10 brands that won't be around in 2012 from MSNBC article

[arbilab]

Last Kmart I was in (Austin TX), the inventory was incomplete and in constant disarray. Sizes and styles missing or mixed, where it was often impossible to find what you wanted. And chronically so. Virtually zero customer service.

That store, and all but one in Austin, closed in 1995.

I can't even remember the last time I was in a Sears. My first fulltime job was with Montgomery Wards, TV repairman in 1965. You probably know what happened to both that outlet and that 'career'.

Wonder is, that these iconic corporate models can and do fail, and even the last hangers-on don't seem to get it until the lights go out. Like Westinghouse, the company that invented electricity as it's used worldwide, went completely out of business in 1997. You can still license the name but there's no such thing as the brand. Same with RCA, Zenith, Maytag just to name 3. Brave new world.

 

[whirlcool]

K-Mart doesn't have any presence in the Houston area anymore, they closed all the stores. Sears isn't really a major player in the retail game here either. They have 10 locations. Two of those are Sears Hardware, two are Sears Hometown Dealer – Sears Home Appliance Showroom, and one is a very small and very old store. And two of the stores are in bad neighborhoods. Not a very big showing for the nations 4th largest city.

 

[arbilab]

From what a relative told me about Houston, EVERY neighborhood is a bad neighborhood. He lived in a sprawling $M ranch home but would not go outside after dark. Like Detroit with a much higher dewpoint.

 

[philr]

Sears opened a store in my hometown just a few years ago. Kmart closed a few years before in the same shopping mall and the one in my hometown (and many others) was replaced by a Zellers (owned by the Sears competitor here, The Bay).
The Bay has bought Kmart in Canada in the late nineties, closed some Kmart stores and renamed the others. Zellers got many ads on TV back then, there was one (in French) that I really liked because it featured one of my favorite appliances, a 1962 Frigidaire refrigerator!

 

[kqkenmore]

I am done with Kenmore I have a 900.00 dishwasher and it is crap it does not work now. Also because of this recent news I will only put a one year protection agreement on any thing from Sears. The one remaining K-Mart that is here sucks looks like a ghost town and  the staff is rude.I like the detergent I hope that it does not go away.

 

[tomturbomatic]

It seems strange that the Kenmore brand would exist without Sears. It was Sears' national coverage along with their service and credit that made Kenmore such a univeral (and very vanilla) brand. Their service is for shit now. Kenmore is not the only brand they sell now and you no longer see Whirlpool as more expensive than Kenmore like it used to be. So if Kenmore died with Sears, parent manufacturing company & widely known brand Whirlpool would continue, probably much as before. Gone are the days when big department stores held sway over the buying choices in cities and towns. Gone is the day when the local department store backed up their sales with their service fleet who could be depended on to provide good service. Big Box and appliance only stores account for a huge portion of the sales of appliances. Sears pioneered catalog sales, but the internet has replaced the catalog. Department stores where you could find almost anything are mostly gone. Sears owns a lot of real estate, much of it in undesireable locations. They are in their death throes.

 

[launderess]

Whomever Thought Up Sears Credit Out To Have Been Shot

Interest rates that *start* in the low twenties and go up to nearly 30% APR, you can get money from men whose names end in vowels in dark social clubs for less interest! *LOL*

Yet persons who purchase major appliances on Sears credit and or run up a balance seem not to care if only making the required minimum or just above will have paid more in interest than probably what the thing cost.

I only use my Sears card when I know I can pay the bill in full when it comes.

 

[tomturbomatic]

I remember signs for something called a "Revolving Charge" at Sears, but never bothered to find out what it meant. Before the days of credit cards existing and being offered in the mail, the ready availability of credit at Sears helped lots of people afford purchases when they simply did not have large amounts of money.

 

[cornutt]

Revolving charge

Tom, it was basically a credit card without the actual card. You could open an account with Sears and arranged to have certain items that you bought charged to your account. You had a monthly balance and you paid on it like a credit card account. IIRC only certain items in the store were eligible to be charged -- you couldn't charge clothing, for example.

There used to be finance companies that offered lines of credit to homeowners that worked sort of like credit cards. Household Finance Corp. (HFC) was a well known one in the Southeast. As I understood the process, you arranged with them to use your line of credit to purchase, say, an appliance. You went to the store and bought the item, and somehow it got charged to the finance company -- I'm not quite sure how that part worked. Then you made payments on the line of credit.

 

[tomturbomatic]

David, thanks. It made big ticket items affordable.

 

[MaytagA710]

Dept. Stores in Canada

It would be a shame to see Sears go, but here in Halifax/Dartmouth, we only have 3 Sears locations, and one isn't a "true" Sears, it's a Sears Home. All they do is sell appliances and furniture. The other two are doing very poorly, and one used to be attached to a mall that now doesn't exist. Has anyone ever noticed that once you play ball with Sears Credit, you get NON STOP CALLS from them asking to sign up for the card or what not!?

Petek, you're right. K Mart in Canada was a joke, their stores looked like a fancy version of a thrift store, stuff just thrown everywhere, and very dirty on the inside. Woolco was also, just as bad.

Eatons disappeared, and now The Bay seems to be slowly doing the same thing... No more Beaumark! Crap! They had attractive machines back in the 80s.

 

[whirlcool]

From what a relative told me about Houston, EVERY neighborhood is a bad neighborhood. He lived in a sprawling $M ranch home but would not go outside after dark. Like Detroit with a much higher dewpoint.

It never used to be like this. If you know where to look and have the $$$ to buy, there are still plenty of nice places to live in the Houston area. The bad areas are spreading out like mad, and where we used to live in Houston is now an area you wouldn't go to during daylight hours.

So we moved to the north suburbs of Houston. Still nice, but who knows for how long, the Gunspoint area is migrating this way.

 

[arbilab]

Dallas and Ft Worth neighborhoods I grew up in are now ghettoes. We barely bothered locking doors. Today you can't leave a lawn sprinkler out overnight.

Glad I'm old, won't have to tolerate much more of this 'progress'.

 

[alr2903]

If you look around anywhere there are lots of retail property's available.  Many commercial buildings are more of an albatross than a free standing home with an underwater mortgage.  There is a website called deadmalls.com  and its a good way to waste an hour of time.

http://deadmalls.com/

 

[arbilab]

There is an abandoned stripmall a half mile from me. It's not run down looking either, just empty. L-shaped, room for ~dozen merchants. One occupant, a cleaner on one end. Next half mile up is where Kroger is. It has vacancies too but more tenants than holes. Across the street from that is an abandoned Dollar store and an abandoned Kwik Car Oil Change which just closed this year.

This town is weird. Unlike Austin which had fast food every quarter mile, Euless has all the franchises but only one of each and all in one place, Main and State 183. Just as well I suppose, for my budget and my nutrition, it's inconvenient. Over a dozen stoplights away. I prefer to bring fast food home and eat as I always do, in front of TV. But over that distance/time it gets cold and can't all be microwaved.

 

[dogboy44]

they have both run there course. . .

Never liked Sears and considered it, and Kenmore both, an off brand. 

Whirlpool could lose Kenmore and we could all lose Sears and Kmart. 

Sears was always very plain and depressing.

GM in turn said good bye to Oldsmobile and Pontiac.

Their cars were coveted at one point, but what they offered towards the end was pretty lame.

 

We have lost much better stores than this.  What is surviving seems to be the bigger is better business model.

 

I do not like shopping in a giant stadium full of crap and prefer smaller more specialized stores.