The only Sears in my city is closing its doors too, at a time when Macy's and JC Penney's (in the same mall) are making money hand over fist. I blame part of it on selection, as well as alienating a whole subset of customers. I'm in Kentucky, okay. Lots of people here are plus-size - it's a fact of life here in a way it might not be in other places. So when I walk into Sears looking for dress slacks for a funeral, there should not only be two racks of casual tops, and maybe some jeans. By contrast, Penney's had at least ten racks, of every kind of clothing you might need.
To make matters worse, this Sears literally is the middle of the mall - you have to walk through it to get from one end to the other. It's a fuck-up of massive proportions that it's closing at all, when everyone has to walk through it.
I'm in NYC, and my Sears has steadily reduced the quantity of plus-size items they have. Meanwhile, the Penney's less than half a mile away has an amazing selection. As for value? That Sears shares a mall with Marshalls, Burlington Coat Factory, TJ Maxx, Century 21, and Kohls. I think they're only surviving because of appliances and shiny things.
I read the Consumerist off and on, and they've well-documented the demise of Sears. It used to be such a good store with affordable appliances, too. The nearest Sears to me is one of the anchor stores in a mall, and I will say they keep that store nice and clean, but no one wants to shop there any more. It's just not worth it. The last I've gotten anything there was when we had to buy a new fridge a few years ago, and that's only because it was the cheapest for our needs at the time.
I was at the local K-Mart (same city) today and it's... eh. It's better than it looked a few years ago, but it's not done well, either. It's a Big K, which is probably the only reason it's still around. It's a small strip mall, so I guess it gets business that way, but it never seems busy. Even now, during the holidays when every other store we went to was packed, it was only about average. I feel awful for it, because they do have good deals on shoes and some nice plus size clearance. =/
The sad thing is the internal competition he hoped to foster at Sears can actually work, just not in the way he implemented it. There's an interesting case study of a very large American company that used to have "charter wars" among internal business units, in which units would compete against each other for projects. The key difference is that losing units weren't left to rot; rather, units that lost their charter or were otherwise struggling would be given extra help to find a charter than fit them better so that they too could thrive. So instead of "survival of the fittest," it was more a story of using internal markets to allocate resources in a way that was efficient yet also gave EVERY business unit a good shot at growth and success.
Ah, Ayn Rand. Come for the nietzschean superman teaching a woman right thinking with his dick, stay for the economic cannibalism.
And yet, for some reason, all the rugged financial independence never stopped one of those people from using the inherent advantages of the system to arrange for the government to funnel the workers' money to them...
I remember after the collapse, when prominent Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan, who handed the world economy over to these hyenas bound and gagged, said that his only mistake was not realizing that people who followed Rand's principles in the real world were not responsible people who had the good of the system in mind. I very much wish I believed there was a hell so I could picture Alan Greenspan spending eternity there. If nothing else, it would give him a chance to catch up with Ayn Rand.
The Sears store in downtown Chicago is not bad (its fairly new, so it hasn't had time to fall into disrepair).
The biggest problem I found was shopping online. Their prices were always higher than almost everybody else - sometimes double the price. They seemed to forget that all things being equal, people shop by price. If I can buy Item A at a store for $X, I'm not going to pay $2X to buy it at Sears.
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To make matters worse, this Sears literally is the middle of the mall - you have to walk through it to get from one end to the other. It's a fuck-up of massive proportions that it's closing at all, when everyone has to walk through it.
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I'm in NYC, and my Sears has steadily reduced the quantity of plus-size items they have. Meanwhile, the Penney's less than half a mile away has an amazing selection. As for value? That Sears shares a mall with Marshalls, Burlington Coat Factory, TJ Maxx, Century 21, and Kohls. I think they're only surviving because of appliances and shiny things.
Reply
I was at the local K-Mart (same city) today and it's... eh. It's better than it looked a few years ago, but it's not done well, either. It's a Big K, which is probably the only reason it's still around. It's a small strip mall, so I guess it gets business that way, but it never seems busy. Even now, during the holidays when every other store we went to was packed, it was only about average. I feel awful for it, because they do have good deals on shoes and some nice plus size clearance. =/
Reply
Reply
And yet, for some reason, all the rugged financial independence never stopped one of those people from using the inherent advantages of the system to arrange for the government to funnel the workers' money to them...
I remember after the collapse, when prominent Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan, who handed the world economy over to these hyenas bound and gagged, said that his only mistake was not realizing that people who followed Rand's principles in the real world were not responsible people who had the good of the system in mind. I very much wish I believed there was a hell so I could picture Alan Greenspan spending eternity there. If nothing else, it would give him a chance to catch up with Ayn Rand.
Reply
The biggest problem I found was shopping online. Their prices were always higher than almost everybody else - sometimes double the price. They seemed to forget that all things being equal, people shop by price. If I can buy Item A at a store for $X, I'm not going to pay $2X to buy it at Sears.
Reply
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