Sears. Compete. With. Amazon.
that's a good one...
Sears lost $573 million, or $5.39 per share, during its quarter that ended Aug. 2. That was nearly three times its loss of $194 million, or $1.83 per diluted share, during the same period last year. Adjusting for one-time items, its loss was $313 million, or $2.87 per diluted share. It was the ninth-straight quarter that the once-mighty retailer has had a loss.
For the third quarter, Amazon posted a net loss of $437 million, more than 10 times wider than the $41 million loss from a year ago. Sales rose 20 percent to $20.6 billion. Analysts had projected a loss of $331.4 million on sales of $20.9 billion.
IIRC, Amazon has only posted 2 quarters of earnings in the last 5 years. Having said that, obviously the two companies are headed in the opposite directions. Which is amazing. Sears dumped their catalog operation(s) just about the time the Interwebz was being invented by Al Gore. I distinctly remember my mother ordering stuff out of the catalog and then later going to the local Sears store to pick up whatever she had ordered. I disremember whether she paid when calling in/dropping off her order or when she picked it up, I was only 7 or 8 and cared more about going and drooling over the Toys and Ted Williams Guns display, then about sheets and clothes.
Anyway, when I worked for OCP, our three largest customers where Wal-Mart, K-Mart and Target. Target, by far had the best and tightest logistics operations. Wal-mart's was very good, their only problem was their size. K-mart's was absolutely horrible. I got charge-backs if I combined orders going to the same DC on one truck. I got chargebacks if I didn't combine orders going to the same DC on one truck. I got chargebacks for using their LTL carriers for truckloads AFTER I had called them and explained it would be cheaper to use their FTL carrier. I got chargebacks for using their FTL carrier to ship large orders, and not breaking them down in LTL loads. It got to the point it was a joke. I got chargebacks for every single order I shipped. I told my boss that I would not ship one more K-mart load, until we had a meeting with their logistics people, as I was tired of my clerks digging through all the shipping records to refute their chargeback claims. (I think they fact that I told him I needed to hire two more clerks just for K-Mart chargebacks got his attention.)
The first thing I said in that meeting was "So, is K-mart's back of the house operation a profit center?" After showing them all their chargebacks and what I had saved them based on how I had routed their freight/combined orders/etc. They agreed to let us continue to route their freight and call first if they had any questions as to why we did what we did.
Morons. Sears and K-mart deserve each other.
The Universe, showing that it has a perverse sense of humour found me, years later, handling the break-bulk and trans-shipping of all of Land's End imported products to their warehouses. Then Sears bought them, and things got stupid. Then K-mart bought Sears and decided that they could do it better themselves. Sadly, they missed the memo that said "Do NOT move move things, like containers, from a Customs Bonded Location, until AFTER the items have cleared US Customs." Seems they were having containers drayed straight to the LE warehouses (to avoid storage charges, because they hadn't figured out how to process the necessary paperwork through Customs), and then unloading them upon arrival. I'm not sure how much the fines totaled, but we got the business back and were able to raise our rates to almost 2x what they had been paying before.
I will not shed a tear when Sears Holdings (aka Sears and K-mart) go Tango Uniform.
