I think you’re right about Kmart/Sears, though the interesting thing was that Lampert was correct that Sears had a great deal of real estate which had tremendous value. If someone skilled at retail had bought it, they could have used the money from selling some of that, to fix the business. Of course, Lampert was only skilled at finance and RE and very obviously just planned to gently wind down the business while selling off its assets, which is much less risky to do than fixing it - and may have yielded better financial results anyway.

That’s why the popular perception is that the Kmart transaction and Lampert killed it, even though their lot had really been cast 15+ years before, when they stopped innovating, and really stopped investing in their stores completely, without getting serious about e-commerce either. That poisoned their brand, which made it really hard to imagine turning it around.

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projektfu 4 hours ago | parent [-]

And really you could say that Discover killed it, because they lost focus on the core (or legacy?) business.

Still, department stores in the US are nothing like they were in their heyday.

	▲	xp84 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sears and Kmart both did so much diversification in the ~1980s! Discover, Allstate insurance, Dean Witter, Coldwell Banker for Sears (and Kmart had bought Borders, Builders Square, PACE, OfficeMax). If you trace the total return to a holder of Sears stock c. 1980, including the value they would have received in terms of stock in the spinoffs, the shareholders themselves may have actually ended up doing quite well in our timeline, even compared to one where Sears had reinvested all their profits into Sears, Roebuck & Co and maintained a more dominant retailing business as a result. It seems like no one really cared if the core business succeeded or failed, though.