threadkiller, I hope you are wrong (about Sears being doomed) but I fear you are right. Ever since Sears got bought by the idiot who bought KMart, he has royally screwed up both of them. Instead of having each “branch” continue to be itself, he has turned most of the good KMarts into those sad “Sears Essentials” stores, lame attempted hybrids of the two names which are as good as neither.
Meanwhile they/he is apparently sending the legendary Sears quality into the gutter. A couple of rentals ago I persuaded my landlady to get a new Sears stackable washer/dryer to replace the one the previous tenants had left infested with mold. After a couple of months the new washer started making a screeching sound during agitation cycle. The repairman came, opened it up, and found that a part which linked the motor shaft to the basket had fractured. He showed me the part– it looked crystalline inside, and he said it looked like it was made out of “pot metal.” However, he said, he had an old replacement one of that part in his truck– when he brought it in, it was a nice sturdy looking stamped part, and he put it in the washer.
He then went onto his handheld to call up the part he’d put in to order a replacement for his truck– guess what– that part # was discontinued. Only the “pot metal” version of the part was carried.
I used to love both the old Sears and the old Big KMarts. Each store did what it did very well. But if they cannot get rid of this idiot, micromanaging CEO they have now pretty quickly, I am afraid he is going to drive both names into the ground and they will go the way of Montgomery Ward. That would be a tragedy.
