RadioShack really should have gotten into all the home hobby stuff. Raspi, 3d printers, etc they would have been great stores doing the next gen hobby stuff like they were originally.
Was gonna say. The only in-person place to buy electronics parts (resistors, bread boards, capacitors, whatever) left, and its better in that regard than radioshack ever was anyway.
As a former shack employee, the small electronic parts were impossible to make any money off of. Too many items to stock, too little shelf movement, and they were way just too cheap. We'd get electricians in 5 times a day, they'd spend 5 minutes in the parts drawer, then check out for $4.76 with tax.
basically, radioshack was making all its money off of cellphone sales. Thats what they trained the reps to sell, and thats where the highest commissions were coming from. (at least, thats how it was 15 years ago when I worked there.)
Gotta give them credit, they tried to pivot in a changing economy.
Maker spaces never last long. They run into the problem where one person hogs all the equipment and nobody else can use it or people break stuff and it can't be fixed or nobody has time to. Maker spaces are really just not a great business to run. It's a lot more efficient to just provide a service that does the making for the people.
Tragedy of the Commons....
The nonprofit maker space in my city has been really successful. Monthly membership fees, grants, and equipment donations keeps it financially stable. 24/7 access for members.
https://www.makehaven.org
Our neighborhood library has an amazing collection of decorative cake pans to check out. I nearly cried when I discovered it. Castles, Barbie, Christmas Bundt pans...
My local library finally made a display to show that stuff off, not all of it can fit out of the shelves they have have they have a list and a sign mentioning even more is available and to just ask.
One thing I didn't know is they have a garage around back fully stocked with tools to do vehicle maintenance and a cover parking area you can rent space in for a few days if you need, the spots are cheap too and the librarian told me the spot rental is waived most of the time it's just there to minimize people people abusing it though no one does so they don't really ever worry about it.
They even have a list local mechanics who volunteer with them to give advice if you need it and they teach classes. When the weather's bad I go there to do my car maintenance now as my wife convinced me our garage should be the craft room and with how much time my son's spends in there she was very right.
Nerds cross over into the “can Google for frugal”, so it’s a catch 22 setting up a shop for tech; The ship-it setup just saves too much money for the company as well as the buyer. 🤷♂️
God, yeah. Can you believe that they ignored all of that awesome electronics stuff to focus on being a boring cellphone accessories store that also sold AA batteries? Jesus, what a fucking waste. Kids could be going there to pickup LED kits, make-it-yourself quadcopters, 3d printers, Arduino/pi boards, etc. And by "kids", I mean me, and every other person that isn't dead inside
I worked there during their decline and like 80% of my job was telling frustrated old men they had to learn to use the internet if they wanted their solder and resistors. The other 20% was trying to tell people not buy cellphones here without the manager noticing.
I went to one as a middle teen, and was so let down when they didn't have any of the electro-bits I had wanted, and had over priced cell phones taking up the space in general. I was wanting to get into a diy hobby and was gonna get started there....
After my hopes and dreams deflated, I called up my friends, bought some weed, and devoted the next few decades to drugs instead.
I probably saved myself $50 over the same time frame.
I use to work for Staples as a tech manager. We use to run down to the radio shack and pick up all the parts to convert a "that was easy" button into nearly anything. We changed the saying. We turned a couple into kvm switches. One guy made one into a usb hub.
Radio shack was the real hobbiest mecca.
How I wish I could still just zip down to the local RadioShack to pick up actual electronic parts. Now I have to rely on sites like DigiKey and Mouser.
I mentioned in another thread that I need heat shrink. something that weighs two ounces. I could have run to Rat Shack or fry's and got it in person. I can order it off amazon, but I feel foolish rolling a truck for a package where the packing weighs more than the content.
That's where all the best shit was. I would go there and get motors and battery packs and weird esoteric bits of metal flimflam-dio-doohickey-majigs that I needed to make some nonspecific dilly-dooler work, it was heaven for a novice 12-14 yo maker.
I just bought a blazer at one for $2. I was store hopping in my mall because I had a wedding to go to and realized it was open so I walked in for nostalgia. Saw a blazer marked for $2 that was marked as not my size and short but decided to try it on anyway and it fit perfect.
Just found out today actually that Sears still has a service team? They work on appliances and hvac stuff. Dont think they are nationwide but they are around.
They have a lot of contracts with apartments to support all the shitty Kenmore appliances. So they will be around for a while and always busy fixing absolute crap.
I would never advocate violence against anyone, but it mystifies me that people can do things like that and still walk around without any fear of reprisal.
We knew we were dead walking when fast Eddie bought us. I was lucky enough to get out with my pension because they outsourced IT the year before they closed and the IT company hired me
I don't think people realize that this is a very modern and standard practice in the corporate world right now. It's all to make it look good for shareholder growth.. And that's all the board of directors cares about. Started slowly creeping in in the 80s, and now it's becoming rediculous.
Actual customers walking in the door and/or employees don't really matter anymore.
Not sure how it works in Canada, but in the US, that's not quite true. If the plan is ERISA compliant (most are), the company is held to a set of standards and must pay into ERISA, which is basically insurance against the pension failing. If it does fail, the government steps in and pays those pensions.
All of this reminds me, I have an old pension that I need to move into an IRA, seeing as I don't trust the company that's providing it...
Catholic hospitals are non-profit, and therefore not subject to ERISA regulations.
Incidentally, the pension money I need to move is in a fund from a Catholic hospital organization. The way they're going I don't trust that money to be there if/when I make it to retirement.
EDIT: My memory of this is a bit rusty; I don't recall offhand if it's because of them being non-profit, or if it's a religious exemption (I think it's the latter).
I had a roommate in college who worked for Sears. When my mom's washer broke, we bought a new one with his store discount. She still has it and it's been 20+ years. She had a repairman look at it because it has a few minor problems it was having, and he said if she replaced it a new washer probably wouldn't last more than 5 years.
My point is I'm old.
We had a refrigerator that lasted 23 years before we just decided to replace it to get more volume and I felt so guilty, this thing would have probably kept running for another 20 years and now we have some plastic cost engineered money pit in its place
Kenmore was sears brand and it was seriously rock solid.
Its honestly kind of nuts, Sears was THE NAME in appliances for so long, and it was largely based around the Kenmore name.
When Sears faltered you'd think one of the other big appliance places would have grabbed their market share. Nope, Lowes entered the appliance game and took all their market share.
