Sears was once the largest retailer in the world, boasting over 3,500 stores in the United States.
Nowadays, the department store chain is in a struggle for its very survival, having closed over 3,000 of those stores over the past decade, as of November 2019.
In 2017, the company saw $17 billion in sales — down $26 billion from 2010.
Now, given the 2008 recession, the rise of e-commerce, and the raging retail apocalypse, it hasn't been an easy 10 years for any traditional brick-and-mortar retailers.
next slide will load in 15 secondsSkip AdSkip AdStill, other macro trends like the decline of the once-dominant department store format — which big boxes and specialty retailers were able to dodge, for the most part— did hurt Sears, in particular.
For the most part, however, the situation at Sears is emblematic of the decade, not because it represents a gloomy example of the woes befalling the industry ...
... but because it is a case study for the crucial importance of keeping up with the times, especially when it comes to tailoring the shopping experience to suit customers' needs.
Billionaire investor Eddie Lampert, who took over as CEO of Sears in 2013, stepped down from that position in October 2018. He has blamed Sears' struggles on e-commerce, changing consumer preferences, and even negative media coverage.
But Lampert himself has been criticized for focusing more on making financial maneuvers than boosting the store experience ...
next slide will load in 15 secondsSkip AdSkip Ad... resulting in messy, understaffed Sears and Kmart locations that drove away prospective customers.
On the other hand, Sears Holdings spent $5.8 billion on share buybacks between 2005 and 2010.
Speaking to Business Insider's Hayley Peterson in 2017, former Sears executives criticized this handling of the company's struggles.
At the same time, loans from Lampert's firm ESL Investments can be credited with sustaining the retailer for years.
Fellow billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who Lampert was once likened to, has expressed the opinion that the one-time Sears CEO was in a no-win situation.
next slide will load in 15 secondsSkip AdSkip AdIn 2005, Buffett was quoted as saying that it was "very difficult" to turn around "a retailer that has been slipping for a long time."
The year before, Sears had merged with Kmart, and Lampert had become the chairman of the newly formed retail giant.
Back in 2005, Buffett said he'd "rather look for easier things to do" than reviving underperforming retailers. In other words, in the retail business, lagging behind the pack can be tantamount to a death sentence.
For its part, Sears has tried to catch up in recent years. In October 2019, the brand launched a subscription-based Amazon Prime-style membership tier.
But not all of these experiments have ended well. Perhaps most ominously, Sears' "store of the future" format — a smaller, modernized store with a focus on boosting the customer experience — closed in April 2019, just six months after opening.
next slide will load in 15 secondsSkip AdSkip AdSears' journey throughout the past decade best illuminates the cutthroat nature of retail today. Failure to invest in the business in order to keep up with consumer preferences resulted in lots of pain for Sears, regardless of the one-time strength of its brand.