Sears- an observation

[Pete J.]

Harry, I can agree to some extent with doing the on line research for a person who is skilled at it and understands the difference between a real review and a BS one placed by a shill and there are a lot of those out there now. Professionals posing as customers. When I was in appliances, I don't know how many times I had customers come into the store wanting a refund on a large appliance they bought on line, complaining that it had an issue that they would have clearly seen, if they had taken the time to come into the store and look at the darned thing. How can you gauge the interior of a refrigerator from a 3" high picture. How can you tell how strong or flimsy a shelf is on line. On top of that there are a lot of things that needed to install some appliances that a salesperson can help you with. Online sites are horrible at that. Example: Did you know that Bosch dishwashers need a special heavier duty cord? None of the web sites that I have seen spell that out, but it is in the owners manual. I haven

't looked lately, but the appliances on the Sears web site use to offer delivery and installation as separate items. I have had many customers come into the store with a receipt that shows they selected both. Installation from Sears includes the installer picking the item up and delivering it. You don't need both! Now that has changed because delivery is now included in the price(no it isn't free, I don't give @@@@ what they say on the sign). It is little things like that that a good sales person can help with.

[Ace-Garageguy]

I'll listen to music online for free

I agree, and frankly, with my time being so limited lately, most of my music listening is done online. I haven't had time to unpack my CDs and reload the players yet, and I like being able to get a specific track from a specific artist playing instantly with no prolonged searching (though the late-generation CD players I have are interfaced with the computer and are searchable, to some extent),

[Rob Hall]

Harry, I can agree to some extent with doing the on line research for a person who is skilled at it and understands the difference between a real review and a BS one placed by a shill and there are a lot of those out there now. Professionals posing as customers. When I was in appliances, I don't know how many times I had customers come into the store wanting a refund on a large appliance they bought on line, complaining that it had an issue that they would have clearly seen, if they had taken the time to come into the store and look at the darned thing. How can you gauge the interior of a refrigerator from a 3" high picture. How can you tell how strong or flimsy a shelf is on line. On top of that there are a lot of things that needed to install some appliances that a salesperson can help you with. Online sites are horrible at that. Example: Did you know that Bosch dishwashers need a special heavier duty cord? None of the web sites that I have seen spell that out, but it is in the owners manual. I haven

't looked lately, but the appliances on the Sears web site use to offer delivery and installation as separate items. I have had many customers come into the store with a receipt that shows they selected both. Installation from Sears includes the installer picking the item up and delivering it. You don't need both! Now that has changed because delivery is now included in the price(no it isn't free, I don't give @@@@ what they say on the sign). It is little things like that that a good sales person can help with.

Yes..it's like buying a car..I can do tons of research online, but until I've sat in the car, felt the materials, driven it, I won't buy it. Likewise for appliances--those are the rare 1-in-10 year type purchases, so I like to check them out up close.

And online does help a lot w/ research on homes...I spend plenty of time checking out neighborhoods and houses on Trulia and Zillow and other sites (convenient when my target areas are 1500-2500+ miles away), but when I'm ready to buy, I'm going to be on the ground...

[Harry P.]

Did you know that Bosch dishwashers need a special heavier duty cord? None of the web sites that I have seen spell that out...

Pretty sure they come with a power cord, don't they?

And if not...

http://www.bosch-home.com/us/store/product/DishwashwerPowerCord/00747210

[slusher]

As far as buying music, I stopped doing that years ago. Back when Napster and Limewire were still working and the music police hadn't shut them down yet, let's just say that I managed to "find" all the music I ever wanted.

As far as new music these days... for an old fart like me, there's very little I care to spend my money on to "own." I'll listen to music online for free, and I always have my very extensive collection of "homemade" CDs as backup. And in the very rare case where I hear something new that I like, I'll buy it on itunes. No need to go to any store for me. But that's what works for me. Your mileage may vary.

I did the same thing and I have a great music collection back when legal. I may have bought 5 cds from Amazon in 7 years. all the Sears retail stores all closed here and in other towns 2 years ago. You can buy speakers home and car from Crutchfields and you to have a money back guarantee..

