Sears Canada to go out of business as department stores suffer
Source: U.S.A. Today
The former Canadian division of Sears is set to go out of business, a fate the U.S. retailer is still trying to avoid as department stores suffer.
Sears Canada, which spun off from U.S.-based Sears Holdings in 2012, said Tuesday that it would ask for a court's permission to liquidate.
The move effectively ends the company's last-ditch attempt to keep some stores open under new ownership.
Read more: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/10/10/sears-canada-liquidation/750791001/
Showing the U.S. branch how this tree is going to topple.
YOHABLO
(7,358 posts)Saviolo
(3,282 posts)From AlterNet: https://www.alternet.org/economy/ayn-rand-sears-and-eddie-lampert
America now avoids Sears at all costs, thanks largely to Mr. Lampert and his love of twisted economic logic.
You might say that Lampert is 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. As a Robert Rubin protégé, he absorbed the lessons of a man whose discredited economic focus on budget deficits ended up starving the countrys infrastructure, education and alternative energy.
Looking at what Lampert has done to Sears, we can see what happens when the lessons of his mentors are actually applied in the real world. It isnt pretty.
At Sears, Lampert set out to create the Ayn Rand model of a giant firm, and 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.
It got crazy. Executives started undermining other units because they knew their bonuses were tied to individual unit performance. They began to focus entirely on the economic performance of their unit at the expense of the overall Sears brand. One unit, Kenmore, started selling the products of other companies and placed them more prominently that Sears own products. Units competed for ad space in Sears circulars, and since the unit with the most money got the most ad space, one Mothers Day circular ended up being released featuring a mini bike for boys on its cover. Units were no longer incentivized to make sacrifices, like offering discounts, to get shoppers into the store.
Sears became a miserable place to work, rife with infighting and screaming matches. Employees focused solely on making money in their own unit ceased to have any loyalty the company or stake in its survival. Meanwhile, Eddie Lampert taunted employees by posting under a fake name on the companys internal social network.
They've been circling the drain for years, now, and the US headquarters is still trying its best to stave off bankruptcy, but it seems like it's inevitable at this point.
Wellstone ruled
(34,661 posts)A libertarian lesson in how to destroy a viable Business.
Bad Management to the core.
Kaleva
(36,307 posts)Penny's, Toys R Us, Radio Shack and the list goes on. Sears did not adapt quickly enoughand now it's too late to recover.
bucolic_frolic
(43,173 posts)Last edited Wed Oct 11, 2017, 09:11 PM - Edit history (2)
In the 90s, Kmart was always shredded a bit in the financial press. 'No computer systems, they would say. Sales and inventory not linked. Trailers of merchandise behind many stores.' The press was being seeded with rumors that the next recession would topple Kmart apparently because of poor financial performance or poor management. Those rumors originated somewhere.
After CEO Floyd Hall, a non-profit guru and originator of the Kmart Pantry, left, they hired a CEO from CVS, headquartered in Providence, RI. He hired a former Walmart marketing guy and soon they both decided to launch a price war with Walmart by putting little flags with discounts on all shelves. This was September as I recall, and by January they were in bankruptcy. Eddie Lampert was operating from Connecticut at the time. Don't know if there was any connection between the two, but a search of Chuck Conaway the CEO will reveal his run-ins with the SEC.
"In 2005, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit that accused him of misleading Kmart investors prior to the company's bankruptcy in 2002. The S.E.C. originally sought $22 million from Conaway.[3] A jury found him liable in a trial four years later, in 2009. While he initially appealed the decision, Conaway dropped his appeal in November 2010 and agreed to pay a $5.5 million settlement."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Conaway
Wall Street tends to coverup its failures.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sec-charges-former-kmart-execs/
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/9051995/ns/business-corporate_scandals/t/ex-kmart-ceo-cfo-face-sec-accusations/
Saviolo
(3,282 posts)I have nothing to add to that, but it's still interesting
Sen. Walter Sobchak
(8,692 posts)First they relinquished Eaton's long-term head-leases to Cadillac Fairview and then they sold some of their owned locations to Concord Pacific and those amounted to the bulk of their assets.
I think they could have been saved, but there just wasn't that much left to make it an appealing acquisition target.
Sunlei
(22,651 posts)Who didn't love that catalogue???
It had way more than could ever be in a Brock's and mortar store.
And this is what made online shopping so popular. They have all the sizes in everything, and often sizes that they do not have in their regular stores, more styles, and for those of us not interested in today's fashion we can find online basic clothing.
Sears could have been Amazon, you are right.
Captain Stern
(2,201 posts)Just like K-Mart could have been Wal-Mart, and Woolworth's could have been K-Mart, and A&P could have been the only grocery store in the country. He who fails to plan, plans to fail.
RKP5637
(67,109 posts)infrastructure and were too dumb to see the writing on the wall.
bucolic_frolic
(43,173 posts)It was not as simple as failing to innovate. Sears was hit by cheap foreign competition. Sears had quality American-made products - lawnmowers, tools, clothing (ILGWU), and all the parts and support that went with it. Many were union-made, and Sears employees had a fine American pension plan. That all shifted against them. As Congress moved toward laissez-faire capitalism through lobbying, American jobs left the country as we all know, and Sears couldn't compete. Sears was undermined politically as much as the rest of us.