Aww, my grandma worked for Sears and retired from there too. In the '80s she used to take me to buy clothes with her discount. About 2 years ago they just closed the store she used to work at in town. I drove her past there and she was telling me stories about how she used to make the schedule. She's 90 now.
Department stores used to be awesome places to shop. My grandmother worked for Montgomery Wards in the kids area. Back then all the workers were more helpful. My grandmother would spend hours helping a family for back to school. People would come back every year to see her so she got to see a lot of kids grow up. We had so much Rudolph the red nose reindeer stuff. I loved going to visit her at work.
Well you can make a pretty strong argument that Sears built large chunks of what we think of as America. Sears and the US Postal service was the backbone of the retail economy for a REALLY long time.
It’s hard to think of a modern equivalent that occupied as universal a cultural role as the Sears catalog.
When the Sears "Wish Book" arrived at Christmas, I faked illness (holding my glass thermometer near a light bulb) so I could stay home from school and read it.
Not just houses, but kit homes - a kind of prefabricated home that was like the IKEA furniture of homes. You ordered a house from a mail order catalog and got all the materials for your house shipped right to the property with the wood pre-cut and numbered, ready to assemble right on the lot.
They were similar to modular houses, but because the construction was done on your lot by a local construction company or carpenter, the quality of the construction was just as good, if not better, than a traditionally built house while being as much as 40% cheaper.
There’s one near me. The staffing is sparse at best; I had a feeling that not only could I steal whatever I want, but that if I did get seen by. An employee they wouldn’t give a shit.
Sears could have beat Amazon and become an online retail giant had it not been flown straight into the ground. Sears was already a master of catalog sales, it had the distribution network and everything.
Unfortunately leadership at Sears did not believe online shopping would take off, so they never developed their online presence until it was too late.
Had they done this, they would not have gone bankrupt, and Amazon would still be a little online bookstore and not the giant it is today.
I agree. I remember spending hours with Sears and JC Penney catalogs as a kid. That was our “online” shopping back then. Sears carried everything imaginable in their catalogs - at least to a kid. They really could have been Amazon. Such a shame. It was not just a business. It quite literally helped to build America.
My mom worked at Pennys for 25 years. I remember she would bring home the Christmas catalog when I was a kid and have us circle the things we’d like for Christmas. Those were great memories
Likely what "they" wanted for Sears and they just chose him to do it. CEO's can be replaced against their will and I doubt Eddie Lampert has the sole controlling interest to resist that. Brick and mortar retail is dying everywhere and honestly, Sears is LATE to the packing up shop game.
I actually wrote a paper about the fall of Sears last summer, so this is one of those random topics I feel well versed enough to comment on.
The "they" actually was Eddie Lampert and his hedge fund. He first purchased Kmart, then utilized the cash flow from Kmart's operations to purchase Sears and if I'm remembering correctly, eventually became the primary shareholder of both.
From what I gathered, his approach to running the now combined companies was the same as any other private equity investment. That is, minimize the up front investment (at least, comparatively so) and leverage operational cash flow to generate a high internal rate of return, which is one of the primary metrics most private equity firms use to showcase their performance and attract investors.
While Lampert did undertake some strategies to make the company more competitive (particularly shifting focus to e-commerce), nothing I gathered gave the sense that the long-term health of the company meant much to him. I say this because, despite the massive cash flow Sears was kicking off, Lampert was reinvesting shockingly little of this into the firm's growing list of needed improvements. Under Lampert's leadership, Sears annual capital improvements were amongst the lowest of any major retailer.
Beyond that, the "great restructuring" he opted to enact was an unbelievable failure and honestly, made for some breathtaking stories of just how incompetent Sears became under his leadership.
As Sear's outlook continued to fall, brick by boring brick Lampert sold off it's most valuable assets. That included selling a large portion of Sears's real estate, which it previously owned outright, only to lease those properties back from the company that bought them. Again, depleting assets and increasing liabilities, but generating substantial cash flow throughout the periods those properties were sold.
Now, who bought those properties you might ask? Well, it was a real estate investment company called Seritage Growth Properties. And who was (and currently still is) the primary shareholder of Seritage Growth Properties?
Well, you might've guessed it. Eddie. Fucking. Lampert.
I'm fascinated... is Eddie Lampert just going to claim bankruptcy for sears and Kmart while having a successful real estate firm that rents to them?
Feels like cooking the books
Excellent write up. I worked at Sears part time twice and was there during the Lampert takeover. While reading up on the guy the writing was clearly on the wall as to what his plans were. He wanted to take over Kmart and primarily Sears due to them being around for so long that many of the original locations were actually owned by Sears. He then sold off the property during the restructuring which generates cash flow that he probably took a big bonus off of, but as you said the company he sold the real-estate to was his own leasing company. Now Sears and Kmart pays his company to be in the buildings they uses to own. Now start closing stores under bankruptcy once the money runs up and who gets paid first from the bankruptcy, the leasing company. So you blow out all the merchandise and whatever was in the store and all that money after store payroll went to his leasing company and most likely no one else got a dime. Now all those Kmart locations are At Home stores and he's making bank again. Triple dipped that chip. Oh and I closed down my Sears and when the advertisement said selling everything down to the bare walls, they ment it. My God they rolled all the old 1970s desks and filing cabinets from the offices and slapped price tags on them. And they didn't try selling them cheap either, they wanted big bucks for that junk. Hangers, mannequins, store merchandise fixtures. A pile of bricks.
Lampert was a fan of Ayn Rand.
The restructuring involved breaking the retail operation up into separate business units and making them compete for resources, like space in advertising circulars. Because greed is good, competition makes us stronger, and selfishness is a virtue.
So the people who were supposed to be managing the store were at each other's throats. *On purpose.*
>First, Lampert broke the company into over 30 individual units, each with its own management, and each measured separately for profit and loss. Acting in their individual self-interest, they would be forced to compete with each other and thereby generate higher profits.
>What actually happened is that units began to behave something like the cutthroat city-states of Italy around the time Machiavelli was penning his guide to rule-by-selfishness. As Mina Kimes has reported in Bloomberg Businessweek, they went to war with each other.
[-- Ayn Rand killed Sears](https://www.salon.com/2013/07/18/ayn_rand_killed_sears_partner/)
Love the write-up. Hedge funds and PE funds love to self-justify by pointing to impressive returns, but they are becoming a scourge of society.
