I doubt it's purposeful - more just that retail in the Amazon era is difficult and he has demonstrated no particular talent or qualifications for running such a business. He used to get talked up as the next Warren Buffett, but I don't really think his skills as an investor have held up to scrutiny either.
2. Invest in nostalgia brands like Craftsman, that can't be purchased on amazon, and come with a built in consumer base.
3. Use previously considerable resources to position yourself as the best place to shop for X product, and make sure that several brands of X product are only available through you.
4. Still probably fail, but at least it looks like you tried.
Craftsman used to be valuable, because they had a strong reputation and a rock-solid replacement policy. That's no longer the case, and you're better off spending less money for Harbor Freight tools that are now good quality and fully warrantied.
Their lifetime warranty used to cover their poor quality. Buying duplicates was cheaper than snap-on and better suited to field work, where losing tools is a fact of life. My dad would buy duplicates and bulk-return the broken ones a few times a year. Apparently he deduced out the engineered working life of most of their tools.
Honestly, I avoided harbor freight for anything unless I knew I was going to destroy whatever it was in short order.
I now have a woodshop full of HF clamps that carry a better warranty than bessey and work just as well. I also have the HF wood lathe that is super cheap for the quality.
At Harbor Freight, every Indian-made tool I've used has been junk (wrenches). Every Chinese-made product has been acceptable to good. Every Taiwanese- and American-made (yes, they have a few!) product has been excellent.
The chrome and stamping on the sockets is every bit as good as my ~2000 era Craftsman sockets, and far better than the last Craftsman tool I bought around '07.
How is Wright a hobbyist tool though? All the Wright tools I have purchased have been as much or more than Snap-On, they are mainly targeting the industrial market (with pricing to match).
Plus, Gearwrench is not american made, it is Taiwanese. Good tools, but your statement is factually incorrect.
It's just crappy wording on my part. I was unsure if Tekton was also Taiwanese so I omitted country of origin on the first two. To clarify:
Gearwrench, Tekton and some Williams wrenches: Asia-made, reasonably priced, more than adequate for hobbyist use.
Wright and some Williams wrenches: US-made, more expensive but cheaper and more available than Snap-on, marketed towards industrial applications instead of professional mechanics.
Tekton doesn't make any tools, but source them from other manufacturers. So they have some Taiwanese, some Chinese, and some US made. Most of the pliers and all of the punches come from Wilde, a US manufacturer.
Best Buy's retail stores have been surprisingly successful. Sears can probably learn some lessons from Best Buy. Turn your competitor's strength into a weakness, e.g. people want to see and try big appliances before they buy them. You can do that at Best Buy and Sears, not Amazon.
I had a nightmarish time last year buying a complete set of 12 point craftsman sockets from sears online.
The first lot arrived at the store in a brown cardboard box from china and about half the sockets were missing. Returned it, complained, ordered another set, same issue.
Their customer service was shocking throughout.
I'd recommend buying an old set of Craftsman on Craigslist - or if you're lucky and find snap-on or Mac at a good price grab them. Otherwise I hate to write it but Harborfreight tools are mostly pretty much on par with Craftsman these days...
I don't think Sears had much control over the sockets they sent, I think they came direct from their supplier in China with no quality check by Sears before delivery.
The packaging was all in Chinese and was basically a bunch of random sockets thrown in a brown cardboard box, no branding.
They were the lazer cut Craftsman sockets with the bigger type on them which I like as you can see the size while grovelling around in the dark under cars, or at least sockets made with the same format. I still have 20 bucks of sears consolation money to spend online due to this debacle but it's hard to know how to spend it...
There are a ton of options as far as tools are concerned, and it really depends on frequency and type of use. For most people, cheap stuff is fine. Harbor Freight is far less "disposable" than people make it out to be, and tons of professionals happily use their tools. (No, really. Go visit your local mechanic or machinist. It is pretty likely they have that one 12in disk sander, if nothing else)
If you want to spend money, DeWalt and Milwaukee are still the industry standards, and I think that reputation is deserved. I've had pretty much exclusively positive experiences with their performance and longevity.
One thing to remember is that a cheap drill with a good bit is often going to outperform a good drill with a cheap bit. So it is worth spending a little extra on that sort of things, particularly if you see yourself working with metal at all.
Also, get some type of Dremel or similar. One of the most useful tools when you don't really have the correct tool for the job.
