End Me Your Sears

You may know that the Sears department store is officially "Sears-Roebuck." And since my name, Roe, is derived from Roebuck, I had always held out hope that I'd turn out to be an heir to the company fortune. But I later found out that Mr. Roebuck left the company and sold his share early on, so he hardly made any money off the business. So the only thing I might inherit is a poor sense of business timing.

But these days it's actually a relief that I'm not going to be stuck with shares in Sears-Roebuck, since the company isn't doing too well. I recently went to the Sears in Cambridge for the first time in a while, and found that it's going to close. At least, I assume it's closing; everything is on clearance and all sales are final, though I couldn't find any signs saying it was actually closing, and I was too embarrassed to ask such an obvious question.

I wondered if any other Sears stores were closing, so I googled "Sears closing." That wasn't very helpful, since I got links to newspaper and magazine articles announcing one round of store closures after another for the past ten years. One analyst compared it to a slow motion bankruptcy sell off.

So apparently I've ignored the decline of Sears during this time that I've trashed Target and made snide remarks about Wal-Mart. I remember hearing about the company's decline under their current CEO, that he's the sort of real-life Gordon Gekko who hands out copies of Atlas Shrugged to his underlings. But during my search through reports of store closures I got a better picture.

His strategy is to increase profits even it at the expense of sales. That is, to cut back on more flexible expenses like advertising and store decoration - that will inevitably reduce sales, but ideally you'll make more money due to the lowered expenses. I hadn't really thought about it, but I guess Sears stores haven't really changed much over the years. I mean, a time-traveler from the eighties would feel at home in a modern Sears, but they'd freak out when they see what today's McDonald's looks like.

Overall, the strategy doesn't seem to be working. There are a lot of complaints about the state of stores, sales are down, and even elderly demographics are turned off. But hey, as long as the company continues to collapse slowly, there'll be plenty of clearance sales for years to come. I was worried that the disappearance of Target would mean Wal-Mart is our only choice for discount department stores, but apparently we have another option: Your nearest closing Sears.