1039169

frysforum.com

>>1039160
Cause they fucked up and it was too late to come back. Now it's just business. Tons of shit retail space full of products no one wants. Too big a company for a takeover and no one wanted it or had the capital to do what needed to be done to save it, so they had to diversify to stay afloat. It's a sad story but it's definitely tied into globalization and the death of middle class American shopping malls etc. They're just a glaring example of a larger economic problem. That's why it's been such a slow motion train wreck to watch. They're one of the big boys who didn't see the changes coming and couldn't get out of their own way fast enough so they got hung out to dry. There's nothing left to do but this. The land is worth money and whatever credit debt they're collecting from grandmas in crap neighborhoods and that's about it. Why fix up stores? Better to invest whatever you got coming in on the positive side into something else. That seems to be their whole deal now.

>>1038862
>reason it's sears holdings
it became sears holdings when eddie lampert merged it with kmart. theres also a reason they do all types of weird corporate actions (think warrants, spinning off lands end). he's creating a publicly traded SHLD thats worth shit while he remains higher proportional ownership of entities that actually possess value. deal in all things lampert very,very carefully.

>>1038658
Eddie Lampert.