Businesses that are defunct that you are pissed about closing

[iowahighways]

Eagle also existed in the Chicago area. I believe they were based out of the Quad Cities. My first job was the Eagle Country Market in St. Charles. My job highlight was having my break with Ernie Banks, aka Mr. Cub. I don't know if I can say I am passed about them closing,  though.

There is still an Eagle store in Dubuque, but it's under different ownership. I drove by it last fall and the "SINCE 1893" on the old signs have been painted over, while their house brands are now Best Choice and Always Save instead of Lady Lee and Harvest Day.

[Pete from Boston]

Russo's in Watertown, MA. Started as a produce stand, but became a giant specialty market with lots of baked goods, meats, dairy, and especially fruits and vegetables of a quality that can't be found anywhere else.

Unparalleled combination of price and selection. I don't think we'll see anything like them anytime soon because I suspect they were able to leverage their buying power as a food service wholesaler to bring an incomparable variety of produce at very reasonable prices.

I never went during the closing frenzy because I just didn't want to see that place in any kind of decline. What a loss. But the $30 million or whatever it was they were offered for the plot is hard to pass up.

[wriddle082]

Just remembered a couple of other chains I'm not happy about their closing...

Media Play - Nashville had three locations, and I think two of them used to be Central Hardware so they were HUGE!  Of course Amazon ruined them as well as nearly the rest of the music store and book store industry.

Phar-Mor - It was like a Walgreens on steroids.  So many health and beauty items, and a small music section in one corner among other things.  They didn't last very long in Nashville at all, with maybe two locations that were open less than a year.  Mismanagement was their downfall.

[HighwayStar]

It's pretty sneaky that these large corporations will deceive you into thinking you have choices between different retailers and it turns out several of them are actually the same company, just with different branding.

This is news to you?  Car brands do it, restaurants do it, grocery stores do it, all sorts of industries do it.

And it isn't really deception, because you do still have a choice.  Jeep and Chrysler, for example, aren't exactly the same product.

I think there is a significant difference between auto companies where the brands are something they created themselves and have had for a long time that are used as market segmenting tools, and companies that buy up old brands and pass them off as their own.

One musing idea I once had was to prohibit the use of a brand once it is no longer owned by the original company to prevent what is essentially false advertising. Example would be old people buying RCA televisions because they used to be good quality, not knowing that the brand has been sold off and is now owned by some no-name firm that acts as a holding firm. Or Craftsmen tools now that they are no longer owned by Sears, same issue.

[formulanone]

...companies that buy up old brands and pass them off as their own.

One musing idea I once had was to prohibit the use of a brand once it is no longer owned by the original company to prevent what is essentially false advertising

Excuse me, but that kind of anti-corporate and anti-capitalistic thinking will land you into one of our American Re-education Centers, which consists of a large dark room with only talk radio blaring from Chinese-made speakers.

[abefroman329]

Mismanagement was their downfall.

Specifically, they were moving inventory from store to store in the middle of the night to make it look like the company had more inventory than it did and, consequently, that it was on stronger financial footing than it was.

[epzik8]

Kmart, pretty soon.

[kphoger]

Good riddance, Kmart.

[I-39]

Sears. No reason it couldn't have thrived even today, but blunders made by management in the 1980s/1990s/early 2000s led to Eddie buying it and destroying it.

[HighwayStar]

Sears. No reason it couldn't have thrived even today, but blunders made by management in the 1980s/1990s/early 2000s led to Eddie buying it and destroying it.

No, Sears could not have lived to today. It was a mid market retailer in a world of falling real wages, a collapsing manufacturing base, a declining middle class, and a race to the bottom on price. Sears was a retailer for the middle class, once the middle class started to disappear there was no future for the company as it existed. Management was not really at fault, it was an organization built for a particular purpose and short of destroying it and building something new that only had the same name it was going to die. The policies which did Sears in go back to the 40's in some cases, and by the 1970's their future was largely sealed. Eddie was a symptom, if not him it would have been some similar fate.

[Scott5114]

Sears had the infrastructure to be Amazon before Amazon existed, but whether it would have been successful had they gone that route is an open question. My guess is probably not, since a lot of Amazon's success is due to opening up their infrastructure to third-party vendors.

[HighwayStar]

Sears had the infrastructure to be Amazon before Amazon existed, but whether it would have been successful had they gone that route is an open question. My guess is probably not, since a lot of Amazon's success is due to opening up their infrastructure to third-party vendors.