People are mentioning Dewalt and Milwaukee here, but if you want a lifetime set of tools for a reasonable price I think it’s tough to do better than Makita. I paid around $250 for a drill and impact driver over 10 years ago and they are still my daily drivers, never once slowed me down.
Reason I bought them is because I asked exact same question you are asking to a bunch of hardcore blue collar guys at the factory I worked at, and they recommended Makita.
Depends on what quality you want, the price you want, what you intend to do, and if you care about the country of origin. Best to buy tools for projects, otherwise you will enter an expensive hobby of collecting tools.
For power tools - Ryobi is fine for home use; the new Harbor Freight power tools have ok reviews. Dewalt and Milwaukee are better IMHO. Dewalt is assembling some of their power tools in the U.S. now. I have Ryobi, Dewalt, Ingersol Rand and Milwaukee cordless tools and battery systems. I personally prefer the Dewalt.
For hand tools, I have Snap-on, SK, Klein, Sunnex, Engineer, Craftsman, ChannelLock and some miscellaneous hand tools from other manufacturers. It really depends on what you want to do. I personally prefer tools made in U.S.A., Japan, and Taiwan in that order. But that is simply a personal preference.
Finally, keep in mind that no one company manufacturers all of their tools. A lot of tools are just rebranded and might be the same exact tool at considerably different prices.
Milwaukee makes pretty decent power tools. Their M18 batteries seem to hold up better than most. Whatever you go with, you really do want to standardize on one model of battery, so that everything is interchangeable and you don't end up with a half-dozen different chargers.
The adage I've heard is that if you care enough that you want to spend money on a nicer one you probably want a corded tool, rather than cordless. Which makes sense to me -- a corded tool is always going to be more powerful.
I'd agree with you, for the most part. Nevertheless, there's always things you need to use in places where running a cable is awkward, and that's where my cordless drills and impact drivers and stuff in that class are workhorses. I've tried to buy cheap Ryobi stuff, but it just gets burned up quickly.
Bosch is good quality and they go on sale on Amazon occasionally. I have an 18v drill, impact wrench, circular saw, sawsall, and jig saw from them and they are all top-notch.
The only one I don't love is the circular saw, but that's mainly because battery powered ones are just not as good as corded.
For hand tools, Gearwrench is a very solid option, IMO their wrenches compare favorably even to something like Snap-On.
Harbor Freight has some good stuff, their hand tools aren't bad and their air tools(esp. the earthquake impact guns) are good, but NEVER buy anything from that store that
1) has a battery
2) is a consumable (sandpaper, saw blades, etc.)
3) you will absolutely depend on professionally (so like craftsman, if you absolutely need then buy 2 and rotate through them.
I've always looked at Dewalt if I wanted something nice, but I usually buy the cheap Ryobi tool and only think about replacing it if it's not meeting my needs. Easy to spend more than you need to on tools as a home owner.
>more just that retail in the Amazon era is difficult and he has demonstrated no particular talent or qualifications for running such a business
"Right, I'm smart enough to realize that Amazon will crush us, and I can't outsmart Bezos, so why not enrich myself, say fuck the world, and go retire with a cool billion?"
In a sense Sears was the Amazon of 100 years ago. They started life in the 1800's as a mail-order catalog, when the communication and distribution technology of the time had just become advanced enough to make mail-order a possibility. Like Amazon, they only opened physical stores decades after they started as a company.
It's pretty hard to ride all the business trends correctly for over 100 years so I forgive Sears for missing out on the internet.
It still blows my mind that you could buy an entire house from Sears through their catalog, and many people did. And not just a mobile home or shed either – we're talking full-on bungalows and multi-story residences.
Kit homes are still around. I think they are not so common in the US because the big builders have streamlined home construction so much that there's no savings in pre-fab.
The Sears homes are pretty neat though. I live in a region where they were very popular.
I keep seeing pre-fab articles pop up on HN, but I think it's having difficulty gaining traction because construction requires a different process--design, sourcing, code approval, labor. Supposedly it can be substantially cheaper, both single family homes and apartment buildings.
My uninformed guess is that it won't be widely adopted until the various pre-fab companies with competing strategies and designs work toward some sort of standardization such that knowledge and skills can readily transfer. I bet it's also a patent minefield, precluding standardization and commoditization.
Perhaps some large homebuilder will acquire one of the pre-fab companies and then we'll start to see some volume. Maybe San Francisco should acquire one and just begin building a ton of cheap apartment buildings....