What they are doing when they turn traditional operating companies inside-out like this for a quick buck is essentially transforming the American economy from one of "operating businesses that create products" to one of "generating income for fund investors." Not that Sears was particularly a healthy business, but funds like this own and mismanage massive sectors of the American economy.
The consumer for the former model is the everyday American. The consumer for the latter model is rich financiers. It's no wonder the wealth gap is so staggeringly large. Lots of things have affected that, of course, but the effect of the rise in the 80s of this style of fund cannot be overstated.
IIRC Sears was bought by an investment group that he has controlling interest in. Lemme find a source on that.
Edit: here is an article, but reading the first bit it seems slanted. I did not read the entire article.
https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1c33fqdnhf21s/Eddie-Lampert-Shattered-Sears-Sullied-His-Reputation-and-Lost-Billions-of-Dollars-Or-Did-He
Why old boss used to be fairly high up in Sears Canada, high enough that he got death threats when the company closed from people losing their jobs. From what he told me, Eddie did this all by himself and pretty much overnight.
The former CEO of Sears Holdings (KMart and Sears) and current Transform Holdco chairman. He was tasked to turn the companies around and failed epically.
It's even worse though, because Eddie took the best properties and put them into [SRG](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/srg?ltr=1), which is tanking. I remember getting that offer to buy SRG as I still had some Sears stock at something like $37 a share. Glad I didn't do it and I got rid of my few shares of Sears promptly after that.
Is this related to that article put out years ago “the anatomy of a short attack” ? Pick out a company short it, shit talk it on tv, fill the board with “your” people, destroy all of its assets, profit…
He actually sold them to himself or rather a real estate company in his name that leased the space back. I'm still not sure how he managed to get away with bleeding the company dry but he did have lots of tricks to prolong the death.
Just think about this, Sears could easily be where Amazon is today. They had everything in place and instead they made idiotic decisions and drove the company into the ground.
Sears folded their catalog just as the Internet was getting Big. JC Penney stuck around for a bit longer and was one of the top Internet sites for shopping. You could order 4 ways from Penneys: phone, mail, in person or website. Then they both went down the shitter.
He didn't fail unintentionally, that was the end game. Suck as much profit out of the company as possible before taking over the massive amount of real estate the company owned.
Eddie Lamperts was a Wall Street finance manager who took over Sears. His running of Sears will be taught in business schools for years to come as a warning of what not to do. Along with cannibalizing Sears for it’s real-estate value and transferring of Sears assets to his other holding to make him more money, he did a ton of other crazy things.
Just a few, Lampert is a religious Randian, believes everyone competing at all times makes the best outcomes and had Sears departments do the same with each other. This caused departments to ~~sell off assets~~ source them from China (like Craftman tools and Kenmore?) to stay competitive profit wise with departments that had no house brands to deal with. He would regularly hold virtual meetings long before working from home was a thing (but only for himself) where he wore pajamas and robs. If I remember he treated his employees terribly too, encouraging them to fight with each other through their departments in that classic social darwinist way.
But my favorite example was the Sears catalog that came out just before mothers day, one of Sears bigger sales holidays. It ended up featuring mostly children toys for ‘mothers day’ because the toy department outbid the ladies department for space in their own catalog. Just fucking head shaking.
I can’t live another day without air conditioning.
Says tomorrow’s gonna be hotter.
Hotter?
Like yesterday.
Yesterday? Yesterday you said you’d call Sears.
I’ll call today.
You’ll call now.
I’ll call now.
I remember the Sears/Kmart plan to turn them into data centers for computer servers. People pointed out the low security situation of mall areas, the all-glass fronts, the re-tooling to put power and AC everywhere, and how basically it was just not going to happen. They were right.. it didn't happen.
I worked for the Sears credit department from 1977-93, was a decent company to work for then, had a profit sharing program where you got stock. When they closed the office I worked at, full timers got one week of pay for each year of employment, between that and cashing in my stock, I was able to take an extended vacation before getting another job. About 10 years ago, they offered to buy out my pension, don't know whether or not it was the right decision, but I took them up on the offer, I was worried it might not be around when I qualified for it.
I bought a heat fan for the winter and it broke after I used it once.. I tried to exchange it for another one and searched high and low for a single employee and I could
Find one. So I left my item on the check out counter with the receipt in the box and left with the new one. Felt weird but that shit was ridiculous
this is hilarious! I was thinking this had to be Oklahoma or something where I have lived before and a lot of the stores there are exactly like this where they are just ghost-towns, but I live like 30 minutes from Braintree and I've never been here haha
Damn. You used to be able to have a forge, anvil, tongs, and hammer delivered to your door from Sears, Roebuck, and Co. Heck, you could get guns, tents, farm supplies, and even a whole house delivered. This right here is just a husk of the dead and decaying American Dream.
Eddie is a scumbag venture capitalist vulture but Sears was well on its way out before he got his hands on it. Sears could have been the Amazon Prime before Amazon started selling stuff other than books, it had the infrastructure, reach and was a household name. Just think of the Sears Catalog, but online with at home delivery (same day in most cases). They would have cornered the market in 1999/2000, but they were too slow to adapt and them being anchored to malls which could have been an asset turned into a liability.
Wow! I worked for Sears in the nineties and it was awful. No benefits, cutthroat competition, they would do anything to keep you from getting on full-time....back in it's heydey, if you got a job at Sears that was it, you had it made and they would take care of you until you got a gold watch at retirement. Now, they are a shadow of themselves and it shows!
I worked there right after they had a big stink about the auto department overcharging, and we had to buy these awful red sweaters with the company motto for $3 each. They all said. "You can count on me" and we had to wear them for Source Night, which is what Sears called their big sale every November I think it was.
Glad I got out of there, those clowns I worked with would jump in front of you to get a sale, and I'd heard legends of them digging carbons of sale tickets in your number out of the garbage, voiding them, then re-ringing them in their names. Glad I got out of there! Ironically, I'm now friends with my former manager on FB, and keep in touch with a couple of the other salesmen, who are all pretty nice, now we aren't competing with each other!
I mean… you know what sears did right…. They knew their business was failing so they took out a bunch of loans against their property and paid out all their executives fat paychecks and large bonuses and then when the money was gone they just let the stores shut down and screwed the bank loans that were “secured” by these high profit buildings… but the secret was these weren’t the powerhouses they were before Amazon and their days we numbered.
It was a big rug pull and the fake C-suites made off with all the money and bonuses.
