Happened to be going through a box of my uncle's stuff a couple of weeks ago. There was a binder with a bunch of letters commemorating his 25th anniversary at Sears. He eventually retired with more than 40 years of service.

Sears was such a presence in the Chicago area, and even more so for my family because of the connection via my uncle.

Bit of a sad day for me....

quote:

After serving shoppers from around Chicagoland for decades, Illinois' last remaining Sears store is closing its doors for good this weekend.

The department store at Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg will close Sunday after 50 years at the popular suburban shopping center.

https://www.nbcchicago.com/new...er-50-years/2683502/

It appears that it’s not going to be Good, Better, or Best for Sears. I’ve been to the Sears Woodfield Mall store many times. The Woodfield store always seemed to have what other Sears stores were out of stock on. A few times, a sales person would look up an item that I was looking for on a computer, tell me that it was in stock at the Woodfield store and then I’d go there and buy it. Their auto service dept. was also very good for tires and batteries.

For those of you who've never seen a Sears catalog, Good, Better, and Best is how Sears frequently described items. Sears would show in a catalog, three different snow blowers for example. One would be labeled "Good", a second one would be labeled "Better", and a third one would be labeled "Best". Good would be the least expensive one and Best would be the most expensive one.

Sears used to be the best!

I was working on a project a couple weeks ago and my Craftsman heavy duty staple gun started spitting out oily chunks of black plastic from its insides. I think it dates from the 1980s.

There is exactly one Sears store left in the greater (and lesser) Seattle area. I am going to take the staple gun there and see if they will replace it under the Craftsman hand tool lifetime guarantee.

When I was in college (again, 1980s), I bought a nice Craftsman lawn rake. A couple years ago, the plastic comb finally disintegrated and the wooden handle was split in two places, held together with duct tape. I went to Sears to buy a new rake. I bought the current incarnation of the same one -- fiberglass handle instead of wood. The cashier said it has a lifetime warranty. I asked if that was always true for Craftsman yard tools. He said yes. I told him about my old one. He said to bring it back and they would give me for free the one I was buying. I needed to get home and finish raking stuff, but a few days later, I gathered up the pieces of the old one and the receipt from the new one, and went back to Sears. They refunded me the purchase price of the new one. That's how you keep a customer for life. Unfortunately, it looks like I will outlive Sears.


F--- Eddie Lampert.

And its corollary, pj. That's how you make stuff so you can offer a lifetime guarantee. It kills me, major appliances now last maybe a dozen years. We had to leave behind our Maytag washer/dryer when we moved. I miss it sooo much. The only repair we had to do was to replace ball bearings. The repairman was so excited he could fix it with his last set of compatible ball bearings. After those go (in, when, 2040?) then it probably will have to be tossed.

On the other hand, we're on our SECOND washer dryer since moving. Grrrrrr.

We’ve had our gas dryer for decades. Repair guy says hold onto it as long as possible because they don’t make them that way any more.

Must hav been very challenging that they didn’t plan the shutdown to occur after the Thanksgiving/Christmas shopping season.

The "good old days" really were the good old days in many ways.

Of course, for many years, Kenmore appliances were manufactured by any number of companies and were not "old time" reliable.

Say, do you remember when manufacturers prided themselves on their quality which went with their brand name? The days before the immediate step after purchase, was selling the extended warrantee?

I wonder if any "kids" today (40 and under, I guess) ever think of the irony of pushing the consumer towards a particular QUALITY make, seconds before pushing them to purchase an extended warrantee?

Why? Because those same salespeople, flipped to persuading the consumer the product was so unreliable they weren't safe without that extra expensive protection?
Quality control used to be real!

That was before somebody made the calculation that it was cheaper to forget checking quality so as to lower the price to beat the competition, and spend their savings paying out for the occasional injury or death.

(I'm always fascinated by those programs that compute the value of a human life - for example, comparing that projected lawsuit payout to the cost of, say, building a stronger safety rail protecting motorists from falling into a ravine.)

I happened to be at the mall where skeletal remains of the last Sears store is. What a freakin' depressing experience.

Apparently only one set of outside doors is open -- the ones closest to the pick-up desk. I had to go in through the interior mall entrance.

Once in, it took a bit to locate the hardware section. There were no lawnmowers or radial arm saws that could be seen from across the store. There were three ten-foot long "aisles" of shelves and racks. They were about half empty. What was there was a random selection of screwdrivers and socket wrenches, and some other tidbits... a lot of which were non-Sears brands.

It kinda looked like a church rummage sale at 3:00 on Sunday afternoon: pretty well picked-over.

They items on the racks were all locked down. The one employee available to unlock them was walking very very slowly.

I circled the entire section three times. Not a staple gun in sight. There was one box of off-brand staples. It was next to some string trimmer line and some sandpaper.

I didn't even try to ask the kid if they would make good on the warranty.

I just left.

I went to Harbor Freight and bought a heavy duty staple gun for $12.95.

I would have paid twice that for a Craftsman. Or at least for a Craftsman from my youth.


So depressing.