Sears to sell Craftsman to Stanley/B&D

[Ed Pawlowski]

According to the news they paid $900million for it

[woodchucker]

That was their own PR piece on their website explaining the $35 minimum.

[krw]

Store anagers have very limited power, these days. Their weekly (even hourly) payrol is often fixed by corporate. Inventory and shelf space is also often dictated by corporate, even though the store manager may understand his customers better.

There is one ACE store locally. It's OK but their inventory is often lacking. They seem to want to sell Green Eggs and accessories, Yeti coolers, and such, rather than hardware. They do have some _way_ overpriced tools. BTW, the local HD and Lowes hardware sections aren't any better.

[krw]

Sure. Sometimes paying the $13 is less painful than spending a day finding the cheapest price.

[krw]

I just keep adding stuff to my cart until it gets to the $49 threshold. It's really not that much money.

[krw]

Not buying that story. Sears has been dying for at least 30 years.

[krw]

If you could buy 50 year old Craftsman tools, it would be great.

[krw]

Make that +2

[krw]

The same could be said for shoes, though a *lot* of people buy shoes online. In fact, if it weren't for online shoe stores (Amazon, mostly), I'd be barefoot. I haven't found a local store that sells my size for over thirty years. Wearing shoes that were too small was getting really old. e-tailers fixed the problem.

[krw]

That really doesn't work either. Width matters and even that doesn't tell everything. I wear 6E shoes, not because my foot is exceptionally wide, rather because my instep is very high. There are very few shoe brands that leave enough material to get around my foot.

[krw]

JCPenney has been a zombie for a decade or more. They were losing money because people figured out that you don't buy anything there at full price - wait for the sale. A new CEO decided to change that, so get rid of all the sales. ...and the customers, too.

[krw]

I think the difference between the success of strip vs. indoor megamalls is weather. You have too much of it. ;-) The preferred mall, here, resembles a downtown of fifty years ago. The stores line the center, divided street (usually cobble stone) with on-street parking. These all seem to have 100% occupancy. They tend to be upscale stores.

[krw]

I wonder how many of the "old ones" are filled with asbestos.

[krw]

The "better" malls, here, do. Mostly B&N (Walden Books went under a long time ago).

Amazon isn't so narrow minded, either. ;-)

[-MIKE-]

Not only that, but many times you do indeed get the best price. If you happen to be within a certain distance of a warehouse you can get same day delivery. I had a friend who ordered a printer and had it delivered to his door two hours later. He went on Amazon and spent about 15 minutes finding the printer he needed at the best price, hit a button and had it on his door step 2 hours later. He could've spent two hours driving around town, from store to store, wasting gas, wasting time, getting pissed off in traffic, and gotten the same printer, maybe at the same price. But no, he was sitting at home, in his studio, making money, no gas, no driving, no frustration, and the printer was at his front door in two hours.

In a way Amazon is merging new school and old school. There was a time when groceries and drug stores, and appliance stores delivered things to your home and it was considered normal. Amazon is bringing that back along with everything that is new in technology and consumerism.

[Puckdropper]

[e-mail] wrote in news: [e-mail]:

So we'll have to add a few numbers to the shoe designation. No matter the system, there will always be people who have difficult feet to fit. My intention is to be able to measure the foot using standardized units rather than some number and a width code that means "doesn't not fit bad enough to do something about it."

Puckdropper

[Puckdropper]

Markem wrote in news: [e-mail]:

Yeah, designing a pair of shoes from scratch is hard. (Designing anything from scratch is hard.) However, once you make a design and learn how to do variations of it, it shouldn't be that hard to customize the fit. It was $100 well spent to have Graf customize my skates so they fit my feet.

Sometimes, I don't care about the price. Just give me a thing that's top quality and fits! (While I don't care about the price, I do care about not throwing money away.)

Puckdropper

[Leon]

Exactly, store manager does not mean what it used to mean. They probably have a key, I'm not sure what else. ;~)

[Leon]

LOL, the hooks are 15 cents each.

[Leon]

10 years ago? ROTFL... I remember in 1974 being disgusted with the crap that KMart sold, I was 19.