By Bob Walsh
Regular readers will remember I recently wrote a piece speculating that K-Mart (sometimes known as KrapMart of K-Fart) might be going belly up. This was based on speculation in a news piece provided mainly by line staff who were commenting on lack of stock, lack of staff, etc.
I worked in retail for a fair number of years. I realize that the cash register jockeys might not see the big picture, but they certainly know what is going on in the trenches better than the suits at headquarters.
There is a pretty extensive piece by Haley Peterson in the Business Insider that says that Sears (part of Sears Holding which owns both Sears and K-Mart) is bleeding cash and is running their stores seriously understaffed. Many of the stores that are still semi-functional have very new, marginally trained and almost totally inexperienced staff in the stores. Some stores only have one or two functional checkouts for the entire store. Building maintenance is not being done. Total
items sold has dropped by two-thirds in some stores. Their Shop Your Way Rewards program has been somewhere close to an unmitigated disaster.
Some new hires last only a month. Turnover is very high and retention of senior staff is a serious issue.
Some of the staff who gave quotes for the article speculated that Sears brick-and-mortar operation may go the way of the Dodo bird relatively soon. They could, at least in theory, turn into an on-line only operation. I admit I don’t know how workable that would be, but it will be interesting to see how they do this coming Christmas season. For a lot of retail Christmas covers the overhead for the rest of the year. If you don’t have a good Christmas you can’t keep the doors open in April.
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