Sears USED to make the best and reliable products.

I bought a brand new fridge from them (Kenmore) about 10 years ago.

It still works ok but the parts (racks, shelves) are cracking and falling apart.

In reality, their products were no better than other brands. But, they stood behind them and worked to make customers happy. When they began screwing their customers, rather than supporting them, they doomed themselves to failure.

And it sucks that Asia is the go-to for replacement parts.

My aunt asked me to get her some new cartridges for her slightly obscure 6-year old inkjet printer. The b/w ink was $25 and the 4-color cartridge was $36, so $61 before tax.

The same store had a brand new inkjet for $49 that included ink. I joked to myself "It's cheaper just to replace the whole printer when it runs out of ink than buy new ink!" However, the replacement cartridges for the new model were $12 and $17.

I bought her a new printer.

(Don't use inkjet unless you have to...printer ink by volume is priced atrociously, and I've had 2 laser printers that I replaced before they ever ran out of the original toner that came with them.)

They decided to get a second one (slightly smaller) to have a little more space, and as "insurance" in case the old one gave out.

The older one outlasted the new one by five years; it lasted damn near fifty years.

I guess planned obsolescence is part of companies' strategies these days. If products last forever, there are no sales gained by replacing them. If the thing gives out after a relatively short time, it generates more sales.

it's part of the markets whole planned obsolescence thing (not just a Sears thing, it's industry wide).

TBH, I only trust German brands (those made and manufactured in Germany). I'm sorry to report that, but the industry wants you to throw away the appliance, rather than fix it.
(Plus, it's not made to last, anyway).

In the refrigerator melted and burned up. Though it still worked we worked it could become a fire hazard. Brought a Samsung that works just ok.

Planned obsolescence

my grandfather went downtown when refrigerators were first coming out in 1938
the store had one but it was already sold and they could order one for him.
he said: I've got cash.
he got the fridge that day.
it was still working in 1981 when they died.

how come 'fridge' has a 'd' while 'refrigerator' does not?

Some other company is in control of manufacturing and pricing decisions now. I'm not defending Sears, because it was a terrible decision on their part to sell off the brand. They've made so many bad decisions in the last 30 or so years. A lot of us thought it was the end when they sold off Craftsman.

Instead of changing its business model, it tried to raise cash by selling it's most important assets - its trusted products.

Bye, Sears. We used to know you.

My experience is just a tiny, minor symptom of that.

I've seen it on Amazon.

I fix stuff, so I have an idea how much parts for various appliances should cost. When your item breaks, they don't want you to fix it even if it's a simple repair. They want you to buy a brand new item, so they price the parts so high as to make buying a replacement seem more attractive. Sears is far from the only company that does this, but they have certainly been guilty of doing it for a long time.

And it’s a wasteland of bad merchandise lit by harsh fluorescent lighting. No customers to speak of—I think I spotted a tumbleweed.

Maybe I'll make a last, sad visit before they're all closed. The one here in the Maplewood Mall has already shut down, leaving that mall without an anchor store on the east end of the Mall. And there's nobody to replace it any longer.

Without anchor stores, Malls have a big, big problem.

The other mall closed down long ago. Our remaining mall has recently lost its Macy’s and a Bon Ton, leaving only a Sears as an anchor store.

i do see entire garage door opener (not just the remote) for $139.99....

of course i don't know what model number you're looking for.


that said, i certainly agree with your premise, sears once had a solid reputation, but has sucked for a long time.

sadly, many companies do this over time. they innovate and build a "brand" by providing something of quality and/or competitive pricing and/or superior customer service. then, over time, they slowly chip away at what made them great, having gotten people into the habit of trusting them.

eventually people figure it out and the company falls apart, but not before they've ripped off and disappointed many, many customers....

At one time she was the youngest catalog manager in Montgomery Wards company. When Wards closed she went to work as Christmas help at Sears. When Christmas was over they wouldn't let her go. Eventually the Sears store announced they would close the manager would open a Sears Catalog store as an authorized Sears merchant. He had all the employees to choose from to join him, he chose my wife as catalog manager. Long story short he eventually decided to retire and asked my wife and I to buy the store. We thought long and hard it was doable. We probably would have if not for the fact that they had a set plan on how store should be run. I'm an old time gearhead and tool guy. I wanted to accentuate the tool department. That wasn't in their plan. The store passed through several owners and eventually closed. Thankful I didn't make that leap. Wife and I were retired by age 55. It all worked out for the best.

I went into one a couple of times, and went away without making a purchase. I couldn't see the utility of ordering from the catalog at a fixed location and coming back to pick up the goods later. Why not just order from the catalog and have the merchandise delivered to my door?

That was an odd thing for Sears to do, I though.

Also lawn equipment. It worked for many years after the big stores closed. Then it didn't. When our Penneys store closed a local grocery store became the catalog desk for them. That also worked until it didn't.

Or Home Depot or Lowes.

Or a dedicated appliance store.