Did you see the link that just went up on HN a couple of days ago about land use regulations in San Francisco? I chuckle to think of the prospects of a pre-fab developer making headway against all of the forces SF has arrayed against them...
In particular, the article mentions Richmond Specials, which are "generic boxy buildings" that are designed to "maximize the size limits on each lot." Sounds kind of like what pre-fabbed apartments might turn out like, right? Unfortunately, they appear to be widely loathed.
I think the so-called Richmond Specials (there are at least 2 on my block--I didn't know the name until reading that article but recognize them everywhere) have aged enough that they've become part of the accepted architectural landscape.
Anything new will be hated by people. But why spend a fortune to be hated when you could spend much less and be hated all the same. San Francisco requires almost every building to prominently incorporate bay windows as part of the facade. (Richmond Specials lack this, which is why they stand out.) Every era of housing does this differently. As long as the pre-fab does it at least as well (very low bar), they'd fit right in. Plus, stucco is an extremely common street-facing exterior finish, and all the pre-fab stuff seems to have similarly textured exteriors.
I'm no architect, but I think if you can mimic the Edwardian or Spanish Revival styles (which are already quite simplified and boxy) which dominate much of the city you can grease the wheels. I don't understand why architects expend so much effort trying to do anything else; all it does is invite more attention.
My brother manages a Menards (midwest variant of Home Depot/Lowes) and they sell a surprising number of kit homes (~5/month in a marked of ~1/4million).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the main market seems to be immigrants, poor credit history makes a traditional mortgage unattainable.
There was a season of This Old House from a couple years ago where they were putting together a kind of pre-fab house. It was somewhat custom, but all the walls and floors and things were made into panels, and assembled in a factory, indoors. They could also set up the wiring and plumbing in the wall panels while at the factory, instead of having to drill into things afterwards in the field. They then just shipped the panels to the site, and basically snapped them together. it was crazy how fast they came together once the panels and stuff were on site.
Indeed it's hard to stay on top, but missing the internet killed them, so i wouldn't go so far as forgiving them.
They had the better part of 20 years to adjust to the new reality but just kept plugging along with dirty, inefficient retail stores poorly stocked and staffed.
How could the same company that sold mail order houses a 100 years ago look at selling over the internet in the late 1990's and say "nah, it will never work - it's just too crazy"?
It reminds me of Blockbuster. They had the market, the product, and the startup capital but didn't take the risk to see if it would be worth it to pivot.
You can find plenty of examples of companies with founders that failed to pivot, and companies without founders that did pivot. I'm not aware of any research showing a correlation between those things.
Blockbuster did pivot though. They went out of business before streaming took off, but they had their own mail order DVD service, and it was pretty damn good. Being able to drop off in store to get the next set of discs shipped out immediately was a killer feature, when it worked! Often times I'd drop discs off but they'd show up as "unreturned" for a few days, basically putting their service on bar with Netflix's mail order business.
Being able to get the DVD extras, and director's cut editions of movies, as a huge advantage of physical discs. And of course the huge, one stop, selection. I currently have 2 VOD subscriptions and often still have to pay extra for quality movie rentals.
You're right; the sears catalog was the biggest, most efficient store on the analog internet and they absolutely killed the competition in supply chain and efficiency.
Toys r us it's another company that was well positioned to dominate but never took advantage of their competitive advantage
I'd argue that Toys R'us was more of a victim of changing times and overambition. Their performance since the buyout was at best mediocre thanks to both Amazon and a shrinking customer base.
If you are looking for an example of maliciously planned LBO, look up Dick Smith Electronics.
That's what I wonder, so. Is it really that difficult? Amazon is opening brick and mortar stores, invested in whole foods and is constantly increasing its logistics food print with all the clst zhat comes along. All traditional retailers need to do is getting some kind of e-commerce unit up and running and we are looking at mich more level playing field. After all, every single exiating store can, by all means, be considered a fulfillment center as well. And from that perspective traditional retails geographic coverage is not bad at all. No idea why most fail to do so.
Walmart being the exception having bought jet.com (?). After all Amazon is making the majority of its profits from AWS.
I think the original plan was to use Sears to acquire more top brands, not sell them off. He made a failed bid for Restoration Hardware early on, and talked about building a portfolio of strong all-American brands.
The liquidation strategy was a reaction to his plan failing as far as I'm aware. In the early years all the talk was on building a bigger conglomerate, possibly using Sears "super valuable" real estate to fuel it.
