I don’t know about Woolco, but K-Mart, Zayres, and Ayr-Way discount stores had auto repair divisions. Each of these discount chains phased out the auto repair division. I suppose it may have been too hard to find qualified technicians. Ayr-Way was bought up and became the Target stores.
Regarding Woolco, my wife used to work for one of their stores as a bookkeeper. She handled the paperwork and cash. They did have an auto service center there much like Wal Mart or K-Mart back in the day. At the time they also did alignments, A/C service, and so on. That was pretty common then and vastly different from the way facilities are run now in stores like that.
At the store where she worked, the 2 armored car guys made a huge cash pickup one day and disappeared. The body of one of them was found a day later shot to death and the other arrested not long afterwards. Apparently the two had a scheme to heist the cash, split it, and head for parts unknown. One decided to double cross the other rather than split it so several lives ruined.
The wife used to be a troubleshooter of sorts and was sent to other stores to sort things out when the numbers weren’t matching. The powers that be from St. Louis were in town once and offered her a position as a traveling auditor with a nice salary, expense account, and the whole nine yards.
Unfortunately, she turned it down rather than travel a lot and be separated from yours truly… 
The old Woolco store here still stands and is a Hobby Lobby.
I don’t know about Ayr-way but Target was a creation of the Dayton (later Dayton-Hudson) Department stores in Minneapolis. Daytons was pretty high class and so Target was designed to go after a little more affluent customer. They also had car repairs to some extent or at least sold tires. One of the few places you could get a couple brand name tires until 9:00 if you wrecked one. Daytons was the first credit card I ever had when I was 16. They catered to teens for clothing and performances in Minneapolis. Way into the 80’s Target took the Daytons card and never had a Target card. Then Daytons was sold to Macy’s or one of those, so Target remained alone.
Some 30 years ago JC Penny and K-Mart use to have their own line of tools and offered a life-time warranty to compete with Craftsman. I bought a 1/2" ratchet from K-Mart…had to have it replaced within 2 months…total junk.
Speaking of tools…my wife’s uncle showed up at Thanksgiving and proved he still was one. He thinks he’s a mechanic but ruined a bicycle wheel just trying to attach it. He has only 2 real tools…a hammer and another hammer…if you know what I mean. He’s always wanted to be mentioned on Car Talk so now he’s got his wish. His late wife was one of the nicest people whom I’ve ever known however. We miss her.
@missileman–I am not a 2 hammerman. I have only 2 tools with which I can fix anything. One is a sledge hammer and the other a propane torch. If I can’t beat something to pieces, I burn it up. However, both my tools are Craftsman Industrial grade.
Well…if you are going to do anything right…you might as well do it with quality tools.
Funny, I only have duct tape and WD-40. Those are really the only two tools you need. They even have a flow chart proving it…
I read an article yesterday that Sears is closing another 296 underperforming stores. Hang on to those real deal Craftsman tools. They will soon be valuable collector items!
Not just Sears…but K-Mart too.
Like I said, I think three years tops. They are blowing through borrowed money pretty fast and sitting on a ton of valuable real estate. I just don’t think the tools will ever be collectors items though. I mean if Olds and Rivieras aren’t collectors items, I don’t think Craftsman will be.
Sears,had a good thing going with the Craftsman tools, Kenmore appliances, Harmony House paints and the catalog department. Sears, in my opinion, could have had a good thing with its service department–something that Lowes and other stores don’t have. However, Sears service on appliances often left something to be desired. The catalog department instead of being dropped should have gone online. Amazon has done well. I don’t think Sears management cared to compete or think about the future.
Exactly
And now, even if they do care, it’s far too late
My dad had a sears vacuum that died in a year…he took it for warranty work to a sears who told him they dont do warranty work there but to go to the other one in the next town. He went there and they took it in and shipped it out for service. Roughly a week or so they called him and said it was ready. He got there expecting a fixed vacuum and they told him it was still broken. It was shipped back to them bc they didnt repair those vacuums anymore. Mind you this story happened like 6 months ago and the vacuum was about 1 year old. They offered store credit but the only models available were not comparable - they were considerably cheaper models. So after all was said and done he upgraded to a dyson ball, and I forget if they ate the difference in cost or if he did. I believe it was roughly 50 bucks more. Typical run around from these kinds of places. Its retail in America.