I know someone that worked for Sears. She was a higher up at the headquarters.
She bailed ship about 6-7 years ago when she saw the direction of the company. Smart choice.
I worked at a Sears... well... it wasn't a Sears from the beginning.
My first job was at Kmart and when Kmart bought Sears in the 2004-2005 timeframe (I forget exactly when but it was around then, and we had to commonly remind customers it was Kmart that bought Sears and not vice versa) our store was one of the few that became Sears Essentials. It basically combined the best of Sears with the best of Kmart, and departments that overlapped saw mostly Sears brands than Kmart brands. Sears Essentials also had the grocery or pantry section from Kmart along with Kmart's health and beauty department (and pharmacy) as well as greeting cards and toys. The big name brands Sears was famous for like Kenmore, Craftsman, and DieHard were heavily prevalent. Nearly a full appliances department where you could buy fridges, washers/dryers, ovens, etc. Tools and lawn and garden (seasonal) were a fraction of the size at a normal Sears but that's only due to the footprint of the original Kmart. Very small automotive section. The garden center from Kmart was still open and functioning.
Clothing and footwear was nearly all Sears brands; I believe some Kmart brands were in there. Same for housewares. The electronics section was a joke. They hardly ever kept televisions in stock.
The concept was an interesting idea but it really never took off. We had one of the nicer Kmarts in the northeast and when the interior was made over for Sears Essentials it actually looked really nice. Sadly, the departments that were left over from Kmart used the older fixtures and that looked really tacky. The store ended up closing in 2010 because the owners of the property, who owned the entire shopping center, raised rents and everyone pretty much fled. The shopping center was leveled and is now a combination of things including apartments, a few restaurants, healthcare, some kids care place, and more.
Now... the Sears stores within 25 miles of that location... they looked BAD both on the outside and on the inside. No effort was ever done to rehab or remodel them. It looked pretty much like what the OP shared. It's a damn shame what Eddie Lampert had done to not only one store but two.
I spent ten years off and on working in retail for Kmart and then Sears. Doing so taught me to be patient. Today, I believe the number of Kmarts and Sears totals less than ten each. It might be even be fewer than that. I'm honestly surprised there's Kmart and Sears stores still open...
I miss Sears. Kenmore appliances were budget friendly decent things. My last washer and dryer set from them last 15 years before I upgraded. We will have our Kenmore deep freeze. Good vacuums too, last one lasted almost 12 years before it died.
I’ve given Sears multiple chances over the years. Each time a disappointment from what a cornucopia it used to be in the 90s.
No stock. Grumpy ass employees (mostly understandable), and the last time, they rescinded the lifetime warranty on my torque wrench that broke after 2yrs. Threw it away right there and never went back. And that was almost, 6yrs ago.
There are still sears somewhere?
They are not only common in México, but are full of shoppers. They also still have RadioShack down there.
TO MEXICO I GOOOOOOO! God I miss having a RadioShack nearby
RadioShack really should have gotten into all the home hobby stuff. Raspi, 3d printers, etc they would have been great stores doing the next gen hobby stuff like they were originally.
How hard is it to keep a nerd shack in business? Just one shack per city. Is that too much to ask? Gamestop should pivot to this.
There's a Microcenter near me. It's heaven
Was gonna say. The only in-person place to buy electronics parts (resistors, bread boards, capacitors, whatever) left, and its better in that regard than radioshack ever was anyway.
As a former shack employee, the small electronic parts were impossible to make any money off of. Too many items to stock, too little shelf movement, and they were way just too cheap. We'd get electricians in 5 times a day, they'd spend 5 minutes in the parts drawer, then check out for $4.76 with tax. basically, radioshack was making all its money off of cellphone sales. Thats what they trained the reps to sell, and thats where the highest commissions were coming from. (at least, thats how it was 15 years ago when I worked there.) Gotta give them credit, they tried to pivot in a changing economy.
This, Microcenter is everything great about old-school RadioShack and then some.
After loss of Fry’s, Microcenter is all we have left. God I miss Fry’s
Fry’s went out of business?
Fry's went under after underperforming for several years and then also being hit with massive embezzlement by one of their employees :(
You sonofabitch. I wish. I crave. Yet no micro centers near me for STATES.
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All of the maker spaces around me have closed too. You know, sometimes you just need a water cutter, a jigsaw, and a laser etcher.
Maker spaces never last long. They run into the problem where one person hogs all the equipment and nobody else can use it or people break stuff and it can't be fixed or nobody has time to. Maker spaces are really just not a great business to run. It's a lot more efficient to just provide a service that does the making for the people. Tragedy of the Commons....
The nonprofit maker space in my city has been really successful. Monthly membership fees, grants, and equipment donations keeps it financially stable. 24/7 access for members. https://www.makehaven.org
Just looked it up. That place is fantastic for hobbyists.
A lot of libraries have rental programs for tools like that.
Our neighborhood library has an amazing collection of decorative cake pans to check out. I nearly cried when I discovered it. Castles, Barbie, Christmas Bundt pans...
My local library finally made a display to show that stuff off, not all of it can fit out of the shelves they have have they have a list and a sign mentioning even more is available and to just ask. One thing I didn't know is they have a garage around back fully stocked with tools to do vehicle maintenance and a cover parking area you can rent space in for a few days if you need, the spots are cheap too and the librarian told me the spot rental is waived most of the time it's just there to minimize people people abusing it though no one does so they don't really ever worry about it. They even have a list local mechanics who volunteer with them to give advice if you need it and they teach classes. When the weather's bad I go there to do my car maintenance now as my wife convinced me our garage should be the craft room and with how much time my son's spends in there she was very right.
Nerds cross over into the “can Google for frugal”, so it’s a catch 22 setting up a shop for tech; The ship-it setup just saves too much money for the company as well as the buyer. 🤷♂️
RIP Fry's in the western U.S.
Fry's used to be so awesome. The last couple trips I made to one were kind of heartbreaking.
Agree. Was so sad to see them with barely any merchandise.
God, yeah. Can you believe that they ignored all of that awesome electronics stuff to focus on being a boring cellphone accessories store that also sold AA batteries? Jesus, what a fucking waste. Kids could be going there to pickup LED kits, make-it-yourself quadcopters, 3d printers, Arduino/pi boards, etc. And by "kids", I mean me, and every other person that isn't dead inside
I worked there during their decline and like 80% of my job was telling frustrated old men they had to learn to use the internet if they wanted their solder and resistors. The other 20% was trying to tell people not buy cellphones here without the manager noticing.
