Sears Collapse is Complete

It's about time. I feel awful for them, though.

Shearshj.

Sad. I hope Sears emerges from bankruptcy in better health.

So are they filing for supervised restructuring or supervised dissolution? I read last week they were going to file for dissolution, ie, no more Sears.

Sad indeed. It was an American icon.

Trump will fix Sears the same way he fixed the coal mines in West Virginia.

Thanks, Trump!

Here’s why: Lampert, who is Sears’s biggest shareholder and will remain as chairman, acknowledged in the statement that turnaround efforts so far have fallen short.

Lampert wanted to bleed it dry, bring it to its knees and pick off the profitable bits. What other CEO would pull the shenanigans he has and get away with it?

The real concern is what happens to their pensioners. Their biggest debt liability is to the pension fund. Will they gyp all of their retirees out of the money they rightfully earned?

I read they are filing for dissolution. All their major creditors were represented at the final board meeting to decide and the creditors told the Sears board they are never getting another single cent of help, so they can't survive. With dissolution, maybe they (the creditors) might get a few pennies on the dollar back on the sell off.

R8, your comment popped up while I was typing the above and as a retiree partially dependent on a small pension, I'm terrified that will happen to me.

Wishing you and other Sears pensioners all the best R9. I'm ordering some trainers this week I saw on their website. I miss having them in Chicago. It was nice to purchase Land's End products there too. Let's hope Sears-K-Mart is successfully re-organised without Lampert and cuts to pensions.

Who would go after them if they did R8?

The ruling political party in this country has shown time and again they don’t care about the non wealthy.

Even here in my liberal state our leaders support the rich.

There are some incredible deals to be had online, even before this confirmation. Get out and shop Sears everyone who hates to see them go.

All the news reports are saying Sears filed under Chapter 11, which is Court supervised reorganization. Chapter 7 is liquidation.

"Its Chapter 11 filing will allow Sears to reorganize, and perhaps emerge from bankruptcy with a portion of its business still alive."

Doesn't look good in the long run, regardless.

K-Mart is still doing well in Australia. I thought Sears did well there too.

OMG, I just went to Hills and it was a vacant lot...

This has been a long time coming

The Bankruptcy Court will look at the debtor's financial situation and if it doesn't feel Chapter 11 (reorganization) is viable, it can order the debtor to refile for Chapter 7 (liquidation, ie, dissolution).

I speak from most unfortunate experience.

Sears' creditors don't feel reorganization is viable. I suspect the Court will eventually agree.

In my case. the Court didn't order me to refile, it simply changed my filing from Chapter 11 to Chapter 7 over my strenuous objections. Maybe the laws vary from state to state. This was in New York, where the Bankruptcy Courts are notoriously corrupt and the banks made a killing off of my case.

GASP! The time has come.

Pardon me while I gather the jewelry, designer apparel , and appliances. I shall take anything that will fetch a price to the market .

I seem to recall pensioners in Canada got royally screwed when Sears Canada folded. If I recall, their pensions were put on hold as other creditors were paid out.

So, as hedge fund investor, Lampert will be the first in line to get repaid? And first in line to snap up Sears real estate, I assume, through bankruptcy sales? Kind of a win-win situation for him, and maybe his plan all along. Totally legal, of course.

R8 is absolutely correct. It was the money manager that single handedly destroyed Sears. Wall Street does not know how to run retailers. Merchants know how. It is a sad, unnecessary ending to an iconic brand.

Sorry but Sears was doomed by the move away from indoor mall shopping to big box store shopping for its wares like home appliances and electronics. Home Depot, Lowe's, Walmart and Target all sell what Sears sells and are located in your neighborhood, not at the regional mall.

I am so tired of people like him getting away with that shit!

Hedge funds. That’s what killed Toys R Us too.

Why not just close the rest of the Kmart stores and see what happens?

The last guy who bought Sears bought it with the specific plan of selling off any assets of value and bankrupting the rest. There was never any intention of turning it into a thriving retail operation again. He has succeeded admirably and made himself a fortune. God bless 'murica.

Isn't that the same evil strategy that killed MGM Studios ?

I believe Kirk Kerkorian bought MGM to sell it so he use its IP for the MGM Grand Casino while at the same time selling its assets so could actually finance the casino.

Eddie Lampert is a lying scumbag theif. He did the same to Sears Canada. This was his whole plan, even though both companies could have been saved. Rot in hell Eddie!

This is not happening in a vacuum (a Kenmore vacuum, maybe). Sears never kept pace with the times. They could have gone deep discount or focused solely on their appliance/car repair services but they kept on trying to be what they'd been in the '50s. Poor management and poor decisions. Sorry to see them go, their Christmas Wishbook was a staple of my childhood.

Who cares? Nobody shops at Sears. The country has long moved on and Sears never had any interest in adapting. They could have focused on online sales long before Lampert took over.

With amazon Sears has become irrelevant. Good riddance to redundant rubbish.

