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Sears: A Wal-Mart wannabe? |
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--Sear's sales have not grown in almost 2 years. So why is the appliance and tool giant, putting up more money to open a center bigger then wal-mart... with fresh milk and food?-- Many of the industry's observers think that it is a very bad gamble. Sear's has had bad sales, and continue to decline for almost 21 consecutive months now. "This is mad," said Howard Davidowitz, chairman of New York-based national retail consulting firm Davidowitz & Associates Inc. Sears plans to go up against the two "super store" giants... Target and Wal-mart, despite there 28 billion dollar debt. Sears is a $40 billion business but with $28 billion in debt," said Davidowitz. "It has posted some of the worst comparable sales over the past few years, a decline on average of about 7-to-8 percent a year. So what are larger stores going to do for them?"
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Despite
the fact that Sears will be going up against two major giants, Target:
ranked #4 in selling retail and Wal-mart: ranked #1 in selling retail.
Sears still believes that this move of theirs will be very positive and
might pull them out of there "slump". But some of the
industry's experts... say that Sears is out of their
mind!
Sears is calling their new store the "Sears Grand". They will
open 5 of them as part of there "pilot" program.... the first
of these will be built in Salt Lake City, Utah in 2005. The new stores
will be free-standing and will not be part of malls as usual, Sears
believes that putting their stores in malls are part of the
problem.
The new Sears Grand stores will be bigger than normal Target and Wal-mart
stores. Target stores are about 126,000 square feet of selling space.
The largest Wal-mart store is about 110,000 square
feet.
But the new stores will be 150,000 to 200,000 square feet in size,
compared to the old Sears stores... at 90,000 to 95,000 square feet.
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