I think the issue is much more fundamental than that. Sears was a company that, fairly late in the game, was still giving generous benefits packages to front line retail workers. It had a massive pension plan liability as well. The discounters, Target, Kmart, Ames, Walmart that rose starting in the 70's and continuing into the 80's were new companies with none of that baggage. You can find signs from the era of Walmart's expansion boasting how they had non union labor to give customers lower prices. Basically the discounters were racing to the bottom and Sears, as an organization built for a different era, could not compete. Corporate culture matters, and Sears was not founded on the race to the bottom everything else be damned.

And while I agree that Sears had excellent infrastructure to one day be Amazon (if the organization had otherwise been capable of such a thing), the truth is Sears was not killed by the internet or Amazon, it was in decline long before e com sales were enough to even track.

[Scott5114]

I mean, just because there's a race to the bottom doesn't mean that you have to participate in it. Sears could have kept all of their union labor and front-line benefits packages and done just fine if they had marketed themselves appropriately so that customers had a perception they were getting added value out of the higher prices. They could have put added emphasis on customer service. "If you want to buy the wrong item for cheap, go to Walmart; if you want the right item at a fair price, come to Sears and we'll take care of you." Basically they needed to take the reputation for quality and service that the Craftsman brand had at the time and find a way to expand it store-wide, and most critically, walk the walk they were talking.

The problem was that Sears kept the high prices but did absolutely nothing to justify them. I remember in the late 90s we bought a Craftsman mower and ran into problems with it, and getting Sears to make it right required jumping through all sorts of hoops. If you're going to have to deal with the same shoddy products and customer-service rigamarole that you do at Walmart, there's absolutely no reason to spend more money at Sears.

[HighwayStar]

I mean, just because there's a race to the bottom doesn't mean that you have to participate in it. Sears could have kept all of their union labor and front-line benefits packages and done just fine if they had marketed themselves appropriately so that customers had a perception they were getting added value out of the higher prices. They could have put added emphasis on customer service. "If you want to buy the wrong item for cheap, go to Walmart; if you want the right item at a fair price, come to Sears and we'll take care of you." Basically they needed to take the reputation for quality and service that the Craftsman brand had at the time and find a way to expand it store-wide, and most critically, walk the walk they were talking.

The problem was that Sears kept the high prices but did absolutely nothing to justify them. I remember in the late 90s we bought a Craftsman mower and ran into problems with it, and getting Sears to make it right required jumping through all sorts of hoops. If you're going to have to deal with the same shoddy products and customer-service rigamarole that you do at Walmart, there's absolutely no reason to spend more money at Sears.

The race to the bottom is tied to the collapse of American industry, the decline of the middle class, and falling real wages. You cannot market your way out of this, the customer segment it is aiming at has shrunk so dramatically to no longer be viable on scale. I think it was in The Betrayal of the American Dream that someone was quoted as saying that anyone with an income less than 200k no longer mattered to Madison Avenue. That is not 100% correct, since it ignores the low end, but the gist was right.

Sears did have a reputation for good service and good products, but when customers become budget constrained it does not matter, they buy what they can afford. The perception of Sears having the same low quality goods comes from long after this era passed. Walmart's innovative strategy was to import cheaper goods rather than buying in the US, ie. other firms were not doing it on the scale they did. A severe drop in middle class purchasing power cannot be solved by any means except catering up or down market. And doing either of those is difficult, and essentially impossible for a store like Sears.
And on the cost side there was nothing to do. Sears could not shed its pension plan liability or cut the pay of its workforce, meaning that no matter how it marketed itself it would still have much higher costs than Walmart. And one of the problems of high costs is that you have less margin for things like quality goods or customer service.
Imagine entering a market where no matter what you do you pay double what your competitor does in costs. Clearly it is very dubious you will ever compete with them.
When you refer to the late 90's mower incident, that was some time after this problem had started (probabally by a decade at minimum). By that point, Sears had high costs which made offering the same customer service as even Walmart uneconomical. Its cash was going to high costs that Walmart did not have to pay, so Walmart could easily eat a return and not care.

One of the very difficult problems in understanding the collapse of retail is the time delay between cause and effect. That is why the mainstream media always gets the story wrong, they blame "Amazon"  for killing retail, even though most of these firms were obviously in decline before Amazon even existed. The date a firm finally files for Chapter 7 is not that relevant, and for a store like Sears the decline can take decades due to sheer inertia.

