Thread regarding Sears layoffs

Wow. That is what it's looking like. @WjJbI1p-2lyg reports receiving cough medicine that expired a year and a half ago.

We just received Acer Chromebooks with a manufactuer date of 2014 on the DC truck last week. Are they just clearing the warehouses of everything?

New/Old stock.Anything with a battery couldn’t be good. Also what about manufacturers warranties?

Even more likely it was written off years ago.

It was probably lost inventory that got found that someone pretended to account for year after year but never really did. Just another symptom of being in final liquidation everything must go mode. Even the coin sorters from the 80s are being sold.

@gqa I have my doubts about the claim that Gateway computers are showing up to be sold (haven't seen them in my area, at least), but looking up the iPad 2 shows it's from the same timeframe (2011) as the last Gateways would have been, so if that part is true then the Gateways could be too.

@bnf - All the stores should be using fairly recent Dells by now (relatively speaking, for Sears anyway), Dell Optiplex with Core i5, 8 GB RAM, Windows 7 is the standard. I don't think Gateway PCs were used in any of the stores. Companies usually stick to one brand and a few models of that brand at that to make it easier to manage IT assets, but who knows, maybe somebody in Sears IT purchasing who knew somebody from Gateway got a kick back, but as far as I know, it was WYSE thin clients and IBM desktop PCs that came before the newer Dells. I remember seeing IBM PCs with Pentium 3's in the training rooms of some of the stores about five years ago -- that must have been really painful since the training was Flash-based.

Sometimes I wonder if the reason Eddie suggests his Ayn Rand reading lists for all the execs is if he's running a social experiment and trying to set up the conditions of complete failure at the beginning of Atlas Shrugged. You have a society where companies that used to be great and were the pinnacle of American dominance, but because of an entitled culture of argumentative elites and workers fraught with inefficiency and lack of innovation, society is collapsing at the seams.

I think they meant gateway computers were being utilized in the store, not sold.

@yvj Does Sears seriously have Gateway computers in inventory? How old? What operating system? Gateway ceased to exist in 2011 when its parent company, Acer, discontinued the name (Acer bought the Gateway company sometime in the early 2000s).

Stuff warming the shelves is just money getting lost on a daily basis. You want your inventory turnover to be as high as possible so you can use the profits to invest it in more profit making activity. It's why Apple is Apple and Sears is Sears.

As a very easy example, what would happened if you opened a lemonade stand, and only managed to sell one glass of lemonade every 193 days? You would still have to buy lemons, and they would go bad. Sears has the same problem. Clothing goes of style. Products are discontinued. Stuff starts to smell bad. That's why stores have Gateway computers, Blackberries, iPhone 4 cases, and iPad 2s incoming right now. There's tons of obsolete stock sometimes decades old that was never sold, taking up warehouse space that can't be sold or leased, but is now used to stock shelves because vendor relationships have been severed forever. And inventory sitting in stock is money locked up in product that can't be used to invest, taking up space that can't be utilized on profitable activities by people doing profitable things.

If it weren't for the stuff that's been shelf-warming for months, Sears/Kmart stores would be a lot more empty-looking now.