Sears died because of Lampert, that's the beginning and end of the story. While they were far from perfect, post-Kmart "acquisition" both the service and stores became garbage and he used Sears as a personal slush fund.
Yeah this article does a great job of painting Lampert as heroically struggling against foes that turned out to be insurmountable, but there's a lot to suggest he was simply siphoning the wealth out of the company, with this being the final and inevitable result.
Couple of HN links with the opposite slant to this article:
So instead of investing in actually making Sears better (like Target and Walmart did), he thought it was a good idea to spent nearly all of Sears' cash reserves buying back its shares (at prices as high as $170)? Now shares are $0.33. Is he just an incompetent buffoon, or did this strategy line his pockets? For example, was he buying shares owned by ESL with Sears' money? If so, that's highly unethical. Seems par for the course with Wall Street.
I wonder if any company in a similar position has just done a total liquidation and turned over all cash as a one time super dividend. That seems like the honest and fair way of doing it. Though it's probably less lucrative than a debt-fueled stock buyback and dump strategy.
This seems like standard operating practice for vulture capitalists (Bain Capital) that swoop in and extract the value from the firm before discarding its debts and bankruptcies and moving on to the next firm.
I don't know about the rest of the country, but they had spent the last 2 years rebuilding their flagship store in Oak Brook Center west of Chicago. Last I was in the mall last fall, it was still under reconstruction.
This should be the top comment. Lampert's mismanagement has been thoroughly described, e.g. the Slate Money podcast from 20th October gives an overview.
Lampert took over in 2013, they were already going down hill by that point. Sears was taken over by bankrupt Kmart in 2004 and the combined company started losing money by 2010.
What are you talking about? Lampert was running K-Mart in 2004... his hedge fund acquired their assets when they went bankrupt. He immediately turned around and took loans against all of K-Mart's real estate to fund the acquisition of Sears.
Both Sears and K-Mart were crappy dumps 30 years ago. Not saying a competent manager couldn't have turned them around, but they've been on their way down for a long time.
I strongly disagree; 30 years ago, 1989. KMart had the popularity and store count in the SE that Walmart didn't. Sears was the top destination (and even still had its booming catalog business)
