
Sears Files for Bankruptcy - jihadjihad
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/14/business/sears-bankruptcy-filing-chapter-11.html
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AtlasBarfed
[https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/03/22/sears-
holdin...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/03/22/sears-holdings-ceo-
eddie-lampert/99487518/)

Basically the scumbag ceo has been pilfering the company of its assets by
selling them at a discount to another company he controls.

~~~
djsumdog
I was wondering about that. The article mentions the spin off companies
without mentioning what they were.

So could this have been preventable? I've heard Toys-R-Us wasn't that bad off;
it's just that they had a leverage buyout in like the 90s or 2000s that put
them in a lot of debt with the hope their growth rate would continue.

The Toys-R-Us failure didn't really make any sense since people still like to
physically see and touch toys before purchasing them (although I guess
retailers like Target, Wal-Market, independent toy shops, et. al. have large
enough toy sections now to take care of that?)

There's a great 99% Invisible podcast about Sears houses. Before the cookie-
cutter boom after WW2, a lot of Americans ordered kit houses from Sears which
arrived in rail cars and could be assembled in a few months. Many of these
houses still exist, and the people who owned them were completely unaware
until amateur historians recognized them, contacted the owners and discovered
the Sears seals or part numbers in their basement or attics.

[https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-house-that-
came-i...](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-house-that-came-in-the-
mail/)

~~~
nadezhda18
thanks for the link, it was so interesting to read about these houses!

It felt to me that ordering kit houses was such an American spirit! Building a
house with your hands, there is something special about it... and ordering a
kit from a store to build it is a bit mind blowing :)

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xfour
I wonder if in a strange way companies like Sears were a victim of the first
dotcom bubble crash. If they had pivoted at that point, they’d have been in a
better place. But I could just imagine the executives being in such an “I told
you this web thing was a fad” mode that they missed their window to modernize.

Especially since the kind of non amazon places that seem to succeed now carry
heavy products and sears had no shortage of that.

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orev
Successful companies are largely victims of their own success. They got to
where they are by doing things a certain way, so it becomes very risky to
change that approach, even when the ground is shifting under them. The
internal structures that worked for one model don’t work in the new one, and
yet they are calcified due to management structures and worker skill sets.
History has shown time and again that these companies just can’t pivot the way
they need to.