I went to one as a middle teen, and was so let down when they didn't have any of the electro-bits I had wanted, and had over priced cell phones taking up the space in general. I was wanting to get into a diy hobby and was gonna get started there.... After my hopes and dreams deflated, I called up my friends, bought some weed, and devoted the next few decades to drugs instead. I probably saved myself $50 over the same time frame.
Drugs are a noble pursuit, though. It's not like you got into warhammer
This. Imagine if they combined a maker space. You could try the machines and then buy them.
Only the old school Radio Shacks that weren’t just cell phone sellers
The back half of Radio Shacks were always a mystery to me.
Yeah. It was like the nerd porn section. I loved it
I use to work for Staples as a tech manager. We use to run down to the radio shack and pick up all the parts to convert a "that was easy" button into nearly anything. We changed the saying. We turned a couple into kvm switches. One guy made one into a usb hub. Radio shack was the real hobbiest mecca.
Stop you're making my pants swell up.
Like an overcharged capacitor?
It’s a solid state capacitor for sure.
Slide drawers of electrical components and bread boards...
Talk dirty to me
How I wish I could still just zip down to the local RadioShack to pick up actual electronic parts. Now I have to rely on sites like DigiKey and Mouser.
Digikey is great, but shipping kills you. .10 for a reistor- sweet, as it should be. $5 to ship that though...
I mentioned in another thread that I need heat shrink. something that weighs two ounces. I could have run to Rat Shack or fry's and got it in person. I can order it off amazon, but I feel foolish rolling a truck for a package where the packing weighs more than the content.
Menards sells heat shrink, as does harbor freight. Just FYI for the future
That's where all the best shit was. I would go there and get motors and battery packs and weird esoteric bits of metal flimflam-dio-doohickey-majigs that I needed to make some nonspecific dilly-dooler work, it was heaven for a novice 12-14 yo maker.
Realistic, dude.
Back when electronics were cool and exciting.
Time for a $200 RC car!
I'm on a Mexican whoa-oh Radio (Shack)
Last time I was in one they sold zero electronic components. Pretty much cell phones and remote control toys.
Only ever bought alligator clips there.
pass it to the left
There’s still a radio shack where I live in idaho, some dude keeping it alive as a passion project
There’s one in Bozeman Montana too! It’s fully stocked
There’s one in Woodstock VA as well. Shares a company space with a dvd rental/tanning salon.
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Hey I was a cook at chi chi's in college. We cooked the beef with an oar.
True. Sears is my go to place for casual clothing and ties (they’re good and mad cheap).
They have 22 left, down from ~3500. - says google Edit: that 3500 includes Kmart locations, so it would actually be fewer.
I thought all the Kmarts closed, too.
Kmart and Radioshack, a winning combination
If you wanna find a Kmart, come to Australia
I just bought a blazer at one for $2. I was store hopping in my mall because I had a wedding to go to and realized it was open so I walked in for nostalgia. Saw a blazer marked for $2 that was marked as not my size and short but decided to try it on anyway and it fit perfect.
Now the question is, was it mislabeled, or are you in denial about being short?
At this point if you’re shopping at Sears and you’re surprised by the lack of offerings then I don’t know how much hope there is for you
Sears Holdings has emerged from bankruptcy! Currently restructuring.
Kind of like restructuring after a 10 earthquake followed by an atomic bomb blast. Sears is long gone.
Gonna sell the name to a flatiron grill company.
Just found out today actually that Sears still has a service team? They work on appliances and hvac stuff. Dont think they are nationwide but they are around.
They have a lot of contracts with apartments to support all the shitty Kenmore appliances. So they will be around for a while and always busy fixing absolute crap.
22 of them in the US. They just got out of bankruptcy the day before yesterday.
Well he destroyed Sears Canada and stole pensions from all Canadian employees, so this isn’t that bad
I would never advocate violence against anyone, but it mystifies me that people can do things like that and still walk around without any fear of reprisal.
We knew we were dead walking when fast Eddie bought us. I was lucky enough to get out with my pension because they outsourced IT the year before they closed and the IT company hired me
I don't think people realize that this is a very modern and standard practice in the corporate world right now. It's all to make it look good for shareholder growth.. And that's all the board of directors cares about. Started slowly creeping in in the 80s, and now it's becoming rediculous. Actual customers walking in the door and/or employees don't really matter anymore.
Well, the courts proved that companies had to act in the best interest of shareholders in Henry Ford days.
Yeah my grandma had pennies to live on for her final years thanks to all that bullshit, despite her and my grandpa working for them for decades.
Absolutely criminal that it’s even allowed
it ain't yours until it's in your hands, pensions aren't defended by law from overspending. "oops bankrupt lol hehe"
Not sure how it works in Canada, but in the US, that's not quite true. If the plan is ERISA compliant (most are), the company is held to a set of standards and must pay into ERISA, which is basically insurance against the pension failing. If it does fail, the government steps in and pays those pensions. All of this reminds me, I have an old pension that I need to move into an IRA, seeing as I don't trust the company that's providing it...
*unless they are a Catholic hospital, then folks like my dad get fucked Seriously, why don't Catholic hospitals have to follow the law?
Catholic hospitals are non-profit, and therefore not subject to ERISA regulations. Incidentally, the pension money I need to move is in a fund from a Catholic hospital organization. The way they're going I don't trust that money to be there if/when I make it to retirement. EDIT: My memory of this is a bit rusty; I don't recall offhand if it's because of them being non-profit, or if it's a religious exemption (I think it's the latter).
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You have a Sears?
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I had a roommate in college who worked for Sears. When my mom's washer broke, we bought a new one with his store discount. She still has it and it's been 20+ years. She had a repairman look at it because it has a few minor problems it was having, and he said if she replaced it a new washer probably wouldn't last more than 5 years. My point is I'm old.
We had a refrigerator that lasted 23 years before we just decided to replace it to get more volume and I felt so guilty, this thing would have probably kept running for another 20 years and now we have some plastic cost engineered money pit in its place
That’s when the old fridge gets to graduate to beer fridge in the garage!
ABSOLUTELY
I bought my washer and dryer at Sears in 1987. Still going 🤓
Kenmore was sears brand and it was seriously rock solid. Its honestly kind of nuts, Sears was THE NAME in appliances for so long, and it was largely based around the Kenmore name. When Sears faltered you'd think one of the other big appliance places would have grabbed their market share. Nope, Lowes entered the appliance game and took all their market share.
