https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/how-sears-lost-the-american-shopper/ar-BBUO2bk
Alan Lacy: It became clear early on that Eddie’s focus was maximizing cash flow in order to buy back stock. And in that process, the culture changed. Some of the investments that could have been made to have given the off-mall conversions a better chance of working weren’t made.
Michael Ryan: We went from spending several million on the remodels to doing it for a quarter of that price. We were taking Kmart stores that were in deplorable condition and trying to put Sears products in them and it was a disaster. The Kmart customers left, and the Sears customers didn’t come because the buildings were not in the best places and not in the best shape.
Lynn Walsh: Right from 2005, there was not a willingness to invest anything in the stores. New fixtures? Why can’t you use the ones you have? You want to redo that part of the floor? Why do we need to do that? It just got to the point where executives stopped asking, because you knew what the answer was going to be. I remember visiting a Sears store in the Chicago area. The parking lot was like a war zone with the potholes. That was when it hit me. What customer would go through this when they can go to so many other stores and get very similar merchandise for a comparable price?
Dev Mukherjee: Eddie was actually very happy to invest. The underlying question was not, ‘I don’t want to spend money.’ The underlying question was, ‘Show me how this works and how we can provide a better experience to the consumer and make more money.’
Meanwhile in stupid-land. . .
Leena Munjal: I don’t think Eddie gets enough credit for what he did in terms of investing in the business. We pushed for a lot of technology investment. We were one of the first retailers to launch ‘buy online, pick up in-store.’ This was in 2001.
While we were ahead on some things, by the time we started to pick up some traction there was not enough runway.