Sears was bought by some Hedge Fund guy...then he canibslized Sears and sold off Craftsmen Tools

They started making craftsmen tools in Asia years before the deathblow.

Yes...and then this Wall Street guy sold off Sears crown jewels...Craftsmen Tools and Kenmore Appliances and Sears imploded

Can't cry when offshoring jobs was fucked in the first place, chief.

Accepting the lowest bid did in Craftsman tools.

When they dropped delta and went with Singer Sewing Machines it was over for them.

And that's just one example.

Also, the company had no way to pay their upcoming pension obligations and was doomed because of that (which is why they move tool production offshore in the first place).

Butt Reagan say muh unions badd....w bushy say union badd.....

What did you expect a Hedge Fund to do?

Sell off the Hedgetrimmer Division!

Welcome to Sears, can I help you?

Sears screwed up in the 70's. They tried to be everything for everybody. Ended up not doing anything well. They should of went 'all-in" with home improvement. They could have been Home Depot or Lowes.

Safer to distrust the sems than to give them a pass. They're such victims, you know.

To clarify something: Mr. Lampert bought a controlling stake in Kmart, not Sears. Then, a few years later, the beleaguered Kmart merged with Sears.

Long before (edit: I looked it up, and it wasn't all that "long before". It was shortly before the initial Kmart buy-in) any of this occurred, someone kidnapped Mr. Lampert. In Connecticut, I believe it was. Mr. Lampert had already earned amassed considerable wealth. Not Bezos/Walton/Buffett bucks, but enough to make a ransom worthwhile. I wonder what asset level is required before a person has to thinking about the risk of being kidnapped.

Anyway: the kidnappers took him to a motel and sent their ransom demand. They didn't harm their trophy. While waiting for a response to their ransom demand, they got hungry. They needed pizza. Mr. Lampert was hungry, too, but he didn't want any pork-contaminated pizza, so he asked for a clean pizza.

He offered to pay for the pizza. He gave them his credit card. He was rescued a few hours later.

I have a bad feeling that using the word "Lampert" is liable to get me baned.

Last Edited by Overgoverned on 04/11/2023 06:42 AM

Xiden is helping unions by importing massive amounts of expensive and skilled labor?

Actually it was AutoZone board members who put the hit on Eddie. They were offering those seven kidnappers 3 million. I met him when delivering a piece of furniture to him in a Chicago penthouse. Had a beer and smoked a joint too. The next year, I went to work for sears auto for ten years.

I've read that, and I got the impression it'd been discarded as just being part of the negotiation tactics that the kidnappers were using. Your story sounds like there might actually be some truth to it.

Lampert made a damn good return from his AutoZone investment. I don't know if he's still invested or not.

He was the controlling shareholder at the time and they were pretty upset with him. None of the kidnappers ever change their story and said it was the AutoZone board members that put them up to it

He was the controlling shareholder at the time and they were pretty upset with him. None of the kidnappers ever change their story and said it was the AutoZone board members that put them up to it

He was the controlling shareholder at the time and they were pretty upset with him. None of the kidnappers ever change their story and said it was the AutoZone board members that put them up to it

I started working at Sears in 92 as a part time electronics, vacuum cleaner / sewing machine sales person. Some of those sewing machines would pay me 16% to 18%! At first even a low profit margin $2,000 home PC would pay me 6%! My first year I averaged over $32 per hour on commission and was good part time money at the time. I always also had a full time day job.

I worked at Sears almost ten years at night / weekends and witnessed so much change and my last year I was only able to make an average of $12 per hour as profits in the product was cut to a point I could no longer make any money...

I was never a fan of Craftsman tools as I prefer the round handle tool like Snap-on but many people loved Craftsmen and was a big money maker for Sears as people would finance those huge tool sets on a Sears card for like a hundred years or something at only $10 a month!


Last Edited by Soundman on 04/11/2023 08:00 AM

Craftsman is black and decker in the UK , Stanley have bought them out and are dropping the name they still have DeWalt which is black and decker just with a different colour and name same parts fk Stanley

Do you know anything about the nuts and bolts of how he provoked their anger? The board members are supposed to "maximize shareholder value". His ideas were working way better than theirs. I don't think he did anything illegal, but I don't know exactly how he woke up the stock price. Him taking a big stake in the company would be a good start, because other investors would say "Eddie's getting into AutoZone, it's going to go places".

Putting a contract out on a big stockholder's life, that's probably illegal.

No great loss.

The Craftsman Tool brand was destroyed years ago when sears had them made in China.

Think in terms of Harbor Freight quality.

Thats what hedge funds do. They buy a failed company for pennies on the dollar and sell off everything of value to include any buildings, real estate, office furniture, I.T. equipment, company owned vehicles and aircraft and product line. If not for the hedge funds the stores would just be boarded up and left to decompose to a point to where buildings and stores would have to be torn down. If Sears would have changed with the times and started "online" website with home delivery, they would have survived and maybe have been the top 3 online retailers today.

The whole thing was and is nothing more than a slow-play real estate deal. Sell off the assets.

Elon or some other rich guy should save Craftsman.

It will always be Sears Tower in my mind.

no we just need to use the fucking tools they made the last 50 years, there should be a set for everyone out there in the wild

And that catalog...