Noticed yesterday the electronic dept. Tvs etc. All on clearance. Looks a mess. Any meaning behind this as far as store closing etc.? This is a leased sears in an upscale mall.
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This has been happening at KMart stores for about 3 years now. They did it in phases but now it is just about every store the Electronics store is probably 15-20% the size there were a few Christmas' ago. Appliances and whatever other random bulk items they could find took over the extra space and some stores added mattresses just to take up room. First video games went out, then laptops and computers, then just about everything else except for generic brand items and Sears company owned items.
This is par for the course across the company, except for "larger" stores where sales volumes can sustain electronics. Even then, it probably best at this point for Sears to leave the remaining markets. A while back, the majority of Sears FLS with CE moved CSAs from commission to hourly...I kind of figured that we were exiting the CE business at that point.
I noticed that electronics sales dived at our store roughly two years ago; around that time, the VP/senior leadership had changed hands...maybe the new head of CE business was incompetent. Many products were frequently out of stock or on national backorder, plus we started getting things customers didn't want and didn't carry a whole lot of what they were looking for. Electronics is a tough business to be in as it is, the situation gets worse when Sears is thrown into the equation.
Our CE department is about to go. We just started clearancing out everything...all of the yellow closeout signs trigger questions from customers in regards to whether we are closing or not.