Edward Lampert's no strategy to save Sears

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reshaping retail sales in the years since then, forcing retailers to retreat; many of them have turned to strategies requiring heavy investments in online shopping tools and expensive upgrades of physical stores.

"Eddie took office with the intention of running a retail business in his own way, and he did not believe in conventional wisdom," said Mark Cohen, former executive director of Sears Canada and director of marketing at Sears. "It did not work."

Shortly after the $ 11.5 billion deal between Sears and Kmart, Lampert wrote that Sears did not have a "one-size-fits-all" strategy and remained committed to that. .

He was reluctant to commit capital to new ventures. Describing a plan to convert Kmart's independent stores into Sears stores, he said: "We will not be launching money behind a concept, we will test, evaluate, perfect and prove the calculation for the investment. be justified ". Initiative after initiative respected an equally lukewarm commitment, without attracting the necessary investments to gain ground.

It was planned to convert Kmart into an online retail center with relays. (Today, a similar, multi-year effort helps

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to make a comeback.) But Sears technology spending was meager compared to

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Target and Amazon. Walmart spent more than $ 2 billion on e-commerce in fiscal 2015 to 2016, roughly the same as Sears' investment spending for the entire decade.

Efforts to make clothing offerings more trendy, such as the Kardashian Kollection, kollapsed kwickly.

"There was a lot of under-investment," said Greg Melich, retail analyst at MoffettNathonson. Cohen and Melich say that Sears was not well managed before Mr. Lampert's arrival. Stores were obsolete and operations ineffective. "But his value creation strategy did not help," said Melich.

Mr. Lampert, who founded an investment company in the 1980s and made a name for himself as a pioneer of hedge funds. Among his best bets:

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the largest US distribution chain. He has entered the retail sector, with many companies spending billions of dollars a year on new stores. Mr. Lampert, in annual letters, stated that he did not need to follow either

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because the collection of more than 2,000 Sears stores was more than enough.

But Sears invested only $ 4 billion in capital expenditures between 2006 and 2017, including upgrading stores or creating initiatives such as a loyalty program to collect data from client. This represents less than 1% of revenue during this period, while Target and Macy spend 4% of revenue.

While Sears spent $ 6 billion on stock repurchases, these two rivals also made an aggressive stock buyback during this period, but not at the expense of innovation. Target spent about $ 23 billion on stock repurchases during this period, but spent $ 31.6 billion on capital improvements.

Sears has sold billions of dollars in stores and created a real estate company from certain assets. He threw or uprooted Craftsman tools, the credit card division based in Sears, Canada, the Lands' End draper and the California hardware chain Orchard Supply.

Mr. Lampert could not be contacted for comment, but he has repeatedly refuted claims that he was starving Sears and Kmart, claiming that the company had been treated unfairly and that hundreds of millions of dollars in technology spending had been ignored.

Many rivals curbed capital spending after the financial crisis. After a series of bankruptcies reported by circuit companies from Circuit City to the border, retail executives gave up their physical expansion and pumped money into technology projects. While they tend to be more efficient, the technology investments do not immediately respond to the demand for immediate return on investment in many of Mr. Lampert's letters.

"It is very difficult to" reap "the retailer's investments because the needs and preferences of consumers are changing," said Melich. Companies need to be flexible in a competitive marketplace and be willing to adapt their strategy to reflect new trends, but must ultimately stay within five years.

Claiming a better return on investment that has never materialized, Mr. Lampert lost sight of the main player in retail: the customer.

"When someone approaching Kmart or Sears, he does not see the return on investment," Mr. Cohen said. "They see grilled light bulbs, potholes in the parking lot and an entrance door that seems to have been hit with a hammer."

Mr. Lampert did not just grope the company's legacy. He misjudged the future of society. A recent study in the Edison Trends study found that Sears sales in e-commerce accounted for just 17% of Macy's sales, while overall revenue was about two-thirds of Macy's.

Cohen, now a professor at Columbia Business School, said the long-standing legacy of Sears, the leader in catalog sales and early Internet experiences, laid the foundation for a different destiny for the company whose ads are once boasted of being "where stores in America".

"Sears could have been Amazon," he said.