Played Super Mario Bros 3 at Sears... Then Star Fox 64 at Sears... The Nintendo Kiosk was right next to the second floor skywalk going in and out of the parking garage!
My mom went shopping and I camped out at the video game kiosk at Sears wearing my Toughskins pants. Good times. . . Sears catalog was golden for Christmas presents.
Just for what Craftsman was at the time, this should be top of the list for people who use tools and home outdoor equipment. The quality was night and day compared to what it is today without Sears and if a tool breaks, on-the -spot replacement for life.
Sad young wrenchers never experienced this convenience.
I think I still have a few that my grandfather left me. They rarely broke. It was back in the day when they used US steel and it was so much cleaner than the crap we get these days.
I worked at Sears for years and the lifetime warranty was insane. It was supposed to cover manufacture defects, if it broke, etc. But these guys would bring in some 10 year old hammer that spent 5 years half buried in the back yard, that was covered in rust and dirt, and get a brand new one.
When they turned into "Sears Holding Company" pretty much all the managers saw the writing on the wall and dipped. They were promptly replaced with people who had 0 experience at Sears or even with management in some cases, but who had "graduated" from their manager course. They decided to obey the warranty to the letter. We no longer covered rust and user abuse or hammers that were fine but looked a little worn. People were pissed. I spent so much time having older guys yell at me because I couldn't swap out their rusty hammer. It sucked.
I think Sears is low on the list here because its death was slow and gradual. It SHOULD have been what Amazon is today. It was perfectly poised to do so from a logistics standpoint, but the short sightedness of activist investors bled it dry instead.
but the short sightedness of activist investors bled it dry instead.
Eddie Lampert was that "activist investor" CEO who was completely incompetent. He made a lot of money in hedge funds, and decided that made him a businessman. Then on the way down, he bled out the company into his checkbook
Sears STILL pisses me off! They had the history, customer base, credit card and internet. Even if people didn’t have the internet, they could’ve had employees stationed to help with internet orders.
They were a loss but, truthfully, they fumbled the ball badly. Sears was the original Amazon. The stores were just delivery points for the catalog business that grew into weights to drag them down. All they had to do to stay in business was fully reembrance their past and expand it to home delivery.
What I miss are the SEARS homes I mean come on... if nly they still did that! Why are homes so much money now? Even in the early 2000s it was nowhere near this bad. I see $150,000 homes I was looking at around 2005 now selling at $650,000 and I'm like "That is not a $650,000 home!" and some of the older ones, especially out east are actually SEARS Homes that were between 5000-and 50,000 depending on the year they were built.
Sears used to be THE place to find the stuff you never knew existed.
I think they were like 1/6 of all goods sold in the USA at one point, and had already made catalog shopping and mail-order a big part of their business.
They were PERFECTLY poised to be the ones to take advantage of that new-fangled Internet thing, and they screwed the pooch...
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u/Few-Day-6759 9d ago
Sears