Thread regarding Sears layoffs

What about all of the "owned" stores in crappy malls/lackadasical locations? What will happen to those?

It seems like all of the stores with property owned by the company that close have everything to do with location (leased properties are another story -- the company doesn't want to make a commitment, regardless of the particular location's profitability, so it opts to close them when the lease is up).

Sears can get top dollar for those stores in good locations, so it sells/closes them to make way for someone else. Meanwhile, the properties owned by Sears Holdings that aren't as appealing as far as location and economic viability is concerned tend remain open, even if the store is losing tons of money.

It seems like there are a lot of those kinds of stores left. All of the better performing stores with higher volume and decent profit have went away or will go away because they were either leased, or if the property was owned by Sears Holdings, it would make a decent amount of money selling it off.

To me, it looks like the company is going after short-term, one-time gains by closing stores with a measurable potential of large returns based on those stores being situated in "prime" locations attractive to other retailers or other venues. However, as these stores close, the stores that have little to no viability on the commercial real estate market tend to remain open and are often a major draw on the company's bottom line, so the short term gains of real estate transactions are offset by losses incurred by remaining, underperforming stores that the company keeps open.

As a semirhetorical question, what will happen with all of these stores in/on property owned by Sears Holdings that are basically worthless in the commercial real estate market?

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Post ID: @OP+SVa82M0

13 replies (most recent on top)

Credit card company (Citibank) has Eddie as a major shareholder.

SYW not a part of Sears. Syw is a different company and every time someone signs up for SYW SHC pays SYW.

Major properties moved to Seritage (owned by Eddie) to raise cash to keep SHC going.

Now Eddies investment firm (ESL) wants to purchase Kenmore, Home Services and more to give SHC more cash. Problem with this is that the vendors have been told that the inventory, Kenmore, Home services, etc are collateral for vendors to send merchandise because SHC cannot afford to pay.

BK coming soon. Figure it out people!!

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Post ID: @2icz+SVa82M0

@1pjc - It makes more sense now. As a former salesperson, credit had been drilled into us as the most important thing above anything else, including sales. PAs were second, Shop Your Way signups and "loyalty numbers" on the register were #3.

Days would go by before one of us would break $1000 in sales by the end of our shift, even if it was eight hours or longer, but that didn't matter. It only mattered that you handed in credit apps before you left for the day. It didn't matter that the store was so dead that someone could go target practicing in there without hitting anyone, all that mattered was CREDIT. The store manager actually admitted that "credit" was the only thing keeping that place open during a rally meeting.

The store I worked at was accurately described by the OP, and guess what, it's still open, even though I left six months ago. It is located in a dead mall and has no customers. We are the only anchor store, 90% of the storefronts in the mall were empty. If it ever closed, I think even $100,000 would be too much for the store since there's no business at the mall besides a theater. Our store manager was mostly content of the lack of sales, but only cared about credit apps and PAs.

With as much pressure they put on us to push credit and PAs, I really do think we pushed a lot of customers out the door in the process. There were a couple of associates that wouldn't take no for an answer for credit or PAs and on several occasions the customers they were dealing with either walked out on them or asked to speak to a manager.

If they spoke to a manager, they were told that it was company policy to ask every customer to ask more than once. So the customer walked out at that point steaming mad and the manager high-fives the pushy associate, encouraging their customer unfriendly behavior.

I honestly think that we'd have more signups if we didn't ask. Some stores, like don't even ask (like Walmart) and yet they still have a lot of cardholders.

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Post ID: @2thn+SVa82M0

@1lhm, seriously its getting old.

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Post ID: @1qyb+SVa82M0

Eddie will claim them in BK because all of his loans to SHC are backed by inventory and property. He will take that property and either sell it or redevelop it into more retail or condo's. That is the purpose of Seritage

@apr- exactly right. Just look to see who has a major stake in Citibank the issuers of those credit cards. Answer: That would be one Eddie Lampert.

@dur- Just wait until the 1Q 2018 comes out and come back and tell me how profitable SHC is.

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Post ID: @1cnb+SVa82M0

All the lies, and fake news has got to stop. Sears will be Great Again. Sears will win in the next election.

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Post ID: @1lhm+SVa82M0

I always said there were stores that couldn't make a dime and stores that could have been run by an untrained chimp.

Truth is, credit played a huge part of those distressed stores staying open. They weren't well kept , well stocked , or user friendly but they made money their way.

They'll be lcollateral for whoever is left holding the bag . Worthless.

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Post ID: @1pjc+SVa82M0

there are no signs that when a better Sears store closes customers will travel to less successful Sears stores. Nope they transfer to TJ Max or Target, Home Depot, Lowes or Walmarts that are closer to their residence.

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Post ID: @jcl+SVa82M0

Some of these low volume, barely profitable stores are the biggest producers of new Sears credit cards. Keeping a store open for the credit apps it produces is sheer genius.

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Post ID: @apr+SVa82M0

OP- a lot of the people on this board only want to see shc fail because they’re bitter or they trade the stock (read the posts, I mean what sears/Kmart employee is on a Bloomberg terminal day trading in his spare time??) How else do you expect us to make money? Working at Sears? Or working for the Toys R Us Liquidator until the check bounces? We have been reduced to day trading , because we gotta eat.

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Post ID: @alp+SVa82M0

The ghetto stores are the ones that make money, just saying.

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Post ID: @hfj+SVa82M0

OP- a lot of the people on this board only want to see shc fail because they’re bitter or they trade the stock (read the posts, I mean what sears/Kmart employee is on a Bloomberg terminal day trading in his spare time??)

Here’s the reality. The company is doing better now. We had a tough time but we are through it. Yes we are smaller, and leaner, but we are profitable now. Everything is going to be ok.

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Post ID: @dur+SVa82M0

yes Eddie is just trying to delay this so SRG has time to prosper and redeploy its property

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Post ID: @hdb+SVa82M0

At least some of them will remain open until the whole company goes under.

There is hope of some amount of revenue improvement at the bad-location stores, if they're close enough to a good-location store to get some of its customers when the good-location store gets shut down.

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Post ID: @oxp+SVa82M0

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