SEARS GREAT FALL/AN OPINION

So Sears is in real trouble and is closing even more stores.  Any one that had a career with Sears and worked during the 70’s and the 80’s forward, saw this coming a long time ago.  The opinions expressed are my own, but I believe that they are the entrenched views of thousands of Sears associates, past and present.

Before judgments are made as to personal bitterness or career disappointment, let me state at the beginning of this narrative, that I have had a 36 year career with Sears, and it has both enriched me, rewarded me, and fulfilled me.  I loved experiencing personal growth and milestones, developing incredible friendships with valued mentors, friends and associates, and having the reward of an income to raise my children and support my family with enough leftover to retire comfortably.

But, I want to be definitive that my greatest joy in working for Sears, Roebuck, and CO. resided in the years 1969-1989, and again in 2000-2004.

My own career with Sears began in in 1969 as a part timer cutting up T.V. boxes on the back dock of the Paducah, KY retail store on 1500 Broadway. I did not know that it would turn into a career that would encompass the rest of my working years. When I returned from my Vietnam tour in 1969, of the many places I solicited for a job, Sears was the first willing to launch me into the civilian workforce. I was grateful for the opportunity then, beyond my words to express. I remain so today. Sears in Paducah, KY announced its closing from its current mall location shortly after Christmas 2016.

My tenure with Sears concluded in 2004 in an assignment that required me to fly to Chicago from my Columbia, S.C. home office to spend one week a month in business senior staff meetings. In 2004, right before the Kmart merger, we were experiencing yet another of many reorganizations I endured during the span of my time with Sears, and this one meant my field based responsibilities in the Southeastern United States and Puerto Rico, would now necessitate a relocation to Chicago.  And by that time, although my parent business within Sears was satisfying to me both professionally and financially, I wanted nothing less than to assimilate with the Sears corporate environment.  Because of my status at this time in my career coupled with my unwillingness to relocate, a “golden handshake package” was proffered that I felt offered a great opportunity to move on to the retirement stage of my life.

The greatness of Sears began with a merchant, a visionary in merchandising.  Its success and glory years were intertwined with proprietary brands, great merchants, regional marketing, distribution, and merchandising, local store management with discretion to use creativity and local initiative to drive sales, and long service employees and management personnel at every level that resulted in outstanding customer service.  Sales and customer footsteps were driven by the needs of the market and the customer base, and not by a centralized marketing organization in Chicago dictating assortment, advertising, and local inventories, those warehoused for distribution and store assortments as well.  The mantra became one less focused on the value of initiative and more defined by implementation of the centralized ideology and marketing plan.

If you did not drive sales and provide outstanding customer service during the years of local market dominance, your career would be short-lived.  As a sales associate, if you took care of the customer, worked well with others, took pride in your work and valued training to become a better customer advocate, you found yourself in the company of like-minded individuals that would become like a second family.

My early relationships from the sixties, seventies, and eighties, formed friendships and bonds that have lasted to this day.  Our Sears families were incredibly intertwined with our at home families.  We took lunch together and breaks together.  We met after work to plan Saturday morning skits for store pep rallies.  We played softball together, basketball together, and spent our off days fishing and hunting together.  We were all like-minded individuals, wanting Sears to succeed and seeing that success as something which we could affect, and was intricately interwoven with the ultimate success we could achieve for ourselves and families.  Sears wasn’t just a place to work...it was our careers.

The concept of career had different meanings for different people.  For some...those that viewed the local market as home and were not inclined to relocate for advancement….it meant full-time status, yearly salary increases based on performance, with full benefits and profit sharing for future retirement.  For others, it meant a chance for promotion to a commissioned sales environment, where chances for growing net household income was substantially enhanced.  For still others, it meant careers in local sales management.  Sales management contained many opportunities for advancement as well, the different categories of merchandising paying commensurate with the sales and profits the categories made to the local unit.  Making that local unit successful was every associate's goal, because that store’s success translated directly to their own financial rewards and career growth and sustainability.

For other associates, the concept of career meant achieving local success to the degree that it enhanced their opportunities for advancement beyond the walls of their store and defines of their local market to advanced checklist salaried opportunities in other markets and areas of expertise.  And then the endeavor was to succeed in those assignments as well, and to advance to the next opportunity in that or a new market or area of expertise.  

For those looking for careers in middle management, as store managers, store operation managers, in-store merchandising managers, etc. the goal was to wear as many of the “hats” as possible.   A typical advancement might mean a couple of moves to different sales volume retail stores as an in-store merchant in softlines, hardlines, or automotive, to an eventual assignment in store operations as the assistant store manager.  You may move a couple of times as an operation manager before, you hope, a chance as a small store manager.  And then you hoped for enough success to warrant another move to a bigger revenue market.  Beyond this, some hoped for opportunities at district, regional, or zone levels.

The point, I hope clearly positioned here, is that Sears was not viewed as a place to work...SEARS WAS A CAREER DESTINATION.

In 1989 Sears centralized the buying, marketing, assortment and inventory decisions, and logistics operations from the geographic Regions to Chicago.  Local markets no longer drove the sales impetus of the company, Chicago did. IF the markets could just implement their strategies, assortments, and marketing plans, everything would be great.  

Never did senior management accept any premise that their reorganization was at the root of the problem for the results that followed.  Failing sales and profits had to be because the field couldn’t implement their ideas and plans correctly.  The stores and district and regional teams that were now in charge of overseeing implementation had to be the problem.  Store managers, their management teams and associates had to be the problem.

So, since the mid-1990’s has come the idea from people in senior management with degrees of merit, but mostly not representative of the core of those of the tenured Sears Family institute of higher learning, that Sears Associates weren’t the solution for the company’s vision for S.V.A. (shared value added) on the bottom lines of the balance sheets.  It was, in fact, articulated that Sears people and culture were the roadblock to the vision.

Long term service, especially at store levels, no longer was a desired commodity.  A tremendous push came to hire from the outside from competitors and other industries to replace the core of the workforce.  To positions even as once viewed as sacred and earned as Store Management and District Merchandising levels, came the effort to recruit from the outside and replace as many of our long serviced Sears personnel as possible.  With new faces, we were told, would come new ideas.

As an example which I believe is pretty typical for service for my time of employment, I wore 6 “hats”, or achieved 6 levels of advancement, over seven years in my initial retail store.  On my advancement to my first checklist position in another market as an In-Store-Merchant, I spent three years learning the nuances to succeed at the next level.  At that next level of In-Store-Merchandising in a new market, I spent almost another four years honing my craft and expertise.  Then came almost five years as the Regional Merchandise Manager for South Florida and Puerto Rico for several merchandise categories, followed by another four years after the 1989 reorganization, in South Carolina as District Merchandising Manager for parts of four states.  Then, it was determined that my resume was complete enough, had enough background and experience, to assume responsibility of Store Management for my first retail store. It had been 25 years. I had a footlocker full of "hats".

I loved the people and the management team that I led in my Retail Store Management years in Columbia, S.C. during the mid to late 1990's. It was a large showroom, with about 110,000 square feet of retail space presented over two merchandising floors. It also had tremendous perimeters of office and stock rooms, about another 65,000 square feet if I recall correctly.

But, I regretted the environment that the sales management and support teams and associates suffered preparing for and during Senior Level store visits. Most Regional Merchants were helpful, as was the Regional Manager, but they had their marching orders, too. Perfect implementation, signing, display, presentation, stocking, inventory results, and old merchandise liquidation were the focus of store visits. Sales of service agreements were on every visiting manager's agenda to review for the appliance associates and appliance sales manager....without fail.

From a more sparse and less tenured sales force, even more was expected. There was a time when visits from these levels celebrated sales and success and championed the store teams. But, now they had their checklists, the checklists were what was important, and the visits were more like audits. Passing was everything.

By the mid-to-late 1990’s it was determined that Store Management-- earned through the corporate career ladder-- was no longer a desired commodity or requirement, that we should just recruit new blood from the outside, and were assured this would re energize the culture, sagging sales and profits.  A young person with a couple of years managing an Auto-Zone became more desirable as the new typical Sears Store Manager. They were often preferred over the Sears career manager that had worn all the hats in exemplary fashion to earn the position, was personally vested and invested from toes to nose, driven sales and profits at every stop, honed their leadership and people skills in multiple work environs, and relocated their family as often as the company required, to practice their craft. It was a disaster leading to an inevitable path of further decline.

It was likewise determined that the full-timer in the hardware department was too expensive and a liability to the visions of the new regime in Chicago. Where a customer, developing relationships with a store hardware associate over a number of years, could once depend on a visit to the store to get an explanation of how to use a power or hand tool and could get that information from someone who had actually used it...now found a part-time junior college student….who could not only be unable to tell the customer how to use it…. didn’t know what it was or where it was located in the hardware department.  Training became far less an imperative. Why should it be? The new associate work force wasn't here for a career. They would move on in short order.

Minimum wage vs that more expensive full-timer?  This was short-sighted vision at its worst.  Other than its whole house and brand share, Sears had no more valuable asset than its long service associates, entrenched in the doctrines of product knowledge and outstanding customer service, vested in making the store and company a success.

And so, then, Sears began its freefall in earnest.  Short term, in-store payroll costs declined, but so did customer service and sales.  New outside hires in management found the workplace demands and expectations unreasonable and in rapid and predictable intervals of time, they too, were moving on to other opportunities with other employers...they had no investment in the long-term success of Sears, so why should they stick around for the obvious demise?  In came another wave of even less trained, skilled, and non-Sears cultured management hopefuls with even less of an idea of what it took to run a team of managers and associates in a retail store, evaluate and trouble-shoot a P&L, and champion sales and high levels of customer service.

Before my retirement in 2004, I realized my last assignment, in senior management, in a newer branch of the company with Sears Hometown stores.  These were hardline oriented stores locally owned, but merchandised with Sears brands both proprietary and open-market, and supported by corporate national marketing campaigns. I was manager for 165 stores comprising the Southeast United States and Puerto Rico, with 10 districts and District Manager teams.  Most all the District Managers were warriors for sales, most all were merchants. They had worn all the hats. I had total accountability for a substantial portion of a 1.2 billion dollar balance sheet.

As much as I enjoyed this assignment, one that I hoped would provide new impetus for the mother-ship proper, I was even more more thrilled to get refuge from the Corporate Retail expectations for a corporate main stream retail store, from the demands and expectations of the centralized headquarters organization.  I was sick to the bone of top-down management and the eroded value placed upon the field for creativity, market needs, and feedback from the ground floor on what they needed to drive sales.  I was sick of the operators taking charge at the bridge of the mother-ship, at every level, bemoaning the field’s poor implementation of merchandising direction and lack of expertise, and our weak operational disciplines on local P&L’s.

I spent almost four years in this last assignment and I confess to tremendous enjoyment in an environment where merchants were as  appreciated as operators.  Hometown stores experienced tremendous growth in sales and profits in a culture of merchants where creativity and value-adding were coveted commodities by the business Senior Management team; a team to which I was fortunate to be a member.  Of course, local ownership of the stores also meant someone was once again vested in achieving results.

As much as I bemoan the circumstances that resulted in Sears becoming a retail concern more focused on selling what they wanted to sell, versus what the customer wants to buy….what items they make the most profit on versus those driving foot traffic and transactions….an organization of centralized control versus local market driven….transient and untrained associates versus the Sears family environment in which I was nurtured and grew….as much as the circumstance and fate of the organization is as dire as it is today….it hurts me to the core that it could not avoid this fate.

Today, proprietary brands that once made the organization elite, now are auctioned off to the highest bidder.  Clothing assortments and styles are a laughing stock to not only the industry, but by the consumer base.  Store category assortments stand for nothing, are incomplete, and offer no incentive for shopping frequency.  Advertising in local newsprint is deemed too expensive and circulars inserted and market driven are infrequent if non-existent; this is an antiquated concept in today's retail environment.  And with rare exception, I defy you to find someone to talk to in the stores, much less have the product knowledge you need to make a buying decision.

I am both saddened and embarrassed that it has come to this.  “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”  And, as underlings, helpless to reject the poor vision and leadership of the select few that were inopportunely chosen to lead us.

My time in military service taught me a couple of things about about soldiers in the field: if they have experience and are well-trained, morale and well-being nurtured, and have the weapons and ammunition they deserve, they will succeed more often than not. If they do not succeed, it will not be because the effort wasn't satisfactorily expended or the tactics employed...it will be because of poor strategy and logistical support provided by those that plan the battles and war. I believe the analogy applies to Sears unfortunate demise. This, like all of the other thoughts I have placed in this graphic form, are, I repeat, just the opinion of a grizzled, well-traveled veteran of the Sears experience, from the box-cutter to the corporate "executive".

I do not want to devalue the reality of tremendous competitor growth linked to declined corporate performance and loss of market share during the years of my employment, nor the many new shopping alternatives available to our targeted customer base, such as on-line purchasing and cyclic shifts away from malls to free-standing outlets. But, I hope I have positioned my view of our poor strategy in response to it. We used the employee-centric vernacular "Sears, a compelling place to shop and work" in its many forms throughout the years. We became neither.

Alan Lacy may have finished us off. But poor leadership made it possible.

I could have written this opinion using demographics (who was our customer?), market analysis including changing competition and consumer buying patterns and our response to it, infrastructure, merchandise assortments, Shareholder Value Added, and the further extrapolation of balance sheets ad nauseam. I didn’t want this to be that. That has been done already by people much more qualified in that area of expertise. I wanted this to be an opinion of someone that went through all the changes and restructures and position changes and witnessed first hand the effects of senior management direction on the associates, customers, and culture of Sears. It is an opinion.  But I guarantee that it is one shared by thousands of past Sears field associates.

I once was employed and a valued member of the largest and most successful retailer in the world during its glory years.  It’ll have to do.

Rest in peace, Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck. Pompous men sporting fancy degrees but of poor vision have undone your legacies. All have been well compensated for doing so. Needless to say, they were not of merchant stock.

copyright by the author, Keith Wayne Ragan,
1/24/2017