There’s quite a bit of traffic today predictions that Sears and Kmart are going under.
Interestingly enough, Walmart is not… despite, one might presume, being subject to the same Market forces.
Indeed, one would have thought that the transition from the world leader in mail order… a position Sears held for decades, to the internet would have been a breeze.
But of course Walmart and Amazon for that matter are beating them there as well.
There’s plenty of blame to go around. The union Stranglehold on the company didn’t help their positions any. Which by the way is one of the reasons that Walmart has been so staunchly anti-union and justifiably so. I’ve seen the inside of their distribution Network… A distribution center down near Philly, and I have to tell you if that place is an example of the way the company’s been run, my predictions of the day for the company’s demise were far too generous.
Taxes, government regulations, local government zoning ordinances, etc etc etc.
But at the bottom line the company’s poor choices are what really happend to them. Poor choices that cause them to be concentrating not on being innovators as they used to be but merely on survival. Any group, organization, country, culture, that concentrates nearly on Surviving and not thriving is going to do neither.
It is sad to see what happened to them but it’s not like we didn’t see it coming. The smell of death has been over the place for decades now. It’s just recently that they’re starting to acknowledge it themselves.
