Toys R Us is liquidating all 750 of their remaining stores. After looking at the chart below, any reasonable person knows they will be doing the same thing in the near future. JC Penny and Macys won’t be far behind. Ghost Malls R Us.
Guest Post by Anthony Sanders
Sears was one of the original mail-order companies, before the internet and Amazon perfected on-line sales. Too bad Sears went the route of big-box retail instead of waiting for the internet revolution.
Here is a chart of Sears annual sales and service revenue since 2009. Do I detect a trend?
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Quarterly sales are not much better and this part holiday season was a disaster (peak lines are Q4).
You used to be able to get everything from a Sears and Roebuck catalog including autos,
homes,
rifles,
and every other item.
Say, I could use this for my perpetually painful lower back!
National Lampoon magazine even published a Sears Sex catalog!
You’ll see , it’s going to be fantastic , unbelievable ! As soon as Sessions gets off his ass and starts asset forfiture proceedings on everyone that made a fortune defrauding the American cotizens the big turn around wow I got this deal wait and see .
Making America Great Again , one bankruptcy and one fnrcloseur at a time . Build that wall , 800 steel workers back on the job 93,999,999 to go sounds like a plan . Prepare to duck everybody the shit will definitely hit the fan soon !
When I was a kid in the 60’s, one of the very first Toys R Us stores was located 2 blocks from my house on the Northwest side of Chicago. It was originally called BargainTown U.S.A. “Toys R Us”. It was extremely popular with the neighborhood kids. I never forget the sign they put in their door one day stating any kid under the age of 13 could not enter the store unless accompanied by an adult!
Even at the age of 12 I never forgot how ludicrous and asinine it was to keep a kid out of a toy store. I never bought a damn thing from Toys R Us again. So, here’s to you Toys R Us. You had a good run without me, but fuck you and good riddance.
Haha, that gave me a true out loud laugh. Holding grudges can be justified. I don’t blame you. Fuck’em.
Too bad they didn’t show a photo of morphine loaded syringes you could buy, also through the catalog. No Rx required!
The Big Box retailers are up against the new online retail model taking over the same way the old Ma and Pa shops were up against the Big Boxes taking over a few decades ago.
Some of the Ma and Pa shops survived but most did not, the same will be true for most of the Big Box stores now.
Sears had plenty of chances to make the transition to internet sales, but go right now and try to find and buy a product on their shitty web site. It’s fucking painful. In 2018. These guys deserve to go bankrupt.
My #1 rule of business: Make it easy for the customer to buy your product.
Or your service. And make it easy to pay for it. Why I had three women manning my front desk and 9 other staff fully cross trained. Many restaurants lost me from having to wait in a long line to pay when leaving. Remove all speed bumps was my motto.
Yeah, Keyser. A friend of mine (who reads this blog every day) told me 30 years ago, “see those two women up front? They cost a lot of money, but if you call my business, a person capable of answering your questions picks up the phone every time.” I never forgot that. One of the small secrets of success.
I tried to call my bank yesterday. I learned the drive through hours and the fax #. Then I was dumped into voicemail. I will move most of my money out of that bank in the next few month.
If they are still an active company, maybe FUBU, that iconic clothing line for people of color,
can ride in to save both Sears and Toys R Us from bankruptcy.
-work that minority status designation, for tax breaks and gov contracts.
Rename the kiddie diversions-from-learning product wing: We Be Toys
Dip ,you better be careful.Holding grudes can come back and bite you on the ass.I learned that the hard way.
It is sad the see the companies that made America falling from their historical places in our society.I think it’s a reflection of our whole Nation.
I will miss Sears.
I’ll miss their reliable Craftsman tools, but the Chinese HF stuff is getting better and better lately.
JC Penny…how they are still breathing now is miraculous.
They refined selecting idiot CEOs to a science. Like the latest genius that thought jumping into the major appliance business was a strategic move.
They will never recover. They are next.
add monkey ward to that list.
Sears Canada went belly up earlier this year.
I find it simplistic to blame online for all of retails problems. Online is under 10% of sales. Half of that is Amazon and the other half is all retailers online. So Internet ordering merely replaces mail order and is a mere 4-4.5% of all sales ( the other 4% is retailers reducing items in the store, having the customer order ahead of time ). Amazon is just a mail order company that doesn’t send out a catalog. The entire consumption paradigm is what is in trouble, and that is from half of all workers earning under $30k a year. Average rent on an apartment is $1k a month, the average car is $500 a month, and if you are lucky your medical insurance “only” goes up 20% a year. No one has any money left over from paying the bankers to buy anything retail OR mail order. And need it be reminded that Amazon only stays in business by losing money?
Sears set itself up for failure when they cheaped out and didn’t spend the money to lobby to have their products declared EBT eligible. I read that EBT is 40% of Wal-mart’s gross.
In the 80’s I bought work boots at sears. Year after year, the same boots-from the same factory-same lasts- maybe the same hands made them. They fit.
By the 90’s the boots were different each year. I have bought almost nothing from sears since then.
Sears isn’t dying from external causes – it’s a slow suicide, and it seems intentional. The current CEO has an office in his home in a gated community in Florida and only teleconferences with his underlings. The big box stores intentionally killed off the mom & pop stores by intentionally taking a loss for the short term and then raised their prices when all of the local competition was gone. Now the big box stores are dying. Without competition it appears that serfdom is once again dead ahead.
As a kid I would pore over the Sears catalogs for hours, dreaming and hoping there was some way to afford a boat, a motor, a rifle, whatever.
When I was newly married I was invited to apply for a Sears credit card, and being then ignorant of credit cards in general I applied. My wife did, too.
Her app was accepted. Mine was denied. Turned out to be a very good thing for me for I learned later that there are two kinds of people in the world- those who understand compound interest and those who pay compound interest.
Many times in the years since I’ve been invited by Sears salespeople to apply for a Sears card. I always tell them “No thanks. You had your chance.”
The last brand within their realm that had any power, Craftsman and essentially just their hand tools, they sold the rights to. Now you can buy Craftsman with the same warranty in Ace Hardware so who need or wants to haul off to a mall to buy them? The only other brand they own with a modicum of selling power is Kenmore. Curious to see if Lowes, Home Depot…or Walmart takes a shot at purchasing the brand name when Sears finally tanks.