Thread regarding Sears layoffs

Stfu id–t everybody makes a difference only lazy people decide to jot blame themselves

They should really look into how this company is doing their commission rates it seems very fishy how they're adding the 90 dollar delivery cost to every sales contribution so every sale you make in appliances is 9 dollars less than it should be in commission

Yup this company likes to treat their sales people as disposable liabilities so that's the attitude of every worker besides the ones trying to wait out retirement, disposable liabilities, better hit your metrics or your fired and we won't even make an effort to pay ya for it. y'all don't give damn so we don't give a f*ck as lil Jon would put it, just a bunch of heathens waiting for unemployment left and those are the more competent ones, anyone new with any potential gets eaten up within a couple weeks on the sales floor thrown out there with no training basically you're going to go several hundreds in the hole in draw pay trying to maneuver this company's available inventory you have no chance to make commission if you aren't familiar with how it works and you have to know which products are available before a customer even comes in to push them to products that you know you can still get because they don't tell you till you try to order it in and find out it's unavailable

Let me guess, this statement made by a store manager who comes to work and sits in his/her office all day while collecting a FAT check!!!

@thx Not only was our office associate out down for one app a day, our MPU/store support was even put down for one app a day. Our SM's grand plan was to assign a register ID to every non-register associate (OA and backroom), give them register training and give them a mandatory five hours a week working at the softlines CAC on top of their normal schedule, taking labor away from softlines to do it. Fortunately it never materialized because that was just plain dumb, just about all of the backroom threatened to quit on the spot and softlines was not too happy to hear that they would lose even more hours to make this work. I think our DM was the one to say no to that, believe it or not.

Eddie's stake in Citibank. It all benefits his pockets. https://www.streetinsider.com/Insiders+Blog/Eddie+Lamperts+RBS+Maintains+Stakes+in+Citi%2C+CIT%2C+Reduces+Exposure+to+Other+Financials%2C+Takes+a+Little+Sears+Off+the+Table/5650346.html

It’s not untrue, but customers don’t want to deal with it.

Credit card apps should be handled by having a table a by the door with an employee asking customers as they came in to sign up and telling the current promo. Then do the app at a separate register which would avoid long lines if they agree. I watched a guy apply for a garage door opener because you got whatever back (might have been $60 at the time), get approved, then he learned he could buy more after he was already partially rung up then left the register to buy tools leaving everyone else waiting. The only exceptions to it should be appliances which people tend to spend more time engaging in the whole purchase process.

PA are fine when and where they might be warranted. lawn and garden, exercise, and appliances. Appliances is a less hurried experience so there is more time to give a lengthy pitch. Some guy buying the bargain basement throwaway snowblower or lawnmower is not going to purchase one anyway so the focus should be moving those people along to get them out of the way. The smart long timers already know this, but they hire new people who will pitch an expensive agreement on a $130 lawnmower the person is just gonna replace in a year or two. It wastes tons of time, if that person just buys their throwaway you might have more success pitching to the guy buying a zero turn. Instead the guy buying the zero turn leaves and goes to Home Depot because he’s sick of waiting.

At my store and I imagine all the others, cashiers were being paid minimum wage to make maximum dollars for Citibank by pushing those credit cards. Losing scheduled hours and threatened with termination if they didn't get enough apps. The number of apps required was greater most days than the number of customers shopping in the store so an impossible task.
Even the office associates were listed as needing one app a day!

Citibank made enough on this that they gave some money back to Sears for it but important to note is Eddie Lampert has some type of personal stake in Citibank so he benefitted personally as well.

And no, that's not why the stores are closing.

Eddie should have tried shopping at a Sears or KMart. The 90s era IBM registers always cause problems at checkout. There are always lines. It's a grind to shop the store every time. Pushing customer loyalty c-ap was absolutely not the problem with Sears. Brick and mortar–specifically, poor use of it–was the problem.

Hard sales tactics work when you have something that nobody else has (e.g., Apple products) - but we were simply not in that position

"First of all, I think the continual pushing of PAs and credit had a lot to do with people not wanting to shop at Sears anymore"

As a customer (former long time Sears employee) I 100% agree with this statement. Not only the hard sell, but also the ridiculously long check out times made me think very hard about shopping at Sears.