@Triedaq
"I hope Penney’s doesn’t go under because that is the only place I know to buy underwear."
I can count the number of movies on one hand that I have seen. However, one of the movies from 1988, Rain Man, starring Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman answers that question. Apparently savants know where to find it. 
CSA
Apparently Sears going to the Sears Hometown smaller stores maybe one way the name can survive. It appears the bulk of their sales are tools, lawn and garden, appliances, and so on and each store is locally owned.
A net worth of 100k dollars and 60-80k investment makes you a Sears store owner if you come up with a 55 foot minimum store frontage and roughly 5-10k square feet of floor. Sears controls the inventory though.
Of course that’s going to bring with it the inherent headaches; employee turnover, workers comp, utilities, lease payments, and so on along with what will likely be the Sears Hometown owner now being the one taking on the mandated healthcare costs and headaches associated with it.
My Closest Town Has A Sears Hometown Store. I’ve Shopped It For Years. However, Those Stores Aren’t Full-Blown Sears Stores. They’re Independent. They Don’t Honor All Sales That Sears Advertises…
…and the one near me is currently run by a couple of females (at least one has jewelry installed in her face) and they are totally profit driven, not big on customer service. They don’t deliver what they promise, literally.
Those women can really haul appliances around on a hand truck and load them, but don’t seem to follow through on anything after money changes hands and aren’t very concerned when customers have problems.
Could it be that younger folks (the ones that are supposed to provide service) have never experienced real customer service in their lifetimes and don’t know what it looks like?
Customer repair service is handled by a couple of different independent repair services who will do Sears warranty work and repairs.
CSA
Target and WalMart do a booming business in my neighborhood at the expense of Sears and JC Penny, and I live in a well to do area. We shop at Target because of the prices and quality of the goods. When it comes to lawn tools, we shop at Home Depot or Lowes for the same reason. Department stores are losing ground and will likely fold if they can’t find a way to compete with big box stores. They havent yet and I doubt they will.
We have a WalMart, Lowes, Rural King Menards, Meijjers, Best Buys and H.H. Gregg all within a mile and a half of our house. Sears and Penney’s are in a shopping mall across town and Target has its big store right next to the mall. Most of what we need is close enough that I rarely fight the traffic to go to the mall. I buy a tools, garden supplies, hardware, dog food and even jeans and underwear at Rural King because the prices are better most of the time than the other stores. The last time I was in the Sears store, there were a lot of empty shelves. I had the sinking feeling that this store won’t be in business much longer.
The Rural King, which is essentially a farm store, put in a mower repair service last year. If I buy a mower next year, I will go there first. A couple of years ago, a friend bought a new mower at Sears. When she got it home and started it up, it had a bad vibration. The blade was out of balance. She took it back to Sears and they shipped it to a service center 100 miles away. She didn’t have the use of the mower for 10 days.if Nobody locally in the Sears “service department” was allowed to balance the blade or replace the blade, since the mower was under warranty. I sharpen and rebalance my mower blade at the start of each season. I contrast this with an inexpensive television I bought at Target for our sun room. It started acting up. The warranty information said that I was to call a number, give the information on the store receipt which I had fortunately saved and I would be told where to ship the set, at my expense. The set would be repaired and then shipped back to me at the manufacturer’s expense. However, when I called, I was told that a technician would be sent directly to my house that very day. He came, swapped out a circuit board and had the set going in 10 minutes. He then spent 20 minutes playing with our dog.
Along those lines, my wife gave me an oil-less air compressor from Sears to use at home and it didn’t last even 1 hour. They gave me another and it smoked like the first one within an hour and the store didn’t have another and wanted me to upgrade but instead I insisted on a cash refund and bought a belt driven model with money to spare at Tractor Supply and haven’t bought anything there since. And the Tractor Supply compressor continues to work great after 20+ years.
Just a little off topic but what I do with receipts etc. for items with warranty’s is first staple together or tear out all the non-English language pages, then staple the receipt to the booklet and record the date, where I got it, and how much. Then I just file it according to major subjects like small tools, rolling stock, appliances, etc. It really simplifies everything. Can’t remember ever needing a receipt but its easy to find the booklet and helpful to know how old the item is.
I don’t know how one goes about buying underwear. You can’t exactly try them on first and I’ve got about four different brands from different stores-only one of which is reasonably acceptable. I even through out a perfectly good package that I paid about $25 for after getting them home and trying one on. What can you do? Can’t bring them back and can’t really give underwear to Goodwill. Its really important to not be distracted while driving.
Years back I decided to replace the shocks on my '89 Toyota pickup. Sears had a really good sale going on, so I bought four there. I went home, jacked up the front end, removed the LF shock, took the new one out of the Sears box… and it was the wrong shock! Fortunately, I had wrenched the top nut off of the old shock instead of my usual habit of just cutting it off.
I put the shock back on the truck and drove back to Sears. They looked it up again and said “whoops, we gave you the wrong shock!”. This time, before I left the counter, I took one shock out of a box… it was different from the first one, but STILL WRONG!! The and was totally different… yet they argued with me and insisted the part was correct! Mine had threaded shock rod ends that go through the mount axially to the shock, the ones they were insisting were correct had the bushing with inserted perpendicular mounting rod with bifurcated ends! Totally, completely different! And they were snickering at me insisting their shocks were correct, trying to intimidate me into taking the wrong shocks!