[Scott5114]

The thing that put my family off of Sears wasn't the price, it was the fact that the price and the product provided no longer matched. Dad was a well-paid civil servant who was willing to spend the extra money if there was a reason to do so, so there was no budget constraint in our family. Sears just stopped providing a rational reason for choosing to pay the premium, so we stopped going there.

[HighwayStar]

The thing that put my family off of Sears wasn't the price, it was the fact that the price and the product provided no longer matched. Dad was a well-paid civil servant who was willing to spend the extra money if there was a reason to do so, so there was no budget constraint in our family. Sears just stopped providing a rational reason for choosing to pay the premium, so we stopped going there.

This type of "budget constraint" is not something people are usually conscious of, its not always "oh, I only have X dollars in my wallet" but more of a gradual decline in what is considered "reasonable" to spend on something. Or equally often, its prices remaining the same or even falling, but the quality of goods and services declining as well.
That said, your experience sounds like it was more influenced by the era after that had taken its effect, when the high costs relative to competitors made the firm unable to compete.The intersection of macro and micro economics is not always tidy and clean, and what is easy to see on a large scale can be hard to find on a micro scale.

[hotdogPi]

The thing that put my family off of Sears wasn't the price, it was the fact that the price and the product provided no longer matched. Dad was a well-paid civil servant who was willing to spend the extra money if there was a reason to do so, so there was no budget constraint in our family. Sears just stopped providing a rational reason for choosing to pay the premium, so we stopped going there.

Where did you go, then? You seem like the kind of person who would avoid Walmart at all costs.

[Scott5114]

The thing that put my family off of Sears wasn't the price, it was the fact that the price and the product provided no longer matched. Dad was a well-paid civil servant who was willing to spend the extra money if there was a reason to do so, so there was no budget constraint in our family. Sears just stopped providing a rational reason for choosing to pay the premium, so we stopped going there.

Where did you go, then? You seem like the kind of person who would avoid Walmart at all costs.

Well, I was like, 12 at the time, so I didn't really have much of a choice in where we shopped. (And this was also before I was old enough to realize exactly why Walmart sucked.) That being said, I have no idea where Dad gets his lawnmowers and such now. Possibly Lowe's.

[GCrites]

In the '90s if you say the average Sears was 100,000 square feet by 2005 other stores were selling 1,000,000 square feet of the same type of stuff Sears was within a one-mile radius of most Sears stores. Lowe's, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Kohl's, Menard's, AutoZone, Best Buy, Harbor Freight. All of which didn't exist or were small regional chains when Sears had a death grip on retail in the '70s.

[I-39]

Sears had the infrastructure to be Amazon before Amazon existed, but whether it would have been successful had they gone that route is an open question. My guess is probably not, since a lot of Amazon's success is due to opening up their infrastructure to third-party vendors.

I think the issue is much more fundamental than that. Sears was a company that, fairly late in the game, was still giving generous benefits packages to front line retail workers. It had a massive pension plan liability as well. The discounters, Target, Kmart, Ames, Walmart that rose starting in the 70's and continuing into the 80's were new companies with none of that baggage. You can find signs from the era of Walmart's expansion boasting how they had non union labor to give customers lower prices. Basically the discounters were racing to the bottom and Sears, as an organization built for a different era, could not compete. Corporate culture matters, and Sears was not founded on the race to the bottom everything else be damned.

And while I agree that Sears had excellent infrastructure to one day be Amazon (if the organization had otherwise been capable of such a thing), the truth is Sears was not killed by the internet or Amazon, it was in decline long before e com sales were enough to even track.

Amazon was gonna be what it is today even if Sears had reinvented themselves. Sears could've reinvented themselves and occupied the segment of the market Target occupies today, a step or two above the likes of Walmart and Lowes.

Yes, there were problems going back to the 50s, but the downfall began in earnest in the mid-70s during the recessionary/inflation period of that time. I think they were already cutting back on hours and benefits by the 80s.

Sears had been very innovative for most of its history, but by the mid-70s, they were so full of themselves that they failed to see the transition to the discount/big box retailer, thus by the 80s while they were distracted chasing customers with their "Sears Financial Network"  trifecta of Coldwell Banker, Dean Witter and All-State, the likes of Walmart, Target and Home Depot were encroaching on their terf.

Another issue, and this was probably one of the most fundamental factors, was they failed to embrace IT early on, which was revolutionizing supply chain and cost accounting control measures by the 1980s. Walmart was so successful because it embraced IT far ahead of the game (this was a reason for them blowing past Kmart as well, which had similar issues with Sears long before they merged).

