https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/29/business/sears-last-christmas/index.html
Maybe it's the real deal this time? Now that the net operating losses matter is settled in court, apart from keeping a single store open (probably in Guam) to for tax purposes, Sears/Kmart have no reason to exist.
This could be the last chance for talking heads to bash the death of Sears. Haha J/K. You know these guys will pass on the legend of Lampert's Great Transformation to their students and heirs.
Quotables:
Now experts say there’s basically little to no reason to keep even the handful of stores it still has open.
“Sears has been going down the drain for a very long time. There’s no chance of it being revitalized,” said Neil Saunders of GlobalData retail, “No one apart from Eddie Lampert knows why he’s keeping these remaining stores open. You can’t make the economics work with that volume of stores. It might be that in some contracts or agreements that there is a penalty if he closes all the stores. Or perhaps they’re open because Eddie Lampert has a very strange view of business. He still seems to hold onto this illusion that he can bring it back. A lot of it could be about ego.”
Although the company’s demise seems inevitable now, it didn’t need to be this way, insists Mark Cohen, director of retail studies at Columbia University and the former CEO of Sears’ Canadian unit before the Kmart merger.
He said that Sears’ experience operating its catalog, which had an all-encompassing list of products, positioned it better than other traditional retailers to make an early move into online sales. And he said Sears had better lease agreements than competing department store chains.
“It could have been a rival to Amazon. It had been the Amazon of its day,” Cohen said. “No doubt that Sears would have needed to close stores and consolidate holdings, but their real estate holdings would not have been the albatross they were for other department store chains. Nothing would have stopped it from having a second life as a world beater. At the end of the day, this was all about the incompetence and malfeasance of its leadership.” As for when Sears might finally close the last remaining stores, Cohen said it really doesn’t matter at this point. “The time of death was 2005,” he said, referring to the year Lampert took control of the company.
Katie Thomas, head of the Kearney Consumer Institute: “It’s tough to make the case consumers will go to those stores if they’re pulling back spending,” she said. “I think that [a recession] could be the final nail in the coffin.”