Everyone knows why. When you don't have brick and mortar stores to run, maintain and pay for, and merchandise can be assembled by robots or people desperate enough to work for beans in a world of stagnant wages, it's pretty obvious who is going to come out on top.

Sears people aren't wandering around scratching their heads over this, your simplistic narrative aside.

They operated out of big city warehouses and shipped goods directly to consumers. It wasn't until much later that they started opening individual stores. When Sears, Roebuck & Co. started in the 1890s, they operated as an alternative to local stores, selling goods at lower prices by not having the overhead of operating local stores.

Eventually, they dropped their catalog sales, just about the time the Internet was beginning. They could have shifted over to online sales at the very beginning, but did not. Instead, they thought their brick-and-mortar business model would see them through. They were wrong. Badly wrong.

I've been studying Sears for years. I have original catalogs from every decade, beginning in the 1890s and ending in the 1970s. My "simplistic narrative" is just a hint about the disaster that Sears is now.

Retailing has changed forever. Sears missed the boat as it was leaving the dock. It also missed the Walmart and Target boats. Lack of vision or tunnel vision was the reason.

But, thanks for your gratuitous insult. Really.

Yep, they crashed and burned for a variety of reasons. My issue was with your claim that they don't know what went wrong. Because of course they do.

Of course they know. They just don't care. They gave up on the entire thing some time ago, and are just trying to eke out the last possible dollar now.

Early in January, I went into a K-Mart near my parent's town. My shoe soles had separated from the last, so I went there and bought a cheap pair of shoes, because it was the nearest place available. What a sad looking place that store was, to say the least. I never quite understood why Sears bought K-Mart in the first place. I know what they were thinking, but it was a huge mistake.

Instead, they "K-Marted" the Sears stores--they sold the shabbier K-Mart brands in Sears and didn't up-scale the K-Marts. I was in a couple of Sears stores at Christmas time and thought how sad they were.

BTW, I volunteer as an historical interpreter during the summer in a village set in 1898--the 1897 Sears catalog I have is a great hit and helps explain a lot about the time period.

edition. From there, I started looking for and buying original catalogs, at least one for each decade after that. I found most of them on eBay, at widely varying prices. The most difficult years to find were the depression years. My 1946 catalog was printed on poor quality paper, and still had a number of things you couldn't order yet, after the war. Once I had at least one for each decade, I finally stopped buying them. From time to time, I'll page through a catalog, especially if I'm reading something that is set in a particular decade.

It's a look back in time to what people were living with and using.

I like your volunteer job, by the way. It sounds like a lot of fun. If I were younger and there was such a place near me, I'd probably be doing that, too. I love talking about history.

BTW, you're exactly right about the K-Marting of Sears. They went exactly in the wrong direction, in an attempt to compete with Target and Walmart on price. Another poor business decision among many others.

Growing up in the 50s and 60s, the Sears store 25 miles from my hometown was a shopping Mecca for my parents. The catalog, too, was where you looked for what you wanted to buy, in almost every category of merchandise.

They knew they had to update for the digital age. They did try. But they fell into to the hands of a modern "capitalist'," Eddie Lambert. Old capitalists made money from production. New ones from destruction. They buy companies so they can make money while running them into the ground. Lampert made billions killing Sears, then he bought the carcass himself to make still more.

Much of the entire retail industry has fallen victim to that. Walmart and Target are next. They're trying to go online, and they're succeeding, to some degree, but they are still weighed down by the cost of keeping actual stores going. That cuts into the profitability of their online divisions.

The old retailing business models no longer work. They can't be rescued, I think.

It's not just Amazon, either, that is challenging those old business models. There are any number of very successful Internet retailers who are taking a more focused, narrower approach. Wayfair is one of those, focusing on home goods.

If Amazon has a weakness, it is probably that it is trying to sell everything. It may be that the specialized Internet retailers will own their own specialized markets, hurting Amazon's generalized business model. It's too early to predict, though.

It's all very interesting, I think.

Here's another interesting thing about Sears. At one point, in the early 20th century, Sears took a stab at being a wholesale supplier to smaller stores in the heartland. It tried to sell merchandise to such stores in quantity. It dropped that model, though, in just a few years. You can see the attempt in the old catalogs. I have a collection of them, beginning in the 1890s and continuing, decade by decade, right up to the final Big Book. It's a fascinating thing to watch.

I do wonder about the costs associated with having employees do this shopping. But I haven't actually gone into a Target in months, though I buy from them as much as ever.

They at least seem willing to split the baby between digital and brick/mortar.

Of course, eventually Bezos' army of drones will be able to deliver you items before you order them just based on the conversation you had with your wife.

Appliance repair parts are often this way as well. There are companies that exist just to flip new/old stock and salvage / part out old appliances. A control board for a 10 year old dryer will probably be $100+ when the whole appliance is hardly worth that anymore.

There are enough people who will pay the crazy premium for OEM replacement parts to avoid risk of ordering the wrong thing plus being unwilling to pay for a full replacement.