I returned all four Sears shocks demanding a full refund, knowing at that point that trying to get the right part from Sears was hopeless, and stopped at VIP for replacements. Went home and finished the job without a hitch. Since I live 1/2 hr from Sears, what should have been a 1-1/2 hour job turned into a full day of aggravation. I never bought another part from Sears. And never would.
And my story is not unique.
Some year later I ran into a friend, car-knowledgeable, who had gotten shocks replaced at Sears and they installed the incorrect ones. The friend ended up at an independent shop that installed the correct shocks and the strange new noise the incorrect shocks were making went away.
I hate to say it, but IMHO Sears deserved to go bankrupt. They had serious problems.
Sears used to have its brand names for different items. Does anyone else remember these Sears brand names:
Sporting goods, guns, bicycles. J. C. Higgins
Freezers and refrigerators. Coldspot
Bottom line tools. Dunlap
Home furnishings,paaint and even light bulbs Harmony House
Walk behind garden tractors. David Bradley
Tires,batteries,car radios. Allstate
Outboard boat motors. Elgin
Radios, record players and televisions. Silvertone
There was also a,Homart brand that was applied to flashlights, flashlight batteries and even home not water heaters.
Sears even marketed a car back in 1952 called an Allstate. It was a,rebadged Henry J made by Kaiser and sold in a few stores…
Heck, Sears used to sell build-it-yourself houses through their mail-order catalog! The entire kit, everything precut, with an entire assembly (construction?) manual, was delivered on-site! Some of them were decent houses. Many of them still exists.
The first motorbike I ever rode was an Allstate from Sears and that was back in the early/mid 60s.
I’ve actually still got a 20 Gauge Sears pump shotgun I bought new well over 40 years ago. I don’t remember who made them under the Sears brand but it’s a fine shotgun.
I vaguely remember Sears selling firearms and bicycles under the J.C. Higgins brand name.
Funny thing about those old Silvertone guitars and amps that were sold on the cheap by Sears is that many of them have become collectible and will bring some serious money. The first guitar I ever owned was a Silvertone 458, 468, or something like that.
Some big time musicians such as Billy Gibbons oF Z.Z. Top even own them.
@ok4450 I forgot about musical instruments. As well as guitars, Sears sold trumpets and clarinets and I think violins under the Silvertone label.
One item I missed: Sears sold typewriters with the brand name Tower.
In the late 80’s, our daughter had to drive 70 miles round trip a day to the state University, so we bought a new 1988 Chevy Nova (Toyolet). I told her to keep the oil changed, and she took it to Sears. I paid no attention for a few months, then looked at the receipt. They were charging her $5 for chassis lube. I checked and there was no chassis lube on that car.
She complained and they gave her one free oil change. Dishonesty is a 100% business killer for me.
Yes, they deserve anything bad which happens to them.
When sears bought K-mart I thought they are going to fix K-mart. The K-mart in our town is a ghost town. As much as my wife shops around for everything, I think if K-mart gave stuff away for free, we would still not know it.
It is also a different image to see the Craftsman tools sold at K-mart.
I bought an electric weed wacker from Sears a few years ago. It is still working but it is not a quality tool at all and I could have gotten something better for half the price at other big box stores.
I have also tried to get some tools at sears, but for difficult to find stuff, the staff working there are not knowledgeable at all. At least at our local store.
Maybe that was a main difference between Wards and Sears. My dad’s shotgun came from Wards but it was a Browning, not a store brand. My Enfield .303 came from Wards and my Moped from Wards was a standard brand, not a house brand. I don’t think I would have like a JC Higgens rifle.
Actually, Kmart bought Sears. I know, it sounds ridiculous but that’s how it went down. Apparently Kmart came out of chapter 11 about a decade or so ago with a clean balance sheet and a pile of cash, with that hedge fund guy Lampert in control, and they bought Sears. Sears must have been in deep doo doo even back then for something like that to happen. I remember reading at the time a lot of analysts thought Lampert was only interested in the real estate and would keep the stores open as long as they generated positive cash flow and slowly close up the stores and sell off the real estate piecemeal. Today it sure looks like that scenario is playing out.
The last time I was in my nearest Kmart, which admittedly was quite a while ago, they had narrowed a bunch of the aisles in the store to clear out a corner of the store which they had filled with rows of Kenmore appliances, refrigerators, stoves, washer /dryers etc. Made absolutely no sense to me. Who goes to Kmart to buy a new stove? Especially when there’s a big Sears store less than a mile away? Plus narrowing the aisles made the store feel cramped and cluttered and cruddy; you could see and feel the ruts in the tile floors from the “scars” where the aisle racking had sat for many years before they moved them closer together.
Morning. Please do try to keep this discussion relatively car-related. Some of you have been weaving it in, but I know how popular the Sears discussion is. Thanks!
cdaquila,
Thanks for indulging us.
Apparently Sears going to the Sears Hometown smaller stores maybe one way the name can survive. It appears the bulk of their sales are tools, lawn and garden, appliances, and so on and each store is locally owned.
I’m not sure what direction they are going in. We had three of those Hometown stores…now two of them are closed…but they gutted the Sears store in Salem to be close to what the Hometown stores sell. The other Sears stores are staying the same,.
"The first motorbike I ever rode was an Allstate from Sears and that was back in the early/mid 60s."
I owned one in the 60s. I believe it was made by Puch (Austria?).
I lived near a big city and it was nice going to a Sears Parts Warehouse for parts. They stocked nearly everything. That was much easier than trying to locate Puch parts or Elgin parts, although I believe my Elgin was an Envinrude.
Seems like I had some Ted Williams sports gear from Sears. Was That their brand, too?
CSA