The last two Sears stores in Austin are closing.
My father did all of his own home and car maintenance, and he swore by (and sometimes at) his Craftsman tools. We didn’t get the Snap-On trucks much in our neck of the woods, and hey! Lifetime warranty!
He also swore by Sears DieHard batteries. True story: once upon a time he was running around the house, frantically searching for the warranty for the DieHard in one of our cars. I asked him several times where the owner’s manual for that car was, since it wasn’t in the glove box. He ignored me the first few times, and finally snapped: “Why do you keep asking me about the owner’s manual?!”
“Because,” I said, with the quiet confidence of a Christian holding four aces, “you’re exactly the kind of person who would stick the warranty paperwork inside the owner’s manual for safekeeping.” Whereupon he went to his briefcase, pulled out the owner’s manual for the car, flipped through it, found the warranty paperwork for the DieHard battery, and proceeded to rush off to the Sears store before it closed.
(He apologized later.)
(Side note: I remember DieHards being warrantied for five or even six years. Now, it seems like you can’t find any car battery that has more than a two year warranty. What’s up with that?)
(Another Dad story: once upon a time, we were on one of our driving vacations. The starter on the car (a Chevy Suburban from the mid-70s: you know, 350 V-8 and plenty of room to work) went out in some small town in Arkansas. Dad, being the type of person who brought tools with him on vacation, dropped the starter out of the car in the middle of a Sears Auto Center parking lot: the manager of the Sears AutoCenter took us over to the local automotive starter rebuild shop, who rebuilt the starter while we waited, then drove us back to the store, where Dad reinstalled the rebuilt starter, and we were on our way. I’m pretty sure he sent a nice letter to corporate about that manager.)
I was loyal to Sears for a long time because of those experiences. The first crack came when I went to one of those local Sears stores to get my personal DieHard replaced under warranty…and they refused, claiming that DieHard was “too small” for my car and thus my warranty was void. Even though I pointed out to them that the DieHard in question had been installed by the other local Sears, and their beef was with that Sears, not me, they still gouged me $60+tax that I could barely afford for a new battery. Yes, this infuriated me.
There were other things. Lawrence has his own story of being screwed over by NTB, back when they were owned by Sears: he’s been boycotting the chain for 20+ years now. As time went on, Sears just seemed to become sadder and sadder, and the only times I went into one were when I was cutting through to get to my parking space. Then I pretty much stopped going to malls, period.
I know Chapter 11 is a reorganization, not a liquidation. But the way things are going, it seems like this is the final turning out of the lights.
Goodbye, Sears. You managed to micturate through all of the goodwill I had for you when I was younger. And for what?
I last set foot into a Sears around 10 years ago. After that experience, I knew they were doomed.
It was that Sears Grand store that was at Parmer and I-35. Wife wanted a thing, and that was the most convenient place to get the thing, since it was close to work.
It was a weekday afternoon in early December, i.e a few weeks before Christmas.
The store was dead. There were people walking around that I thought were other customers. They were not. “Excuse me, could I interest you in new windows for your house?” Or a roof. Or siding. Etc. There were more people approaching me about things like that than there were customers in the store.
And that’s when I knew they were doomed. It’s a shame, really. They could have been Amazon. They had all the corporate infrastructure and could have easily transitioned from the catalog to the web.
So it goes.