Home Depot and Lowes are crowded every day as bored DIY'ers with nothing to do seem to have decided to finish all the projects they've been procrastinating on their whole lives. What do Eddie and the chosen ones do? Shut down all the Sears, not that they were able to stock them anyway. Never miss an opportunity to lose money those fools.
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Missing opportunities has been a Sears specialty for over 40 years. Sears could be right there with Home Depot and Lowes if management had been awake when these companies appeared. Big box hardware stores appeared on the scene and were a great success. So how did Sears respond? The neighborhood hardware store. With small and poorly run stores the concept died in just a few years.
I don't think much of Eddie Lampert, but he did fall right into a pattern. Sears needed decisive moves to address the competition with serious investment in new stores. But instead all he did was cut costs and experiment with silly store concepts, such as Sears Essentials.
It's all over but the final closures now. They might be losing less money with the stores closed, which is why there is no hurry to reopen. With the stores open they have to pay employees.
Sears hasn't really sold the sort of thing diy'ers are looking for in years. It isn't that they missed the boat, they sunk the boat years ago and then sold off the dock in more recent times.
Sears dropped the ball years ago when they started discontinuing product lines such as storm doors, lighting, nuts and bolts, paint, plumbing, etc and then dropped many Craftsman hand tool lines, replacing those with brand name products to cut down on Craftsman hand tool warranty exchanges.
Back in the day, Sears had a hardware department which then got renamed to Tool Territory and then to Tools after so many product lines were shrunk or dropped.
Customers went to the competition looking for products that Sears no longer offered....and many of those customers never came back to Sears.