For a company like Sears and now Transform, it's so worthless it's cooking the books even worse than Enron.
"Profitability" of a store what a joke. Eddie ignored the depreciation amortization and maintenance of stores as they decayed into worthless properties no one actually wanted to shop in or acquire. He ignored interest, and so district managers did too as a metric. He ignored the big picture, so at every level of management, everyone else did too, focusing on one store at a time, looking at the micro instead of the macro, short term instead of long, not thinking of the costs of the distribution centers, or the debt, or the lack of investment, or how the cost of not fixing things would compound and balloon over time and result in exponentially greater costs and declining revenues. All the metrics are narrowly focused on the wrong things, and still are focused on the wrong things, actively accelerating losses.
Retail isn't much different than oil. If you don't maintain your equipment, repair your supply lines and distribution, play nice with vendors, and keep up to date with the latest drilling and refinery tech, looking for new markets, and keep drilling for new oil, your leases will expire, your wells will run dry, your offerings will become uncompetitive, and you'll go broke. It's a good thing Eddie didn't put together ExxonMobil then run them the way he ran Sears, because he would have bankrupted them too, 100% guaranteed.
This latest CRM and tech rollout and "transformation" is the latest symptom of the idiocy. This is why Sears continues to fail ever harder.
Satisfaction Guaranteed or Your Money Back. If Sears has stuck with that metric, they'd still have plenty of customers. When the CEO's stated mindset is "We have all the customers we could possibly want", well, you're going to get there. How Eddie didn't equate this with pure value destruction even if all he wanted was the real estate is baffling.