The (Brutal) Death of Sears | How to Destroy an American Favorite | History in the Dark

Sears used to be a classic and trusted name in American retail. From humble beginnings as a mail-order service, they grew into a billion dollar business with stores all across North America. But at a point, those in charge stopped paying attention to the changing landscape of retail, and after a buyout by another struggling chain, it was all downhill from there.

✈️Further Reading✈️

🟢Join this channel to get access to perks:

Other channels:

---

I WRITE BOOKS! YOU CAN FIND THEM HERE:

#sears #retail #truestory #documentary #corporate #departmentstore #bigbox

[Bikeguychicago]

Sears should have been what Amazon has become. Too many missteps and being late to the party killed the once great and dominant company.

[JenniferinIllinois]

This one hits hard. My dad got his tools at Sears. All of our appliances were from Sears. Our furniture was from Sears. Car service and tires were from Sears. My clothes were from Sears. Oh and the Wish Book! I spent hours and hours every year going through the toys, circling what I wanted for Christmas. 🎄🎁
I never imagined Sears would be gone, but it is. Sad consider Pennys is still clinging to life.

[-playz]

LMFAO i remember that "I'll call now" commercial playing all the time

[tmech]

My brother owns a house that was ordered from Sears Roebuck and shipped, disassembled, in a box car. My grandfather helped haul the parts by horse drawn wagon. My brother found all this out when he was working in the attic and saw the markings for assembly.

[MerelyaTheory]

I am just over 40 now so I think this is early 90s. One time my dad made me go in with him to replace a Craftsman socket I had broken. Honestly I had been mistreating the socket when it broke. I had ground down an extension and had it chucked up in an old corded impact style drill. Might have been a masonry drill. I was using it to try to turn over a lawn mower I found in someone's trash. I released all the smoke from the drill and cracked the socket. My dad beat me as per usual. Making me explain to the sears guy was part of my punishment I am certain. Pretty sure the dude saw my situation and went well beyond the warranty. He gave my dad his new replacement socket and then went through some boxes and worked me up a pretty dang decent tool kit from old display model stuff. He told my dad it was a thing they did for future customers. He put it all in a dented but functional tool box and gave it to me. Dude gave me my childhood of taking stuff apart and putting stuff together.

[djTSOI]

The main reason why Sears survived here in Mexico is because, unlike in the US, malls ("plazas") aren't dead here. There are new plazas being built all the time which are always pretty busy, keeping companies like Sears and RadioShack alive.

[TheMoastWorst]

I was rewatching your Kmart video when this one dropped. I love the personality you inject into these videos. Can you do Montgomery Wards at some point?

[soco]

I talked to a former Sears store manager. I asked if I was wrong in thinking that since Sears was the original "Amazon, " they should have bought Amazon. He agreed that yes, they should have returned to their roots.

[digitalphoenix]

I worked for Sears, I saw what happened from the inside of the company. They hired a CEO that only had experience as a hedge fund manager. As soon as he got in, he started liquidating every bit of the company, selling the Craftsman name to Chinese manufacturers, closing stores, everything he could do to milk every cent out of the company before destroying it. The moment they put him in the position of ceo, that was the final nail in the coffin. And this was in 2016 if my memory serves me correctly

[benjaminreed]

“Eddie and the people working with him were all just idiots.” As a former employee of Kmart (pre-Sears) and the later abomination that was Sears Holdings Corporation that may be the most charitable thing anyone can say about that whole debacle of a merger.

[IAmMisterTterevel]

My parents bought a Kenmore over-the-range Microwave oven that died a couple years ago and since we can't return it to Sears (ours closed in 2018) we've been using it as a snack cupboard.

[Laya_]

Not me remembering the whole Sears commercial at the beginning, word for word 😂

[kellingc]

Okay - I was belly laughing with the streetcar defense - I stumbled across your videos with a bunch of your train videos, and really like the retail history you've been doing.

[lionelplayerone]

My grandfather was a repairman for Sears. Back in the 50's, he would 😢 all over new york and New Jersey to repair their products until he retired in the 90's. when he heard that sears was officially kaput in 2019, He lost his insurance policy as a retiree with along with any other bonuses he worked for.

[MowingMichaelA]

My wife and I met at Sears. I worked at the portrait studio, she worked in the men's dept. Best thing I ever picked up at Sears!

[ShaneHWilder]

Dude, now I want a deep drive into the fall of service merchandise.

[Rheneas]

That sears commercial was a CORE memory lol

[jarrodkopf]

Does anyone else remember when Chicago’s Willis Tower was originally called the Sears Tower?

[mauricecaler]

I worked for Sears Automotive for several years. Several SA locations operated nearly independently of the main stores and were strong earners even when the main stores had weak periods. But they got in trouble over issues relating to internal and external promotions forced on them, fraud and even BBB traps. It was severely restructured and began to have difficulties. I left after they started dropping hours of experienced staff and bringing in low paid and inexperienced people, which further degraded both customer service and employee livelyhood. This was just a few years before the company started the steep decline.

[heavysystemsinc.]

You missed the part where the final management strategy was to have their own stores compete with each other for resources.
Basically, they divied up money in the opposite way they should have and thus became a money sink...instead of trying to help underperforming stores make more money, they gave the money to the stores that were doing fine. This was in the 2000's, so no Amazon didn't sink them. They didn't help, that's for sure, but internal management of this type is no way to run a store. It's the old story about the guy who studied the planes that didn't get shot down in ww2. Everyone else did the Sears thing which was suggest that they armor up the spots that are covered in bullets instead of noticing that the planes that came back weren't shot in certain places and THOSE are the places you add the extra armor.