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examancer | 7 years ago

I didn't know they sold homes. Kind of amazing. It's a surprising footnote in the tragedy of Sears.

The popular narrative of an out-of-touch company unable to compete with the likes of Amazon is false. The CEO is a hedge fund manager who pillaged the company, sold off it's best assets (sometimes to himself), loaded up the company with debt, and used it to pay himself millions.

http://prospect.org/article/it-was-vulture-capitalism-killed...

There is no good reason we are losing this company which has been the backbone of American commerce for over a century.

discuss

order

thaumasiotes|7 years ago

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-10-12/sears-has...

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-10-18/uber-driv...

> Over the years of propping Sears up, Lampert threw his own money into the effort, and his friends and supporters said this wasn’t only in self interest: He wanted to keep the lights on and people employed. He and ESL were willing to lend at much lower rates than others were demanding. He had Sears pay almost $2 billion into the unfunded pension plan in the past five years.

> The traditional story of financial engineering is that smart hedge-fund guys structure complicated transactions that enrich themselves at the expense of ordinary workers. But it’s at least possible that Sears is the opposite story, the story of a smart hedge-fund guy structuring complicated transactions that blew through his fortune to keep ordinary workers employed through a financial crisis. Of course that’s not mainly a matter of disinterested kindness: If he just wanted to give his money away to workers, he wouldn’t have needed the complicated transactions. It’s mostly just a gamble that didn’t pay off: He expected that the complicated transactions would help Sears to recover and make him even richer, but they didn’t.

> I genuinely don’t know what to make of Lampert and Sears. There is a version of the story in which he rapaciously extracted assets from Sears, enriching himself while starving the business, and another version in which he selflessly pumped money into the company to keep it afloat at his own expense. (“Although he has been criticized for selling Sears assets, spending on stock buybacks and collecting interest on loans to Sears, he said it is unlikely he will come out ahead financially on his long-running Sears bet,” notes the Journal.)

newnewpdro|7 years ago

You need to see one of the old Sears catalogs, the ones that were two+ inches thick and sold ploughs, wagons, blacksmithing tools, everything you could imagine of use to homesteaders. It's fascinating to flip through, excellent coffee table reading material.

walrus01|7 years ago

Shotguns, corsets, wagon wheels, pocket watches, derringers, medical apparatus, furniture, top hats, bowler hats, Masonic accessories, oil lamps, wood stoves.

wglb|7 years ago

Growing up in rural America, they were both a delight and a source of necessities.

busterarm|7 years ago

Or maybe don't get your facts from a publication that has a demonstrated strong bias by MBFC and frequently writes articles celebrating the return of socialism to the American political discourse.

Or, and this is their worst offense, maybe direct one that allows me to connect over SSL and doesn't 302 redirect HTTPS to HTTP. It's 2018.