[Modelmartin]

I believe the current owner of Sears is a hedge fund guy. I am sure he is just going to bleed it for a while and then sell all of the real estate. The store in St. Paul is a stand alone with a gigantic parking lot. It is at least 4 full city blocks near downtown, 1 block from the State Capitol building, next to the new light rail line and with freeway access at the corner. It has to be worth a very, very large pile of cash! I have been going to that store since I was a kid and still do when I need tools, a car battery(they still have an auto service center and I have had good luck there) and do buy the odd shirt there once in a while. I will miss it when it DOES go.

[southpier]

I was always afraid to put on the earphones @ Borders. figured at least 1 of the thousand people who did before me had ear-cooties.

[Ace-Garageguy]

I was always afraid to put on the earphones @ Borders. figured at least 1 of the thousand people who did before me had ear-cooties.

I always just boiled my head in Clorox when I got home.

[Pete J.]

Pretty sure they come with a power cord, don't they?

And if not...

http://www.bosch-home.com/us/store/product/DishwashwerPowerCord/00747210

No, they don't come with a power cord, because in some areas the electrical codes won't allow a plug in and require them to be hard wired. In SoCal I had to know what cities did and what cities didn't. It was a pain but it was the job.

You found the power cord on the Bosch website. Now see if you can go to a major appliance dealer on line and find that it is a mandatory part for installation anywhere. What is going to happen is if you order the dishwasher with installation, as most people will, the installer is going to show up with the dishwasher and then sell you a power cord off of his truck for twice what you would have paid for it in the store. It also may be an off the shelf cord and not the one that Bosch requires to honor their warrantee. The Bosch cord is a much heavier gauge cord. Again something I as a salesman knew was needed according to the factory.

[Thatswhatshesaid]

I wanna touch, taste, and smell it before I buy it

That only works for strippers and hookers.

[Thatswhatshesaid]

Considering at one time Sears basically provided everything from lumber to livestock even cars via mail that they are failing now seems ironic .

Same with Kmart. There was a point when Kmart was the Walmart of its time. It seemed like Kmart was going to dominate the retail landscape. Now they have closed a lot of stores and basically become a joke.

[Mark]

Sears really needs to 'fess up, and tell us what happened to Roebuck...

Seriously, they screwed up when they started switching suppliers so often on items like power tools and lawn equipment. Used to be, you could buy a lawnmower and then walk in and buy an accessory for it a couple of years later because they were still selling the same lawnmowers. Now, you've got to know when your lawnmower was made, because they switch suppliers every year or two. Your lawnmower might have a Tecumseh engine while the current ones have Briggs & Stratton powerplants, and they will only have parts and accessories in stock for the ones they're selling now. They might save a couple bucks per unit (that doesn't get passed along to the customer) but it's shortsighted.

Same goes for power tools. I tried to get a couple of new rechargeable batteries for a circular saw. The current battery doesn't fit the older saw because they moved the contacts on the battery. Not much, but just enough that they don't interchange. Nobody is going to convince me that that change was made for any reason other than to make the older tools obsolete for most folks. 90 percent of the people who find that out will buy new tools from them, then go home and toss their older/perfectly good tools in the trash. I'll go to a battery store and get the batteries I have rebuilt, which means Sears won't sell me the replacements. They won't sell me the tools again either. If I were to buy any other rechargeable tools, I'd probably go with a non-store major brand; they'd be more likely to stand behind their product after the next-generation item is introduced.

They shoot themselves in the foot with parts prices too. I wanted to pick up an extra remote for my mom's garage door opener. For what they wanted for one, if I wanted two I'd have been about as well off to just buy another complete garage door opener, which includes two remotes. Of course, the newer remote might have come from a different supplier and thus be incompatible with the older opener...