The time to save Sears was in the 1990s. After Walmart surpassed them, they should have focused on simplifying their operations, modernizing their infrastructure with state of the art IT and getting off the mall and into big box strip centers. They failed to do that until it was too late and so it died off.

[HighwayStar]

Sears had the infrastructure to be Amazon before Amazon existed, but whether it would have been successful had they gone that route is an open question. My guess is probably not, since a lot of Amazon's success is due to opening up their infrastructure to third-party vendors.

I think the issue is much more fundamental than that. Sears was a company that, fairly late in the game, was still giving generous benefits packages to front line retail workers. It had a massive pension plan liability as well. The discounters, Target, Kmart, Ames, Walmart that rose starting in the 70's and continuing into the 80's were new companies with none of that baggage. You can find signs from the era of Walmart's expansion boasting how they had non union labor to give customers lower prices. Basically the discounters were racing to the bottom and Sears, as an organization built for a different era, could not compete. Corporate culture matters, and Sears was not founded on the race to the bottom everything else be damned.

And while I agree that Sears had excellent infrastructure to one day be Amazon (if the organization had otherwise been capable of such a thing), the truth is Sears was not killed by the internet or Amazon, it was in decline long before e com sales were enough to even track.

Amazon was gonna be what it is today even if Sears had reinvented themselves. Sears could've reinvented themselves and occupied the segment of the market Target occupies today, a step or two above the likes of Walmart and Lowes.

Yes, there were problems going back to the 50s, but the downfall began in earnest in the mid-70s during the recessionary/inflation period of that time. I think they were already cutting back on hours and benefits by the 80s.

Sears had been very innovative for most of its history, but by the mid-70s, they were so full of themselves that they failed to see the transition to the discount/big box retailer, thus by the 80s while they were distracted chasing customers with their "Sears Financial Network"  trifecta of Coldwell Banker, Dean Witter and All-State, the likes of Walmart, Target and Home Depot were encroaching on their terf.

Another issue, and this was probably one of the most fundamental factors, was they failed to embrace IT early on, which was revolutionizing supply chain and cost accounting control measures by the 1980s. Walmart was so successful because it embraced IT far ahead of the game (this was a reason for them blowing past Kmart as well, which had similar issues with Sears long before they merged).

The time to save Sears was in the 1990s. After Walmart surpassed them, they should have focused on simplifying their operations, modernizing their infrastructure with state of the art IT and getting off the mall and into big box strip centers. They failed to do that until it was too late and so it died off.

Nope, the market segment Target occupies is nothing like what Sears occupied. Being above Walmart does not make you a middle class retailer. Target employees are more or less the same cost as Walmart, and none of them have a pension plan I guarantee that. It sells the same Made In China goods you buy at Walmart at a slightly higher price. Its not fundamentally different, and most of that perceived difference is the advertising induced hallucination at work.

This is a very common trope about business, whenever a company fails the usual approach is to say "they did not keep up with the times" or some similarly platitudinous statement. The problem with these tautologies is that they ignore the bigger picture.
Suppose you consider the firm making horse carriages in 1900, by 1925 they are bankrupt. You say "they did not keep up with the times" or "its their fault" which is obviously true in a sense, but the cause of every business failure then boils down to identically "they did not keep up with the times" which is a hollow and meaningless answer.
The real problem for our buggy manufacturer is that the horseless carriage, which would be "keeping up with the times" is a fundamentally different product than what they make. It requires a knowledge of mechanics and electronics that our firm has zero experience with. Sure, they could fire most of the staff and hire an all new group of people with the right skills and get a different factory to produce these new goods, but then fundamentally its not the same organization, it only has the same name.
Companies are, on some level, organic and human enterprises with cultures, values, and social positioning that precludes rapid realignment, and any significant realignment is generally the end of that company in practice, if not in name. So while it is perhaps always true that a company "could have" or "should have" or "would have" worked if it had done X, I find that an uninteresting answer, because the real cause of failure for a successful enterprise is almost always a change in conditions exogenous to the firm.

This change can be one of simple technological shift, like the internal combustion engine displacing the horse, in which case we need not be too concerned with the destruction wrought.
However in the case of Sears, and similar firms, the cause is not technological but an economic shift caused by bad policies put in place over a period of time. This type of failure is one that is intrinsically worth understanding on its own terms, and blaming Sears because it did not transform itself into Walmart misses the point. Even if somehow it had, we would still end up with the same impacts.

I don't buy the IT explanation, Walmart was a leader in that, but it was a secondary consideration to their use of imported goods, low cost labor, and other race to the bottom tactics. In some respects, Sears was far ahead of Walmart, such as its very early e commerce work which was years ahead of the competition.

