ESL will go down in business schools for the rest of time as the worlds worst business man, except for maybe the crypto kid that just lost billions of other peoples money.
Under someone else's leadership it could have survived.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/retail/what-happened-to-sears
It is a shame what has happened there. But if you spent any time there, you will know one thing. Vendors (even if they were stiffed in the end), employees (even if they lost their jobs) and customers buying products at clearance (even below cost) walked away from this place with more, and probably by many scales of magnitude, than someone else did.
Sure the market change fast, but remember that the likes of Target was years away from an Internet retail presence when Eddie took over, while he managed to lose a metric bu-t-ton ok the Seritage properties and even the near unassailable competitive is Sears appliance, mattresses and tools, because he thought he could economize Sears like AutoZone.
From 425 go forward to Shaq's shoe size is pretty darn impressive, and between cons like Innovel, DieHard, Citi, Craftsman, he's almost managed to pay off the interest from the borrowing fiascos that came from Sears and the the huge money borrowed for Seritage. It's kind of funny how he always bragged about not selling Sears stock then dumping them in the pink sheets at the final minute. If he'd sold near the top he might still be held as today's great financial engineers instead of one of a historically inept CEO.
He bought into his own hype that he was a misunderstood once in a generation transformational genius without understanding that statisticians had modern efficiency practices and metrics had long left his primitive 20th century math in the dust. Should have stuck to wheeling and dealing. Speed of turnover is everything for ROI, and it's weird that he couldn't apply that to real estate, retail, or even financial engineering which was his alleged area of expertise. Well, he surely was misunderstood, because no one could figure out why he seemed to be deliberately and aggressively losing money like his life depended in it.
Good article.
EL was particularly inept. It's hard to think of worse.
Sears would not likely have survived. The retail market was changing too fast and they had too much dragging them down.
I worked there in the early 90's. Things were off-kilter even then. The '93 layoffs were the largest in retail history. Things didn't get better afterwards except for a little while.