Monday, April 3, 2023

Brings Back Memories

 


28 comments:

  1. From a company that literally invented mail order everything, you'd think they'd have jumped on the internet bandwagon, but... noooo....

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    1. I read that some executive at Sears made the decision to shut down their famous mail order catalog business the year that Jeff Bezos started Amazon.

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    2. I hate Amazon. Sears was a great store and their products such as Kenmore appliances and Craftsman tools were second to none. I have a Kenmore electric dryer that is fifty plus years old abs works perfectly. Damn it anyway.

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    3. If Bezos was the genius he thinks he is, (and that Sears clearly wasn't), he'd buy the brand out, lock, stock, and barrel, and cautiously move his Sears-Amazon brand back into retail, starting with bringing Craftsman Tools back to Western Forge, and re-opening strategically-placed Sears stores, now staffed with Amazon employees.
      Then start selling Kenmore, and make the appliances the bomb-proof last-forever kind that people would give a kidney to get.

      Tim Allen and Mike Rowe would be the spokesmen.

      He'd become the world's first trillionaire.

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  2. No palm trees here but definitely remember the script logo…

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  3. My local Sears in North Hollywood.

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  4. They captured half of the big W.

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  5. The first escalator I ever saw was in the Sears store a couple of counties over. To a wee child normally surrounded by flat farmland, that was like an amusement park ride.

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  6. My first credit card was from Sears in 1983.
    Bought a microwave and a vhs vcr with it.

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  7. It used to be my favorite store, but that was a long time ago. Although not long ago, three years, i got some metal things to pull pork. Easier to pull the pork butt with metal than plastic.

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  8. Sear; if they didn't have it, it wasn't worth having
    My first color TV came from Sears. Bought it the day before the Redskins lost to Miami in their first Super Bowl.
    Not sure what Sears failed to do; learn from mail ordering or grasp the potential of telemarketing. L.L. Bean failed to take solid telemarketing to the next level.
    And yeah, "Under the Big W".

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    1. Thomas Sowell goes into the whys&wherefors of he big outfits tanking.

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    2. One theory is that they really didn't do anything wrong. Their market was the middle class and the middle class has been destroyed in this country.

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    3. I think Sears went before the middle class did..

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  9. My father worked at Sears, he had his first heart attack in the kitchen appliance department. Because of the employee discount, my parents had a lot of Sears 'stuff'.

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  10. A must have: Sears Toughskins pants for kids, bought by parents who couldn't justify buying Levies for their children, knowing they would just outgrown them in short order.

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    1. yes, tough skins of the kids, appliances, tools, and auto service, too.

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  11. Sears was the goto place since I was a kid looking at the "Wishbook" catalog of toys at Christmas time, up thru me being an adult and needing to replace my stolen hand tools, to "needing" a washer and dryer...
    I remember the washer/dryer day, we were walking back from the laundromat and went past local Sears store front store and looked at the machines in the window. Went in, talked a bit, pulled out my Sears card and later a guy showed up to install the Kenmore washer/dryer... That was 1985 I think...

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  12. gimme a ted williams brassiere, please

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    1. Remember Ted Williams 22LR ammo, sold by Sears? I still have a brick of boxes of that. 10 50 round boxes and the big box they came in. I found them all scrounging through the garbage at my local public range many moons ago.
      Fun times. The garbage bags were like boxes of chocolate. You never knew what you'd find.

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    2. I have a 7 shot magazine bolt action Ted Williams 22LR with a military style peep sight that was manufactured by Winchester. This was my grandfathers rifle. When I was in my 20's I could hit a beer bottle cap at 50 yards 10 times out of 10 with it.

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  13. I bought everything there, first place I went to.

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  14. Ala Moana shopping center, Honolulu Hawaii. Ocean side. Shopped there often.

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    1. Roger that. Ala Moana was the first Sears and the first escalator I'd ever seen.

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  15. And the Sears Catalog, what an institution! As a kid I would dog ear the pages of the toy section making Christmas wishes. . A few years later I did some close study of the ladies' lingerie section, gnome sayin?

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  16. Sometime in the early or middle 1980s, a young hedge fund manager bought K Mart them leveraged that to buy Sears. Roebuck was gone by then.

    Sears had been slipping into the abyss but that punk sealed it.

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    1. He strip-mined the brand.
      Then they scrimped on employees, and the aisles looked like hordes of hobos had swarmed through the place with dynamite and hand grenades.

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  17. Pretty sure that was the Montclair Plaza store in SoCal...

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