"Good riddance to redundant rubbish."

This will be the epitaph on R30's tomb stone.

I'm sad to hear this. There's a space for Sears in the market. I liked to go to Sears to shop their clothing. Sears wasn't always first on my list, but when I went there, I usually found something interesting that I liked. The merchandise quality was better than Walmart but without approaching Macy's average prices. I also liked the variety; it was the only place in the mall you could get tools, and my local Sears had an auto repair garage in the parking lot. I did not enjoy shopping on their website, though. It seemed unorganized and messy. The search results pulled in items from both Sears and Kmart, and there even seemed to be third-party sellers in the results too.

If Amazon can take out Sears, it can also take out JCPenney's, Kohls, Macys, and even Walmart and Target. Going to the department store or mall isn't just fulfilling a need; it's a social experience. It's a chance to see, touch, and smell new things, and it's an opportunity to talk with store staff and other shoppers. But more and more, people want to complete tasks without actually having to talk to other people or even leave their house (and lose valuable time staring at their phones).

I guess smartphones are to 2018 teenagers as malls were to 1988 teenagers. In 1988, you went to the mall to talk to people, watch movies, listen to music, browse and buy books, buy anything else you possibly needed, buy something to eat. Now you can do all those things without leaving your house and interacting with other humans. It's more efficient...but is it better?

I’d say no

There are things I just will not order without seeing the specific item I would be getting.

In my 20s and 30s I had a succession of VW bugs that were kept alive by Sears Die Hard batteries. Fifty bucks and they lasted forever.

I am with you, R33. Anyone who would buy a pair of shoes, especially running shoes, without trying them on first is an idiot. And I don't have time to run to the post office or some other drop off point for returns, whether they are free or not.

A friend of mine ordered her mother-of-the-bride dress from Nordstrom's on-line. It has to be returned because the actual color is no where near what was pictured on-line.

so sad.

For anyone interested in a more in depth observation : The Twisted Truth About Sears and the American Dream.

R30 state your (true) age for purposes of analyzing the reason for your myopic comment.

Sears was never in Australia. The Kmart and Target stores in Oz aren’t related to the US stores with those names, though Kmart was once partly owned by the US Kresge company.

R38, I’m 35 years old.

Sears in many ways is the story of so much of America, including (and especially) the Deplorable areas.

They may have been great, but they were unwilling to change and became resistant to new ideas and new people. Both are in decline because of that.

Who else remembers these commercials from the 90s? Probably one of the best advertising campaigns ever.

I always hated going to music stores as a teenager. They rarely had what I was looking for and had to have them order it for me. I wanted an Eartha Kitt CD once and had them order it. I came in to pick it up and the cashier thought there had been some mistake.

She looked at me like I had two heads when I said no, there’s no mistake. That’s the CD I ordered.

Being able to buy music online has been heaven. I can find what I want and don’t have to deal wit strangers judging my taste in music.

And I buy shoes online, too. Stores generally don’t carry men’s shoes smaller than a 9. I wear a 7.5.

I hated it when I was young. Toughskins (((shudders)))

Here's another in depth analysis.

Thearth.

Kmart was wholly owned by Kresge's. Kresge's basically invented the mass market sector.

Why does DL always say "_______'s collapse is complete"? Where does that come from?

It was a taunt to Hillary supporters in a thread title during the vicious 2008 Democratic Primaries threads. As close as DL ever came to full blown Civil War.

As mentioned up-thread Australian Kmart has seen a remarkable turn around from the brink of closure and obscurity of ten years ago, to an almost cult like resurrection from the ashes. Mall growth also seems to be resisting the US trend of closures, in fact malls seem as popular as ever with most having millions of dollars of infrastructure added to them despite the uncertainty.

That they gave up the excellent Kenmore appliances alone was a fucking tragedy. I know people that have 30 plus years of those, that work as well as the day they got them. The ones you get today that are made in China last about 2 years. What a disaster.

From article:

Longtime Sears boss and investor Eddie Lampert orchestrated a "multiyear and multifaceted scheme" to strip the company of assets and capitalize on its decline, a group of the retailer's major creditors alleged.

Lampert, who remains chairman of Sears and was CEO until the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October, presided over the closure of more than 3,500 stores and the loss of about 250,000 jobs, according to a scathing filing Wednesday by unsecured creditors.

The creditors are hoping to persuade a federal judge to force Sears to liquidate instead of accepting the latest offer by Lampert's hedge fund ESL Investments to keep a shrunken version of the company alive.

They took the unusual step of filing a 136-page history of what they called "Sears' tragic descent from giant to ghost."

Lampert "engaged in serial asset stripping" of the company after taking control in 2005 following the company's tie-up with Kmart, the creditors said. "Lampert was hopelessly conflicted as he presided over Sears' descent into insolvency and into a persistent state of liquidity crisis."

I XMAS shopped online at Sears. Try to support them, as if we each bought something, maybe we can turn it around for them !