The 90's was not the time to save Sears, for anyone. Sears needed saving in the 40s, 50s, 60's, and 70's, and not in the boardroom in Illinois, but in the Capitol and White House in Washington, District of Columbia.

[I-39]

Nope, the market segment Target occupies is nothing like what Sears occupied. Being above Walmart does not make you a middle class retailer. Target employees are more or less the same cost as Walmart, and none of them have a pension plan I guarantee that. It sells the same Made In China goods you buy at Walmart at a slightly higher price. Its not fundamentally different, and most of that perceived difference is the advertising induced hallucination at work.

This is a very common trope about business, whenever a company fails the usual approach is to say "they did not keep up with the times" or some similarly platitudinous statement. The problem with these tautologies is that they ignore the bigger picture.
Suppose you consider the firm making horse carriages in 1900, by 1925 they are bankrupt. You say "they did not keep up with the times" or "its their fault" which is obviously true in a sense, but the cause of every business failure then boils down to identically "they did not keep up with the times" which is a hollow and meaningless answer.
The real problem for our buggy manufacturer is that the horseless carriage, which would be "keeping up with the times" is a fundamentally different product than what they make. It requires a knowledge of mechanics and electronics that our firm has zero experience with. Sure, they could fire most of the staff and hire an all new group of people with the right skills and get a different factory to produce these new goods, but then fundamentally its not the same organization, it only has the same name.
Companies are, on some level, organic and human enterprises with cultures, values, and social positioning that precludes rapid realignment, and any significant realignment is generally the end of that company in practice, if not in name. So while it is perhaps always true that a company "could have" or "should have" or "would have" worked if it had done X, I find that an uninteresting answer, because the real cause of failure for a successful enterprise is almost always a change in conditions exogenous to the firm.

This change can be one of simple technological shift, like the internal combustion engine displacing the horse, in which case we need not be too concerned with the destruction wrought.
However in the case of Sears, and similar firms, the cause is not technological but an economic shift caused by bad policies put in place over a period of time. This type of failure is one that is intrinsically worth understanding on its own terms, and blaming Sears because it did not transform itself into Walmart misses the point. Even if somehow it had, we would still end up with the same impacts.

I don't buy the IT explanation, Walmart was a leader in that, but it was a secondary consideration to their use of imported goods, low cost labor, and other race to the bottom tactics. In some respects, Sears was far ahead of Walmart, such as its very early e commerce work which was years ahead of the competition.

The 90's was not the time to save Sears, for anyone. Sears needed saving in the 40s, 50s, 60's, and 70's, and not in the boardroom in Illinois, but in the Capitol and White House in Washington, District of Columbia.

And I don't buy the "external conditions"  argument.

Just because a company doesn't have knowledge with a fundamentally different way of doing things doesn't mean one can't adapt and learn it. Plenty of companies have adapted to "changes in conditions exogenous to the firm."  See Disney for example.

You're last point is exactly the mentality Sears had in the 70s, it's everybody else's fault but ourselves. Regardless of the hand dealt to them by the powers that be in D.C, you adapt or die, and Sears didn't properly adapt when they should have in the 80s and 90s. You can't blame the "bigger picture"  for that. They could have made the transition from a mid-level retailer to an upscale discounter with hardlines a la Target (which was essentially what their Sears Grand concept was), but they didn't because they were too busy making excuses and doing side projects that were detrimental to the bottom line.

[thenetwork]

I had stumbled upon an article that said Kmart (whats left of it) just hit their 60th anniversary, and on the day of their 60th, their big news was Eddie Lampert announced was stepping down from his post.  Class act....NOT!

[kkt]

I had stumbled upon an article that said Kmart (whats left of it) just hit their 60th anniversary, and on the day of their 60th, their big news was Eddie Lampert announced was stepping down from his post.  Class act....NOT!

"It's dead, JIm."

[formulanone]

Phar-Mor - It was like a Walgreens on steroids.  So many health and beauty items, and a small music section in one corner among other things.  They didn't last very long in Nashville at all, with maybe two locations that were open less than a year.  Mismanagement was their downfall.

Phar-Mor was poised to be the next Wal-Mart, especially because they chose areas which didn't have them. The story goes that they expanded too quickly, but also funneling profits into a start-up minor league basketball league is one of the fastest ways to hemorrhage all sorts of resources.

In their heyday, they were stupid cheap and tough to resist if you had few brand loyalties.