Maybe in the Sixties or early Seventies a store could be everything for everybody, but those days are gone. Montgomery Ward failed long before Sears; maybe someone at Sears should have seen the writing on the wall. Someone should have decided if Sears should be a womens' fashion store, a mens' clothing store, or a tool store, and then gone in whatever direction they thought was right. My brothers and I have my dad's tools; nearly every one was bought at Sears. I can't remember the last time I bought anything there; the last couple of times I went in there were the "garage door opener" and "rechargeable battery" episodes, when I just walked out disgusted.

Remember when nearly every K-Mart store in the country was laid out pretty much alike? When I worked out of town, I'd hit the K-Mart if I needed to pick something up because I didn't have to walk the whole store looking for something. I remember the hobby section was pretty close to the center of the store, automotive was at the back, ladies' stuff was pretty much at one end because that's where I'd have to go to catch up with my mom and my sister. When they scuttled that trying to go "upscale", the train pretty much jumped the track. It's not upscale, it's K-Mart; they were making tons of money, why not just leave it alone? In my area, they're down to one store now...and the last time I was there, you could fire a cannon down most aisles and not hit anyone...

[Ace-Garageguy]

Mark, if what you're saying about switching suppliers frequently and planned-obsolescence on tool batteries, poor parts availability, etc. is all true (which I don't doubt) it sounds to me like Sears has fallen into the same moronic new-think business management trap that many companies have fallen for...focusing completely on short-term profits without understanding or giving a damm about long-term staying power, customer service, product quality, etc. etc. etc.

I've been howling for decades about the necessity for a business to focus on its PRODUCT FIRST, and that if it does so effectively, profits will follow. When a business focuses on PROFIT FIRST, the product and service suffer, and the business isn't going to be viable for long.

Of course, I'm not a well-known business "expert" who endlessly repeats the maximize-today's-income platitudes and "knowledge" that's all-pervasive these days, but I think the rash of failures and problems the primarily profit-driven businesses are having (including GM, whose primary business became making money, not cars, long ago) bears out my theories.

Honda, one of the most respected car builders in the world, has never been a chaser of today's $$ at the expense of tomorrow's reputation, and has in many ways gone against the stream, finding its own product-quality-based way in a world that screams that's an obsolete notion. Nor does Honda stupidly waste energy trying to be "number one". Again, they focus on building really good cars, with engineers in positions of power rather than idiot marketers, and they're content to stay solidly in business making a good profit margin doing what they do WELL, rather than mindlessly striving for a larger piece of the car-market pie.

Edited August 26, 2014 by Ace-Garageguy

[clovis]

A very interesting article on Sears' Holding, and their CEO, Edward Lampert.

Note that Sears has had "declining sales numbers for the past 30 quarters." Momma didn't raise a math major, but the way I see it, that means that Sears has had declining sales numbers for almost 8 years in a row.

Wow. Talk about running a company into the ground.

http://blogs.marketwatch.com/behindthestorefront/2014/08/21/sears-fatigue-is-ceo-lampert-wearing-out-investors/

[Tom Geiger]

Both Sears and K Mart have been circling the bowl for years. It's like the Packard / Studebaker merger, someone once described as 'two blind men helping each other cross a street'.

We were a Sears family, out of necessity since my father was military and we lived outside the US much of the time. Our lifeline to civilization was the Sears catalog. They had a deal with the military PX system that you could place orders to pick up there. The PX usually had a poor selection of nothing, so much of our goods, clothing and especially Christmas toys came from Sears.

The last time I was in a Sears was many years ago when we still believe in buying everything at the store. I ordered a dishwasher, which needed to come from a central warehouse somewhere. They also wanted to charge a delivery charge so I was going to pick it up at the store. We order it, and while we were still waiting, I get my Sears card bill and they had charged me in full. I made a phone call and told them I wasn't paying for something I hadn't received, and they told me they noted that, and I should call them back when I got the item.

A month later, I get my second Sears bill. I still didn't get the item. Mess of excuses, back ordered, etc. So I call them again, especially since my bill says past due and they've added their zillion percent interest. Operator says not to worry, they'll fix it.

