The end of Sears is 'very near'

[sofa king]

123. They even f&*^% that up.

In the early 70s, Sears defrauded a guy named Peter Roberts out of his design for the quick-release socket set that we all have (except the 10 and 13mm sockets, which we have all lost).

Sears then spent over fifteen years fighting his lawsuit, and losing. According to my father, that was when Sears' tool quality dropped to merely average.

At the same time, Sears concocted a hilarious "strategy" that came very close to saying, "we are ignorant flyover state people who are better off following someone else."

And so they did, closing stores, killing off their catalog business the year before the Internet began to expand, and spinning off the financial service divisions which were keeping them afloat. They've struggled ever since by acquiring even worse-off retail companies, like K-Mart, and quickly driving off whatever talent those entities retained.

I've never really seen a company come unsprung in such slow motion, pretty much continuously downward and without a noticeable rebound, since 1976. They must have been absolutely enormous in the 1970s, to be able to ablate stores, expertise, and customers for forty years and still not die.

But it won't be long now.