Open Thread

What’s on your mind?

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[Dr. Ed 2]

Sears & Roebucks is down to just five stores, and people laugh at me when I say that the same implosion is in the process of happening to higher education and particularly to law schools.

https://www.costar.com/article/1406528706/once-giant-sears-could-soon-be-down-to-just-five-locations

The Sears of a century ago was a mail order giant -- using Rural Free Delivery (which had arrived in 1906) and Parcel Post (which the US Post Office has now essentially abandoned), Sears sold almost everything including houses. Seriously, Sears sold ready-to-assemble house kits although those were shipped to the nearest railroad siding.

With the post-war prosperity it opened physical "brick & mortar" stores which became the anchors of shopping malls but still maintained its catalogs and its national inventory numbering system for every item it sold. Most of the stores were small and didn't stock most of the items in the catalog, but you could either have your catalog order delivered to your house and pay for shipping, or have it delivered to the nearby store for free.

To get to the part of the store where you could pick up your order, you had to go through the rest of the store and would inevitably buy a few more things, and their telephone ordering system (you called someone and gave her the numbers of the things you wanted) could have easily been easily been transferred to the web.

And payment -- Sears had its own credit cards...

And as to Christmas Toys -- at the height of the baby boom, the toy department was all commission sales -- something that would be unimaginable today.

So Sears first abandoned its catalog in favor of larger stores, and then abandoned its stores in favor of e-commerce and then abandoned its reputation for middle-class quality by merging with "that junk store" K-Mart, and regardless of what Eddie Lambert may or may not have done, imploded itself.

Sears stopped meeting its customer's needs in the 1970s, starting with responding to the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo by not decorating for Christmas that year. (The next year they put the decorations up but didn't plug them in.) It was more than this -- and it wasn't -- but Sears imploded. Just like the railroads did a generation earlier, and just like higher education soon will....

[Frank Drackman]

Those Kenmore appliances would run forever.
Remember my Dad bought a Sears Lawn Sprinkler, had a 10 yr warranty, gaskets went at about 9yrs 10 months, Sears replaced it with a new one, and that's not why they're failing (that was 1971) because Dad probably bought $20 of Crap he wouldn't have bought getting a $4 (it was 1971) Sprinkler replaced.

Frank

[Malika la Maize]

As the clock struck midnight on Christmas morning at one Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, at least one someone was stirring. 

Starting in the early hours of December 25 and ending in the evening, President Donald Trump posted over 100 times on Truth Social…

At 12:01, Trump began the spree by sharing an over-eight-minute video by someone explaining “The DEMOCRAT FRAUD PYRAMID.” 

Throughout the day, concluding around 7 o’clock, the president repeated many times that the 2020 election was stolen. He also shared a post that praised White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s handling of the “fake news,” another of someone who called Democrats a “criminal organization,” and one where Trump said, of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), “Throw her out of the U.S., Now!”

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/12/trump-spent-christmas-posting-over-a-hundred-times-on-truth-social/

[Frank Drackman]

and with all that he still won every "Battleground" State, and Florida? the state "W" had to go to the Surpremes to ratify he won by 534 Votes in 2000, "45/47" won by oh, 1.4 million.
that's a "1.4" with 5 Zeroes after it.
But of course look at who he was running against, the Late, Great Dr. Hannibal Lecter could have won against her, and her prancing Forest Sprite, Sergeant Major Pepper-Waltz

Frank

[Dr. Ed 2]

I have 4 inches of Global Warming to shovel.

[Frank Drackman]

Sounds like there was some Shrinkage