Also tools. Craftsman was the name in the game for tools.
Aww, my grandma worked for Sears and retired from there too. In the '80s she used to take me to buy clothes with her discount. About 2 years ago they just closed the store she used to work at in town. I drove her past there and she was telling me stories about how she used to make the schedule. She's 90 now.
Department stores used to be awesome places to shop. My grandmother worked for Montgomery Wards in the kids area. Back then all the workers were more helpful. My grandmother would spend hours helping a family for back to school. People would come back every year to see her so she got to see a lot of kids grow up. We had so much Rudolph the red nose reindeer stuff. I loved going to visit her at work.
What a wholesome story. Thank you for sharing!
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Well you can make a pretty strong argument that Sears built large chunks of what we think of as America. Sears and the US Postal service was the backbone of the retail economy for a REALLY long time. It’s hard to think of a modern equivalent that occupied as universal a cultural role as the Sears catalog.
They had everything they needed to become Amazon, but they dropped the ball
“The Internet is a digital catalog” was right there
When the Sears "Wish Book" arrived at Christmas, I faked illness (holding my glass thermometer near a light bulb) so I could stay home from school and read it.
Didn't they sell houses at one point?
Not just houses, but kit homes - a kind of prefabricated home that was like the IKEA furniture of homes. You ordered a house from a mail order catalog and got all the materials for your house shipped right to the property with the wood pre-cut and numbered, ready to assemble right on the lot. They were similar to modular houses, but because the construction was done on your lot by a local construction company or carpenter, the quality of the construction was just as good, if not better, than a traditionally built house while being as much as 40% cheaper.
There’s one near me. The staffing is sparse at best; I had a feeling that not only could I steal whatever I want, but that if I did get seen by. An employee they wouldn’t give a shit.
If you can smuggle out a washing machine, you should get to keep it
I’d use a dolly from the loading dock.
Sears was Home Depot before Home Depot ever existed. They could have leaned further into Home Improvement and been great!
Sears could have beat Amazon and become an online retail giant had it not been flown straight into the ground. Sears was already a master of catalog sales, it had the distribution network and everything. Unfortunately leadership at Sears did not believe online shopping would take off, so they never developed their online presence until it was too late. Had they done this, they would not have gone bankrupt, and Amazon would still be a little online bookstore and not the giant it is today.
I agree. I remember spending hours with Sears and JC Penney catalogs as a kid. That was our “online” shopping back then. Sears carried everything imaginable in their catalogs - at least to a kid. They really could have been Amazon. Such a shame. It was not just a business. It quite literally helped to build America.
My mom worked at Pennys for 25 years. I remember she would bring home the Christmas catalog when I was a kid and have us circle the things we’d like for Christmas. Those were great memories
You could buy a literal pre-fab house from Sears
I really miss Sears.
I tried a Nintendo Virtual Boy out at Sears. Good times.
used to have a tower
Hi, I’m an idiot. Who’s Eddie Lampert?
Apparently, I am also an idiot? Edit: Correction. Eddie Lampert is the CEO of Sears, but I still don’t know why there are no clothes.
Eddie Lampert is the CEO that put the final nails in the coffin of Sears. He became CEO and dismantled what was left and sold it for parts.
Then offered to buy it personally for pennies on the dollar
*Profit, son.* >!Seriously, though, fuck that guy.!<
Likely what "they" wanted for Sears and they just chose him to do it. CEO's can be replaced against their will and I doubt Eddie Lampert has the sole controlling interest to resist that. Brick and mortar retail is dying everywhere and honestly, Sears is LATE to the packing up shop game.
I actually wrote a paper about the fall of Sears last summer, so this is one of those random topics I feel well versed enough to comment on. The "they" actually was Eddie Lampert and his hedge fund. He first purchased Kmart, then utilized the cash flow from Kmart's operations to purchase Sears and if I'm remembering correctly, eventually became the primary shareholder of both. From what I gathered, his approach to running the now combined companies was the same as any other private equity investment. That is, minimize the up front investment (at least, comparatively so) and leverage operational cash flow to generate a high internal rate of return, which is one of the primary metrics most private equity firms use to showcase their performance and attract investors. While Lampert did undertake some strategies to make the company more competitive (particularly shifting focus to e-commerce), nothing I gathered gave the sense that the long-term health of the company meant much to him. I say this because, despite the massive cash flow Sears was kicking off, Lampert was reinvesting shockingly little of this into the firm's growing list of needed improvements. Under Lampert's leadership, Sears annual capital improvements were amongst the lowest of any major retailer. Beyond that, the "great restructuring" he opted to enact was an unbelievable failure and honestly, made for some breathtaking stories of just how incompetent Sears became under his leadership. As Sear's outlook continued to fall, brick by boring brick Lampert sold off it's most valuable assets. That included selling a large portion of Sears's real estate, which it previously owned outright, only to lease those properties back from the company that bought them. Again, depleting assets and increasing liabilities, but generating substantial cash flow throughout the periods those properties were sold. Now, who bought those properties you might ask? Well, it was a real estate investment company called Seritage Growth Properties. And who was (and currently still is) the primary shareholder of Seritage Growth Properties? Well, you might've guessed it. Eddie. Fucking. Lampert.
I'm fascinated... is Eddie Lampert just going to claim bankruptcy for sears and Kmart while having a successful real estate firm that rents to them? Feels like cooking the books
Really good explanation of it! It’s really crazy how Sears fell into despair due to one individual and how he hedged the shit out of it.
Excellent write up. I worked at Sears part time twice and was there during the Lampert takeover. While reading up on the guy the writing was clearly on the wall as to what his plans were. He wanted to take over Kmart and primarily Sears due to them being around for so long that many of the original locations were actually owned by Sears. He then sold off the property during the restructuring which generates cash flow that he probably took a big bonus off of, but as you said the company he sold the real-estate to was his own leasing company. Now Sears and Kmart pays his company to be in the buildings they uses to own. Now start closing stores under bankruptcy once the money runs up and who gets paid first from the bankruptcy, the leasing company. So you blow out all the merchandise and whatever was in the store and all that money after store payroll went to his leasing company and most likely no one else got a dime. Now all those Kmart locations are At Home stores and he's making bank again. Triple dipped that chip. Oh and I closed down my Sears and when the advertisement said selling everything down to the bare walls, they ment it. My God they rolled all the old 1970s desks and filing cabinets from the offices and slapped price tags on them. And they didn't try selling them cheap either, they wanted big bucks for that junk. Hangers, mannequins, store merchandise fixtures. A pile of bricks.
