Sears & Kmart are likely down to their last 24 hours

Outside The Beltway
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Lampert is not likely to be able to secure the financing he needs to put forward his buyout proposal. No others have bid for the whole company. And even he does put forward a proposal by the upcoming deadline, the odds are not good that the bankruptcy court accepts it.

Sears and Kmart will most likely go into liquidation in mid January, with the termination of all 68,000 employees and the closure of all stores.

Simply put, Sears and Kmart are worth more to their creditors dead and in many pieces, rather than as a living whole.

And sheer pragmatism points to liquidation. I don’t think anybody believes that Sears or Kmart will ever again be viable entities and with that view in mind, keeping them alive and burning through cash is foolish.

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J.C. Penney may not be far behind.

Its stock just dipped below $1.00.

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68k is a lot of people that are going to be out of a job.

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At least the impact is spread out nationwide and no one area will take a major hit.

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Thanks, Donald.

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True, but a couple of areas will feel the pain like Tennessee which will have 4 closings and Puerto Rico with 3.

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Trump had nothing to do with this.

The fall of Sears and Kmart is of their own doing.

They should have evolved and kept up with the times and technology, but they didn’t.

I guarantee you, had Clinton won, Sears would still be in the same exact situation.

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The irony is the Sears was essentially “Amazon” before there was an internet for public consumption.

You could literally look through the catalog, order whatever you wanted, and it would arrive at your door a few days later.

They were in a prime position to “out Amazon” Amazon before Amazon before Amazon even formed.

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If anyone has even been in a KMart or Sears in the past few years, this is no major loss anymore. They havent even tried, and it shows.

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Agreed, Sears simply missed the boat entirely.

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Kind of reminds me of Kodak. Kodak was the first to patent digital photography.

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Agreed. That was the situation with the Sears nearest to me, both now closed.

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I don’t agree. Sears has been my go to store for appliances and tools for years.

Only recently have I noticed a fall off in selections and quality.

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And now the icons go to the guillotine to face their fates.

I feel for the workers.

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My dad was a drive-up appliance repairman for Sears back when I was a kid. He drove one of those Sears trucks and went to home and fixed washers or refrigerators or whatever needed to be done. He did something you certainly couldn’t do now and took me with him. He’d buy me comic books and let me either read or come in with him. (That was boring, I have to admit.) But Sears had a lot to do with our getting through those years.

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Those were the days, my friend
We thought they’d never end…

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Crazy how the consumer mentality has changed so drastically within the past couple of decades. People just don’t care to repair these washers or refrigerators anymore, they just buy a new one because it’s cheaper to do so.

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I have a feeling that if Clinton had won, someone on the right would post “thanks Clinton” and he would use your argument in response. Such is life in partisan politics.

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I’ve posted this in the last few Sears threads. They were Amazon before Amazon. Bit of irony indeed.

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It’s technology that drives that mentality. When I was getting my degree in electronics engineering, repairing televisions, VCRs and stereo systems was still a thing. Who does that anymore? The art of component level troubleshooting is lost these days. Is it even taught anymore? Maybe in the military?