Enquiring minds want to know

Based on our evaluations of the changing retail environment and our current store count, we have restructured our Retail Services field leadership team this week.

Kmart and Sears stores will now operate as two cross-format divisions, each led by a Vice President, Division Leader. Randy Andresen will lead the North and Anne Hand will lead the South.

Each division will consist of a series of cross-format markets, which will be led by a new market leadership structure:

Each market will be comprised of 45 stores on average, based on geography, generally holding within state lines.

Markets will be led by a Market Leader and their staffs, who will lead Kmart and Sears store teams.

Supporting each Market Leader will be a Market Merchandise Leader and a Market Local Marketing Leader.

Store General Managers will report directly to their respective Market Leader.

Each division team will consist of a Division Director in each of these areas: Human Resources, Finance, Asset Protection, Merchandise and Local Marketing. Each market will have the support of additional Human Resources and Asset Protection resources.

This new alignment is possible due to the learnings gained and best practices developed across Sears and Kmart formats over the past six months, and helps us support our core priorities in 2019:

Better for Members

Simpler for Associates

More Profitable for SHC

For full details, review the Field Realignment website.

Offshore

Due to the unique nature of the offshore markets of Puerto Rico all reporting/systems should reflect the new hierarchies by 2/19/19.

Facility and CORE, (which support legacy Sears systems like RIM, NROS, SPRS, NFX, DOS, RES, PRCM, CLRP, & Alex) will be updated over the course of several days, beginning 2/16 and with targeted completion of 2/20/19.

Note: While the store roll-ups to the new ‘Divisions’ & ‘Markets’ will be complete by 2/20/19, reporting will continue to reflect the current naming conventions of ‘Regions & Districts’ until all reporting migrates to new systems.

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"The Final Liquidation Plan"

It's like somebody on death row finding God so they can go to heaven.

Losing millions/billions for years and it takes filing bankruptcy for Sears to wake up and realize that the way the company was run previously didn't work... Unbelievable

@wjo

Sears has/had about 215 stores and +/-28 districts and (IIRC) 5 regions. PR is/was both a district and a region unto itself. Districts were only Sears or Kmart stores, regions were both formats. Sears Auto and I believe Parts had their own district/region breakdowns separate from retail. They’ve seriously culled the mid-level management numbers over the past week or so.

This is going to be poorly implemented and a mess. For whatever reason, the corporate cultures have never even come close to aligning between the two formats, and for all intents and purposes they remain two very different companies loosely joined by the back end and high level management. Why even bother with leaving 10 districts in place? You could run it on half that, with no region level managment, especially when you consider the number of stores DMs were responsible for in both companies prior to the merger

I sure hope all of the negative people on here voluntarily leave the company. No use having them on our transition journey.

Under the previous region/district/market mgr structure, about how many stores were there at each level? Aside from the obvious big change of now mixing Sears & Kmarts together, I'm wondering how big of a change this is vs just renaming previous levels.

LOL at "learnings" - why didn't they just say "knowledge" instead of making up a word?

(Thanks for sharing this news, OP.)

I can't see this being implemented in a month. Looks like lots of work for consultants here and in India.

A lot of those systems cn barely be called running... At least that was the case when I left 2+ years ago.

Strangely enough for a lot of the replacement systems, the legacy systems were still doing all the actual back end work.

Partially because the new systems couldn't, and partially because no one actually understands how the systems interact across all the business units because of all the bandaids and special one offs that have been built over the past few years.

So all Dms were fired yesterday and were told they can reapply for the new market leader position and then out of those they will decide who they will want

First thing I have seen even resembling a plan

Learnings and best practices for the last six months? How to maximize the liquidation speed of a store closing? Use totes for best effect? Sell appliances that aren't coming to inflate your sales numbers? Present empty sections of your store as currently remodeling? How to fix toilets? Fun party games you can play with your broken escalator that hasn't worked in five years?

Wow can't believe those systems are still running worked on them decades ago.

In another month it'll be transformed again into no managers and a lot of real estate because there will be no SHC.

The big plan of fail.

Thread regarding Sears layoffs

Enquiring minds want to know

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