I finally get tired of waiting and cancel the order. They refund onto my Sears card. I call and they refund all the interest etc. After I canceled the order in person, I walk across the street to a big appliance store... that's when I learned that the world, but not Sears had changed! I buy a dishwasher, and they deliver it for free the very next day. They take my old one for free. And Sears hadn't caught onto what the competition was doing, still blindly following their old 1966 era model. I never walked into their store again!

As for K Mart, again we spent a lot of money there when I was younger. There is one on the highway near my house and it's a sad looking store. Clean but everything from the floor to the ceiling tiles are worn and old. There was no music playing, just silence since there were few customers. The few employees there looked sad. I got the heck out of the place because it was an uneasy feeling!

[clovis]

I hear ya, Tom.

My folks, like many others who have posted, were poster children for Sears. They literally could have shot Sears commercials at my parent's home.

Every appliance that my parents ever purchased were Kenmore. My dad bought Craftsman mowers, and any new tool that he bought came from Sears. My folks were excellent Sears customers, and my dad particularly like them because he could buy parts at a Sears parts place in the city.

I have bought, in my adult lifetime, very little from Sears. I have to be reminded that Sears sells other things, besides tools. I believe that the last time I walked into a Sears store, for other than tools, was sometime around 2003 or so.

[Tom Geiger]

My folks, like many others who have posted, were poster children for Sears. They literally could have shot Sears commercials at my parent's home.

Yup.. if you watch old reruns of The Wonder Years (especially the episode where they were all gathered around the TV watching the first man walk on the moon), look at their living room table set, coffee and end tables. That was a popular Sears set that my parents bought in 1968 and currently is the set in our basement family room!

[Pete J.]

Up until the later part of the 20th century, mail order companies were a viable if not vibrant method of retailing. This was because there was a huge population that lived in small towns and rural areas. Sears and Wards were the primary server of those communities. I grew up in one of those communities and Sears and Wards both had "Catalogue" stores in town. For those who haven't experienced them, they were very small retail spaces, maybe 10' by 30' as a show room. They had a few appliances on the floor and a service desk. The real action was the back room. You could go in and order anything out of the catalogue(The Big Book) and it would come in on the next truck. The deliveries took about a week where I was. Yes there were other small stores in town that sold similar items but they just didn't have the expansive selection that these catalogue companies had. My Dad ordered veterinary supplies, livestock handling stuff. Mom had clothes and household item and don't get me started on the Christmas catalogue. It was part of small town America. As this part of the population disappeared the validity of the retail method went with it. I was always surprised that Sears didn't become Amazon before Amazon. They could have easily owned the internet market. They had the distribution network and suppliers all they needed to do was get online. They just came to the table too late.

[southpier]

I still run into people afraid to use the internet (and not just for shopping). and don't want to be bothered by learning!

[Tom Geiger]

I still run into people afraid to use the internet (and not just for shopping). and don't want to be bothered by learning!

there are a few dinosaurs in the modeling community. about five of them that had a hissy fit when we stopped mailing a four page show flyer, instead sending out a postcard directing people to our website for information. Cost savings over a thousand dollars!

[Ace-Garageguy]

I still run into people afraid to use the internet (and not just for shopping). and don't want to be bothered by learning!

I still run into people afraid to use (fill in the blank: enamel, resin, fiberglass, BMF, fractions, 2-part filler, measuring in scale, spell-check, etc.) and don't want to be bothered by learning...

Edited August 30, 2014 by Ace-Garageguy

[Rob Hall]

I still run into people afraid to use the internet (and not just for shopping). and don't want to be bothered by learning!

Yeah, my brother is like that....and only 65. I have two cousins (same age) that are online and we stay in touch through Facebook.

[Tom Geiger]

I still run into people afraid to use the internet (and not just for shopping). and don't want to be bothered by learning!

Yeah, my brother is like that....and only 65. I have two cousins (same age) that are online and we stay in touch through Facebook.

I think there's a word for that... AMISH!

[Rob Hall]

I think there's a word for that... AMISH!

Ironically, he lives right at the edge of Amish country in e Ohio.... he was online for a few years back in the dialup era but lost interest, I guess....