What's killing Sears? Its own retirees, the CEO says

[PatrickforO]

65. Yeah, I definitely don't have a high opinion of Welch at all.

But you've made an interesting post here. The example I think of is Kodak. I'm an aging Boomer and I'll tell you, we all started off with a Kodak instamatic camera. That was a big deal. I mean, Paul Simon even sang a song about how great Kodachrome was.

And, even though you could by an expensive one, most Kodak cameras were CHEAP because they made money on Kodak film.

Then, in 1975, an engineer at Kodak invented the digital camera! But shortsighted executives wanted to keep that lucrative film market going and so held up the marketing of the digital camera and squelched any efforts to improve it.

Then, oh-oh, in 1986 Nikon came out with a digital SLR camera and by 2005 digital cameras had pretty much replaced film ones.

Kodak struggled painfully to keep up but they'd already missed the boat. They ended up having to file for bankruptcy in '12.

I guess the moral of that story is no matter what, workers get screwed. You either have a greed-head dirtbag like Crazy Eddie who is systematically driving the company to ruin while at the same time buying off its assets so he can enrich himself even further. A money-glutton parasite swollen with worker misery until he's ready to burst.

OR

You have well-meaning executives that fail to keep up with the market due to internecine politics and the company goes belly up. Hey, who gets hurt then? You guessed it - the people who get laid off and the retirees who lose their pensions.