Sears probably had nothing to do with that price.

It's an old part, so it's likely the price I saw was from a third-party vendor. The principle is the same, though. Sears always overcharged for part like that one, which is why there's an aftermarket for manufacturers and retailers to take advantage of. The last time I priced Craftsman garage door remotes, Sears wanted over $40 for that same remote, years ago. My mother-in-law needed one to replace the one she lost.

I ordered a third-party one for about $10. It worked fine, but, predictably, M-I-L found her original one before the replacement arrived.

to replace one that's gone walkabout. I think Ebay has originals for a whole lot less.

I'd just go for price on those things. I imagine they all have the same basic circuit boards inside. Just match your opener model with one that's compatible and you're all set. But, that's the trick, isn't it?

normally I would have but I wasn't certain if it was a thermal fuse or other cause. Turns out it was the door safety switch, he had to make a trip to the warehouse to see if they had a part. He came two days and checked his spare parts first. So the parts kit was 40 and included the parts that broke 20yrs ago too, he replaced everything. I could have went to Lowe's and paid 429 for a new one or if I wanted abuse, Home Depot same dryer 498, or best buy for 499.99. I could have left it jury-rigged but why bother.

The box stores eat the mom and pop shops. The internets eat the box stores.

What comes around goes around, I suppose.

Amazon is becoming overweight at this point. And it's starting to do stupid things like buying Whole Foods and playing with brick and mortar locations and local delivery services. I'm betting they're looking at going into new car sales before long. Carvana is doing internet sales of used cars now. Wayfair is gobbling up the home goods business. I wouldn't be surprised to see Amazon start teetering a bit in the next few years.

I suspect more specialized smaller Internet companies are going to end up eating Amazon at some point. However, their web servers may be in Amazon data centers. it's fascinating to watch all this happening at such an accelerated pace.

But, today, there's already 8" of snow in my driveway, and it's still snowing. So, it looks like my afternoon is hosed. Can I order driveway clearing on Amazon yet?

with Sears died before the internet. They were part of the merger boom after Reagan. Mobil bought them out they knew holes in the ground but not retail. Many companies ceased to exist because Reagan encouraged mergers. Many companies were merged just so they couldn't compete any longer and were simply vanished. But many were just managed into the ground by people who had no idea what they were doing. I know of two in my small area who were put out of business so they didn't compete.

It has to do with original founders of things. Once they age out, die, or get ousted, many companies tend to fade fairly quickly. I think it's a matter of vision, really. The founders of Sears, Roebuck & Co. were around for quite a long time, and succeeded. Then, once they were gone, their vision was gone with them. Similar things happened during the tech boom, but not always. For example, when did you last hear of Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, or WordStar. Both were leaders in the application software business, but their founders left. Without that vision from the founder, they soon faded. It doesn't always happen, but it does often enough to make me wonder if it isn't more or less a general rule.

Of course, time also passes, and with it the fresh opportunities that empowered the new ventures, so that could also play a role.

We'll have two choices - a giant Costco the size of Kansas for our every day needs and then a giant Amazon fulfillment center the size of Alaska to work at. Oh and let's not forget the Brawndo.

Along with customer revies for almost every item.

I had a garage remote fail and after some research, I ended up at my local Sears store and bought a replacement for about $20. No shipping, got it the same day. Thing is was, it wasn't a "Sears" brand of any sort. It was some China off brand. Works fine. Not sure that Sears could survive just being another Walmart.

... probably 17 years old. Great tool, and I have used it a lot.

But my batteries have died (I have 3). I went to the Sears Home Store to buy a couple of new ones and learned that the new ones won't fit my drill. You cant buy the old ones "new" anymore. I can get re-furbished ones on line for about $40 (which I'm wary of), or I can have mine refurbished (also wary and it's $45 bucks a battery). So Sears made a decision at some point to change their line-up of tools, and intentionally changed the battery. Then phased out the old ones. I told the guy I was beginning to understand why they were failing, and he said "yep".

I now have my eye on a Dewalt on sale for about $150.

After a certain number of years, the designs will change and they'll stop producing batteries for older models. 17 years is a long life for any cordless drill. They aren't designed to last that long, really.

So, that new DeWalt drill you buy will probably not have batteries available for it after about 10 years. Batteries keep improving, and tool manufacturers keep increasing the voltage of their tools. It doesn't take long for replacement batteries to become obsolete, sadly, and then unavailable soon after that.

Often, you can find a lesser brand of the tool for less than the cost of new batteries for an older one. Frankly, that's what I do. I start with the off-brands. When the battery no longer takes a good charge, I buy a new tool for less than I'd pay for replacement batteries. I do buy a spare battery for the tools when I buy the tool, though.

However, I do not use those tools professionally. If I did, I'd buy better ones from the start.

Sears wanted $21 for a replacement knob. I wound up buying an off-market replacement for about six bucks. It's not exact, but it does the job.

I believe Norman's son still has the name but it's nothing like it used to be.