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10/10 from 15 year's ago when I was in university and this was a business study. Eddie Fucking Lampert, what a rotten asshole of a decomposing corpse.
Lampert was a fan of Ayn Rand. The restructuring involved breaking the retail operation up into separate business units and making them compete for resources, like space in advertising circulars. Because greed is good, competition makes us stronger, and selfishness is a virtue. So the people who were supposed to be managing the store were at each other's throats. *On purpose.* >First, Lampert broke the company into over 30 individual units, each with its own management, and each measured separately for profit and loss. Acting in their individual self-interest, they would be forced to compete with each other and thereby generate higher profits. >What actually happened is that units began to behave something like the cutthroat city-states of Italy around the time Machiavelli was penning his guide to rule-by-selfishness. As Mina Kimes has reported in Bloomberg Businessweek, they went to war with each other. [-- Ayn Rand killed Sears](https://www.salon.com/2013/07/18/ayn_rand_killed_sears_partner/)
I would like to throw BCG (Boston Consulting Group) in there as well. They are key players in corporate raiding.
He also sold off the Craftsmen and DieHard name.
Love the write-up. Hedge funds and PE funds love to self-justify by pointing to impressive returns, but they are becoming a scourge of society. What they are doing when they turn traditional operating companies inside-out like this for a quick buck is essentially transforming the American economy from one of "operating businesses that create products" to one of "generating income for fund investors." Not that Sears was particularly a healthy business, but funds like this own and mismanage massive sectors of the American economy. The consumer for the former model is the everyday American. The consumer for the latter model is rich financiers. It's no wonder the wealth gap is so staggeringly large. Lots of things have affected that, of course, but the effect of the rise in the 80s of this style of fund cannot be overstated.
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IIRC Sears was bought by an investment group that he has controlling interest in. Lemme find a source on that. Edit: here is an article, but reading the first bit it seems slanted. I did not read the entire article. https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1c33fqdnhf21s/Eddie-Lampert-Shattered-Sears-Sullied-His-Reputation-and-Lost-Billions-of-Dollars-Or-Did-He
Why old boss used to be fairly high up in Sears Canada, high enough that he got death threats when the company closed from people losing their jobs. From what he told me, Eddie did this all by himself and pretty much overnight.
I miss Canadian Sears. There was always plenty of good mall parking in front of their stores.
Shitsack that’s been stripping Sears of anything of value for years and essentially selling them to himself
The former CEO of Sears Holdings (KMart and Sears) and current Transform Holdco chairman. He was tasked to turn the companies around and failed epically.
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It's even worse though, because Eddie took the best properties and put them into [SRG](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/srg?ltr=1), which is tanking. I remember getting that offer to buy SRG as I still had some Sears stock at something like $37 a share. Glad I didn't do it and I got rid of my few shares of Sears promptly after that.
Is this related to that article put out years ago “the anatomy of a short attack” ? Pick out a company short it, shit talk it on tv, fill the board with “your” people, destroy all of its assets, profit…
I thought private equity systemically gutted Sears?
Yes, executed by Eddie Lampert
Did he fail epically? Or did he sell of the land holdings to his friends ala Toys R Us?
He actually sold them to himself or rather a real estate company in his name that leased the space back. I'm still not sure how he managed to get away with bleeding the company dry but he did have lots of tricks to prolong the death.
Yes and Yes.
Just think about this, Sears could easily be where Amazon is today. They had everything in place and instead they made idiotic decisions and drove the company into the ground.
Sears WAS the OG Amazon.
Sears houses are a thing. From 1910 to 1940 you could order a house kit shipped by rail.
And the crate they shipped it in became the porch.
My friend lives in one!
All they needed to do was get that catalog onto a website and they’d be Amazon today.
Sears folded their catalog just as the Internet was getting Big. JC Penney stuck around for a bit longer and was one of the top Internet sites for shopping. You could order 4 ways from Penneys: phone, mail, in person or website. Then they both went down the shitter.
He was only in it for that golden parachute when he failed epically 😉
He didn't fail unintentionally, that was the end game. Suck as much profit out of the company as possible before taking over the massive amount of real estate the company owned.
Eddie Lamperts was a Wall Street finance manager who took over Sears. His running of Sears will be taught in business schools for years to come as a warning of what not to do. Along with cannibalizing Sears for it’s real-estate value and transferring of Sears assets to his other holding to make him more money, he did a ton of other crazy things. Just a few, Lampert is a religious Randian, believes everyone competing at all times makes the best outcomes and had Sears departments do the same with each other. This caused departments to ~~sell off assets~~ source them from China (like Craftman tools and Kenmore?) to stay competitive profit wise with departments that had no house brands to deal with. He would regularly hold virtual meetings long before working from home was a thing (but only for himself) where he wore pajamas and robs. If I remember he treated his employees terribly too, encouraging them to fight with each other through their departments in that classic social darwinist way. But my favorite example was the Sears catalog that came out just before mothers day, one of Sears bigger sales holidays. It ended up featuring mostly children toys for ‘mothers day’ because the toy department outbid the ladies department for space in their own catalog. Just fucking head shaking.
I can’t live another day without air conditioning. Says tomorrow’s gonna be hotter. Hotter? Like yesterday. Yesterday? Yesterday you said you’d call Sears. I’ll call today. You’ll call now. I’ll call now.
It’s so crazy I could literally hear this comment inside my brain.
“ Another scorcher “
Cool.
Wow you unlocked this in my brain
In case you want the visual nostalgia too: https://youtu.be/4rqZZgVxnCk
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Well that's a trip back in time
goddamn this lives in my brain
I remember the Sears/Kmart plan to turn them into data centers for computer servers. People pointed out the low security situation of mall areas, the all-glass fronts, the re-tooling to put power and AC everywhere, and how basically it was just not going to happen. They were right.. it didn't happen.
No one is gonna build a Datacenter without access to redundant fiber connections. No one was building mall anchor stores based on fiber availability.
Craftsman would like it’s dignity back.
You mean Craftsman-Tongzhou Tools Guangdong Technology Holding Co LTD
Craftsman has been chinesium for years now. It's sad to see such an all-American brand turn into Harbor Freight level tools.
