Official: Sears at Twelve Oaks Mall is Closing?

[aj3647]

Probably within the year, Sears and K-Mart will go belly up. Toys R Us is gone, Carson's is closing too. That was a nice store that sold quality goods. Too bad Amazon and other online options are the demise of brick and mortar stores. The Malls are scarcely populated now, except maybe during Holidays.

It might be easy to blame Amazon, but it's not correct. To blame Amazon for the failure of Sears and K-Mart doesn't explain why Walmart and Target [[both brick and mortar) are performing so well.

For starters, K-Mart has been on a steep decline since they went bankrupt in 2002, LONG before anyone had ever heard of Amazon.

And for stores like Sears and Toys-R-Us, they are failing because they are poorly run and mismanaged companies. It's that simple.

http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/15/news...ame/index.html

It's true, online shopping didn't help matters, but the struggles of Toys "R" Us predate the boom in online shopping. Many of its wounds were self-inflicted.
The company's biggest problem: It was saddled with billions of dollars in debt. That debt stopped it from making the necessary investment in stores. And that meant an unpleasant shopping experience that doomed the chain.

Even Toys "R" Us CEO David Brandon conceded in an SEC filing last fall that the company had fallen behind competitors "on various fronts, including with regard to general upkeep and the condition of our stores."

Yeah, with the popularity of Amazon, that means retail is a crazy competitive market right now. So there's no more room for mediocre brick and mortar stores that are saddled with corporate debt and run by morons who make bad business decisions.

[iheartthed]

It might be easy to blame Amazon, but it's not correct. To blame Amazon for the failure of Sears and K-Mart doesn't explain why Walmart and Target [[both brick and mortar) are performing so well.

For starters, K-Mart has been on a steep decline since they went bankrupt in 2002, LONG before anyone had ever heard of Amazon.

And for stores like Sears and Toys-R-Us, they are failing because they are poorly run and mismanaged companies. It's that simple.

http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/15/news...ame/index.html



Yeah, with the popularity of Amazon, that means retail is a crazy competitive market right now. So there's no more room for mediocre brick and mortar stores that are saddled with corporate debt and run by morons who make bad business decisions.

I think Walmart started the assault against K Mart and Amazon finished them off. Walmart is now freaking out about Amazon, which the company views as an existential threat to Walmart.

[aj3647]

I think Walmart started the assault against K Mart and Amazon finished them off. Walmart is now freaking out about Amazon, which the company views as an existential threat to Walmart.

K-Mart failed in large part due to good old fashioned mismanagement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kmart#...ger_with_Sears

In a scandal similar to that involving Enron, Conaway and Schwartz were accused of misleading shareholders and other company officials about the company's financial crisis while making millions and allegedly spending the company's money on airplanes, houses, boats and other luxuries. At a conference for Kmart employees on January 22, Conaway accepted "full blame" for the financial disaster. As Kmart emerged from bankruptcy, Conaway was forced to step down, and was asked to pay back all the loans he had taken.

It all boils down to leadership. K-Mart had greedy and incompetent leaders who ran the company into the ground.

Meanwhile, Toys R Us's fate was sealed all the way back in 2005 when Bain Capital acquired them in a leveraged buyout, saddling them with billions in corporate debt. The past 13 years has simply been Toys R Us kicking the can down the road with enormous interest payments on their massive debt, until they finally ran out of road. They haven't turned a profit as a company since 2013.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-t...-idUSKCN1BV0FQ