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Sears Declares Bankruptcy
Looks like he could use a boost from a yellow pages. Remember those?
We used the Sears and Roebuck catalog. Our yellow pages or phone books weren’t very big where I grew up. And if you had a JC Penny’s catalog you were rich!
It’s been pretty frustrating since Sears closed shop up here in the Great White North. I discovered almost right away that there aren’t really many other places where one can buy decent-but-not-too-expensive menswear. All the remaining places are either high-end suits or mid-to-low-end casualwear. The market for basic businesswear has really fallen out. I’ve been scouring second-hand stores to find stuff.
Then again, maybe I’m just cheap.
The REAL burning question is what will become of Craftsman tools?
I have a story. A really weird story, but a telling one, I’m afraid. For the Rodney King riots, I was assigned to a unit tasked with providing security to an area that had been mostly burned and trashed. It included a Sears store, which had not been burned. But the store was totally trashed, and everything of value (and no value) had been stolen. Except…
Now before I go on, let me ask: Men, at least, what is the main thing that would draw you to Sears, if you wanted to get just about the best, short of paying sky-high prices for the top professional models? Right! Craftsman tools.
Now guess what section of that Sears store was virtually untouched?
What does this tell you?
I think they were sold to Black & Decker.
No, I got a lot of decent shirts there over the years. They were a good go-to store in that regard.
Already sold to the parent company of Black and Decker.
Yup.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craftsman_(tools)
Mr. Ramirez, is that you?
Yes. But here is the difference. The Yellow Pages persisted into the Internet age. Sears abandoned its internal knowledge and cancelled the Big Book in 1993. That was the year the World Wide Web appeared, with Lynx 2.0a and Mosaic.
Corporate complacency, born of arrogance, kept Sears from extracting itself from the big box and department store squeeze, springing into a dominant mixed clicks and bricks entity, stunting the potential of Amazon.
All the valued assets of Sears have been disposed of. Die Hard, Kenmore – all of these brands will be back and in general distribution or sold through other retail outlets. I think the tools will be sold in costco stores.
The sad thing about Sears is that they could have been Amazon. The catalogue business should have been a pioneer of the internet in the 90s. They had near universal distribution in North America they could have leveraged their store’s inventories to provide overnight or same day delivery 25 years ago.
Both the local big Sears store and the smaller, even more local Hometown Sears stores near us closed 2-3 years ago. It’s a shame because every time we’ve needed to replace an appliance we would shop at 4 or 5 stores and always found the best deal at Sears.
Check out this guy’s YouTube channel – a lot of interesting videos: