Sears recently announced it’s looking for holdings to sell, from Land’s End to store locations, as it tries to cut its losses. Poor old clueless, ancient, irrelevant Sears.
One of the first business articles I ever wrote was about the rise and fall of A&P. It had been, for decades, the country’s biggest retailer.
But, as we’ve learned over the decades about retailing, size does matter. Big, successful organizations get deluded by their success. They forgot how innovative they once had to be. They get tangled up in executive suite infighting about silly personal matters and take their eye completely off the ball.
Soon, someone else – someone more innovative, someone who has figured out the new national mood – hurdles over them and becomes the new Number One.
In the 60s, that streamlined, innovative retailer was Sears, Roebuck & Co. Sears anticipated the suburbs. Sears became the first mass merchandiser. Sears mastered the art of private brands. Sears understood the need for parking. Sears pioneered credit cards.
Sears made stores families liked to shop in: spotless clean, wide aisles, good lighting, merchandise you could touch and play with. Sears built a brand on proud customer service, a battalion of red vests who patrolled the stores looking for somebody they could help. Sears mastered the nearly impossible co-joining of good quality and low price.
“I got it at Sears,” meant you were a smart shopper, not a bottom-feeder, and that the item would likely survive a nuclear winter – whether it was a TV or an electric drill or a winter jacket.
However – surprise, surprise – the ground shifted under Sears, as well. Those suburban locations proved to be liabilities as the population moved further and further out. The private brands continued to work well in appliances and hardware, but less well in soft goods, which meant women no longer liked to shop there. The battalion of red vests thinned out. And, worst of all, those clean, bright stores became dim, poorly maintained and feeling old – the same problem, by the way, A&P encountered as its empire crumbled.
Kmart, which was all about pricing and selection, had a brief run as the new Number One, but the rise of the category killers in the 90s began to spell Kmart’s doom.
Each of these retail leaders became too big to continue paying attention to detail. Like a glacier, Walmart came rolling down from its rural hillsides to devastate everything in its past.
This fall, I took a train ride that went by Glacier National Park. “Look fast,” an onboard guide told us, pointing to a spot of white in the far distance. “That’s the last glacier left.”
Now Amazon is the new glacier. But even glaciers have to adapt to a new climate – no matter how big they get.
As a journalist, writer, editor and commentator, Steve Kaufman has been watching the store design industry for 20 years, as editor of both DDI and VMSD magazines. He has seen the business cycle through retailtainment, minimalism, category killers, big boxes, pop-ups, custom stores, global roll-outs, international sourcing, interactive kiosks, the emergence of China, the various definitions of “branding” and Amazon.com. He has reported on the rise of brand concept shops, the demise of brand concept shops and the resurgence of brand concept shops. He has been an eyewitness to the reality that nothing stays the same, except the retailer-shopper relationship.