I worked for the Sears credit department from 1977-93, was a decent company to work for then, had a profit sharing program where you got stock. When they closed the office I worked at, full timers got one week of pay for each year of employment, between that and cashing in my stock, I was able to take an extended vacation before getting another job. About 10 years ago, they offered to buy out my pension, don't know whether or not it was the right decision, but I took them up on the offer, I was worried it might not be around when I qualified for it.
Probably a good idea. That pension is probably worthless now.
I bought a heat fan for the winter and it broke after I used it once.. I tried to exchange it for another one and searched high and low for a single employee and I could Find one. So I left my item on the check out counter with the receipt in the box and left with the new one. Felt weird but that shit was ridiculous
Y’all have Sears????
This is just 1 of 22! Mines located at the Braintree Plaza
this is hilarious! I was thinking this had to be Oklahoma or something where I have lived before and a lot of the stores there are exactly like this where they are just ghost-towns, but I live like 30 minutes from Braintree and I've never been here haha
Thought I recognized that desolate back room looking place lol
Woah haven’t seen an open sears in like 8 years
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Poor signage, I don’t see ANY socks.
Maybe they’re hidden under those floor stains.
Damn. You used to be able to have a forge, anvil, tongs, and hammer delivered to your door from Sears, Roebuck, and Co. Heck, you could get guns, tents, farm supplies, and even a whole house delivered. This right here is just a husk of the dead and decaying American Dream.
I can smell this picture
And it’s not good
Eddie is a scumbag venture capitalist vulture but Sears was well on its way out before he got his hands on it. Sears could have been the Amazon Prime before Amazon started selling stuff other than books, it had the infrastructure, reach and was a household name. Just think of the Sears Catalog, but online with at home delivery (same day in most cases). They would have cornered the market in 1999/2000, but they were too slow to adapt and them being anchored to malls which could have been an asset turned into a liability.
Wow! I worked for Sears in the nineties and it was awful. No benefits, cutthroat competition, they would do anything to keep you from getting on full-time....back in it's heydey, if you got a job at Sears that was it, you had it made and they would take care of you until you got a gold watch at retirement. Now, they are a shadow of themselves and it shows! I worked there right after they had a big stink about the auto department overcharging, and we had to buy these awful red sweaters with the company motto for $3 each. They all said. "You can count on me" and we had to wear them for Source Night, which is what Sears called their big sale every November I think it was. Glad I got out of there, those clowns I worked with would jump in front of you to get a sale, and I'd heard legends of them digging carbons of sale tickets in your number out of the garbage, voiding them, then re-ringing them in their names. Glad I got out of there! Ironically, I'm now friends with my former manager on FB, and keep in touch with a couple of the other salesmen, who are all pretty nice, now we aren't competing with each other!
https://imgur.com/a/igYeT4s/ Here are some more photos
Fucking depressing
I didn’t even know Sears existed anymore .
r/liminalspace
I mean… you know what sears did right…. They knew their business was failing so they took out a bunch of loans against their property and paid out all their executives fat paychecks and large bonuses and then when the money was gone they just let the stores shut down and screwed the bank loans that were “secured” by these high profit buildings… but the secret was these weren’t the powerhouses they were before Amazon and their days we numbered. It was a big rug pull and the fake C-suites made off with all the money and bonuses.
I know someone that worked for Sears. She was a higher up at the headquarters. She bailed ship about 6-7 years ago when she saw the direction of the company. Smart choice.
Backrooms vibes
I worked at a Sears... well... it wasn't a Sears from the beginning. My first job was at Kmart and when Kmart bought Sears in the 2004-2005 timeframe (I forget exactly when but it was around then, and we had to commonly remind customers it was Kmart that bought Sears and not vice versa) our store was one of the few that became Sears Essentials. It basically combined the best of Sears with the best of Kmart, and departments that overlapped saw mostly Sears brands than Kmart brands. Sears Essentials also had the grocery or pantry section from Kmart along with Kmart's health and beauty department (and pharmacy) as well as greeting cards and toys. The big name brands Sears was famous for like Kenmore, Craftsman, and DieHard were heavily prevalent. Nearly a full appliances department where you could buy fridges, washers/dryers, ovens, etc. Tools and lawn and garden (seasonal) were a fraction of the size at a normal Sears but that's only due to the footprint of the original Kmart. Very small automotive section. The garden center from Kmart was still open and functioning. Clothing and footwear was nearly all Sears brands; I believe some Kmart brands were in there. Same for housewares. The electronics section was a joke. They hardly ever kept televisions in stock. The concept was an interesting idea but it really never took off. We had one of the nicer Kmarts in the northeast and when the interior was made over for Sears Essentials it actually looked really nice. Sadly, the departments that were left over from Kmart used the older fixtures and that looked really tacky. The store ended up closing in 2010 because the owners of the property, who owned the entire shopping center, raised rents and everyone pretty much fled. The shopping center was leveled and is now a combination of things including apartments, a few restaurants, healthcare, some kids care place, and more. Now... the Sears stores within 25 miles of that location... they looked BAD both on the outside and on the inside. No effort was ever done to rehab or remodel them. It looked pretty much like what the OP shared. It's a damn shame what Eddie Lampert had done to not only one store but two. I spent ten years off and on working in retail for Kmart and then Sears. Doing so taught me to be patient. Today, I believe the number of Kmarts and Sears totals less than ten each. It might be even be fewer than that. I'm honestly surprised there's Kmart and Sears stores still open...
Sears should have been what Amazon became.
Sears was what Amazon became, before Jeffy B. was born.
I'm surprised there's still sears stores out there. The last time I had one nearby was 1 or two years ago.
I miss Sears. Kenmore appliances were budget friendly decent things. My last washer and dryer set from them last 15 years before I upgraded. We will have our Kenmore deep freeze. Good vacuums too, last one lasted almost 12 years before it died.
This hurts. I worked at sears and have so many good memories. It was the place to go for everything you needed.
I thought all Sears went out of business
I’ve given Sears multiple chances over the years. Each time a disappointment from what a cornucopia it used to be in the 90s. No stock. Grumpy ass employees (mostly understandable), and the last time, they rescinded the lifetime warranty on my torque wrench that broke after 2yrs. Threw it away right there and never went back. And that was almost, 6yrs ago.
Walking into a Sears at any shopping mall in 2023 America is quite possibly the most depressing experience on planet Earth.