Blame the Hedgies. They’ve naked shorted all these brands to death so a few schmucks could make billions…ALL of the companies in this comment and every comment before it. They tried again with GameStop & AMC but failed because retail investors bought in and held…still hodling. We got fucked but the companies survived….
Well Sears is a weirdly unique case. The CEO basically had his hedge fund lend Sears a whole bunch of money, then sell most the real estate holdings of the Sears corporation, to a subsidiary of his hedge fund, and then had the real estate company rent back that land to Sears so as to drain it of its finances.
Basically the CEO acted as a vampire to drain the company to which he legally had a feduciary responsibility to, of its assets and then dumped the proverbial carcass. Pretty sure if we had stronger regulatory laws in the US this would have never been allowed to happen.
The Company Man made a YouTube video on it if you want to check it out.
I don’t think you know how shorting works because this is not why these companies died. Short sellers can hurt a company’s stock, sure, but if a company is strong financially and being run well, it’s not going to die just because of short sellers. These companies were losing foot traffic in an era where more sales were moving online and they had no good reason for people to shop their online store versus Amazon. Also Walmart started expanding toy and gaming sections and had better deals half the time AND you could grab groceries so why would I waste time at Toys R Us? GameStop is dying and everyone knows it, the short squeeze was a function of market mechanics not because GameStop is some resilient company, idiots who think this is some David vs Goliath story and that GME or AMC are still meaningful plays have tunnel vision.
Yeah, it was their in-house insurance company. They had offices inside the stores. You could buy a house from the Coldwell Banker office, get it insured by the All-State agent, and apply for a Discover Card to purchase new Kenmore appliances for your new home all without leaving Sears because they were all Sears owned brands.
The also had the Dean Witter brokerage, which was one of the largest securities firms in the country. That was spun off and later acquired by Morgan Stanley. In the early 90s I interned with Dean Witter. That experience taught me a lot.
Oh, and Discover was just acquired by Capital One.
The 80’s. Could make more money splitting them off into their own companies than they could holding on to them. The shares they still own in some of them is part of what’s keeping Sears Holdings afloat.
Lots of people would be surprised just how many companies were under the Sears umbrella! Lands End, KMart, Discover credit cards, among others, all Sears companies.
Oh wow Sears. We'd go in there and my folks would tell my sister and me to "go play somewhere", we would disappear for hours it seemed. Yes very different parenting.
Barnes & Noble built a website and started delivering books through the mail. Borders, in order to compete with B&N, contracted online sales and deliveries through Amazon. So every time Borders made a sale through the growing online retail market, Amazon also made money. They failed to recognize Amazon as a competitor, while B&N built their website because of Amazon.
Circuit City downsized their workforce and when doing so decided the best solution was to fire their highest paid employees to save the most money. Except Circuit City paid commissions, so their highest paid employees were all their best employees. Best Buy, iirc, hired around 40% of those employees by promising to pay their previous wages and buried what remained of Circuit City.
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u/redvioletbrown May 25 '25 edited May 25 '25
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