At the risk of being chastised for being off topic, I am really enjoying this thread. I got my first job at a store called Caldor back in the 1980’s, and I have always been fascinated with the opening, closing, and going-out-of-business of stores. Anybody from the eastern seaboard from D.C. northward probably remembers Caldor, as well as Ames, Hills, Jamesway, Bradlees. Caldor folded in early 1999, in large part because its real estate was worth more than the business. Of course, now that I am thinking about it, we did disappoint an awful lot of customers by always being sold out of many of our advertised items, not to mention severely understaffed stores, (2 out of 11 cash registers open with the lines stretching back into the menswear dept.) and so many items not ringing up at the correct price. Before Wal Mart came to town, you didn’t have to be very good at running your store I guess.
I remember Jack Luskin, “The Cheapest Guy In Town”.
My mother worked for Woolworth’s for a number of years in the late 80’s/ early 90’s. She left before the store closed because she said it got so depressing watching the store deteriorate, it was obvious what was going to happen. To this day she still gets a $59 a month pension from her time there, which doesn’t sound like much, but I guess its $59 dollars more than anybody working at the current crop of stores will get when they retire.
I find the coulda-woulda-shouldas fascinating too. Sears coulda done what Amazon does, Woolworths coulda done what Dollar Tree is doing, Caldor and Bradlees TRIED to do what Target did. Jamesway coulda done what Ollie’s does. I guess everything has a life cycle, be it cars, business, or people.
Seems to me that Sears has been on its last legs for a very long time. I remember Sears being in trouble when I worked at Caldor in the 80s. I saw a documentary where a retired Sears employee said he knew they were in trouble when they started opening the stores on Sunday.
I remember reading an article back when Kmart came out of ch. 11 bankruptcy and bought Sears. It stated that the guy (Edward Lampert) who controls that company is an investor not a retailer, and that he would probably keep the stores open as long as they were generating positive cash flow, and slowly sell them off for their real estate value until they were all gone. It looks like that scenario is playing out. I wish I’d saved that article to see who wrote it and how long ago exactly.
it s a shame. I really like sears.
Ed Frugal I have also experienced this first hand. I was hired in 1979 by the courier division of Purolator. They were known as the “Giant” of the overnight delivery industry. They also had their armored car and automotive products divisions. In 1982 Purolator stock was going through the roof! When I made my daily stop at a Shearson Lehman I would receive a standing ovation! Life was good. Purolator Corporate at this time chose to ignore competition from an insignificant little company. It was Federal Express! By 1986 the common term for overnighting something was to “FedEx” it and Purolator was circling the bowl. The courier division was sold to E.F. Hutton which sold it to Emery Airfreight which was bought by Consolidated Freight. By the time I lost my job in 1989 I didn’t know which uniform I would be wearing the next morning.
Sears being the “Giant” of the catalog sales industry for many decades has suffered a similar fate. I suspect Sears ignored that crazy internet thing when home computers cost as much as a base model car. In 1994 I’m sure they thought Amazon’s online shopping would never catch on. Sears can probably hang on a bit longer by liquidating real estate even though it has much less value than a few years ago. I suppose the giant dinosaurs also ignored those pesky little mammals!
I suspect Sears ignored that crazy internet thing when home computers cost as much as a base model car. In 1994 I'm sure they thought Amazon's online shopping would never catch on
Sears was one of the first companies to have on-line shopping (almost a decade before Wallmart.). Sears had a catalog business for over 100 years. They easily switched over to online sales. There were a lot of things that caused Sears demise…Internet sales…or the unwillingness to embrace technology wasn’t one of them.
I have seen companies come back. Lee Iacoca turned Chrysler around in the,early 1980s. Henry Ford II turned Ford Motor Co around after WW II with its 1949 model lineup. Ford was acfually losing money right after WW II. A little,innovative thinking would help Sears. For example, suppose Sears would give outstanding service on Kenmore appliances. Lowes doesn’t have a service department nor do other similar stores. I needed service on,our washing machine, a Maytag, and had only 3 I independent places to choose. I had to wait for the technician and then wait for parts. If I thought Sears would really service what they sell, I would have a Kenmore machine.
Lee Iacoca turned Chrysler around in the,early 1980s
He turned it around with innovation…but gave up quality to do so. And that’s why they are now on their second owner (Fiat). With the exception of the mini-van…Chrysler vehicles from that era were junk. When was the last time you saw a K-car? I haven’t in years. I have no problem finding Honda’s or Toyota’s from that ere though. And Chrysler was still outselling Honda and Toyota back then.