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Sears Canada (1952-2017)

  • Thread starter CanadianNational
  • Start date
The Eaton Centre location of Sears has started their "Closing Sale" early, since yesterday morning. I thought they would have waited until after Christmas. The sale is okay, but not great. Most merchandise is 10-40 percent off, plus an extra 10 percent if you use their credit card. Everything is final sale though, and the Eaton Centre store is not honouring any other coupons or discounts that the other Sears locations are offering.

Which is having the interesting effect of making some items quite a bit more expensive at that Sears than at others. It'll be interesting to see what, if anything, they do for Black Friday tomorrow.
 
A neighbour of mine works in their head office, and she says they have been told that they will be staying in their current location "for a bit". Also she tells me that the store will be open through mid February, and they will be clearing out a lot of junk from other locations as well once the Eaton Centre stock is depleted and the holidays are over.
 
When the Vancouver store was shut down, the liquidator came in and towards the end you could tell that some of the stuff that they were clearing out never orignated from Sears in the first place.
 
Retail Insider has mentioned on Twitter that Sears Canada may have a domestic buyer. Some are predicting Canadian Tire or Loblaws, but I'm thinking Simons. I suppose it depends on what's more valuable: the chain or the real estate.
 
Simon's isn't big enough, I don't think, to take all those leases. Sears Canada also include the furniture stores, auto centres, catalogue, and small town associate dealers.

It would have to be a consortium of multiple interests (unless it was Canadian Tire or Loblaws). If it was Simons - they would need private equity backing and are perhaps thinking its cheaper for them to partner up with deep pockets, pick up the leases they want and then monetize the other assets via sale. Simons is a private company that I'm sure does well... but can't swallow up Sears without significant fundraising. Sears did $4.3B of Gross Sales. The saks acquisition was 1x gross revenue (or there abouts). I would imagine Simons does somewhere between $600M - $800M of gross sales (Assuming its stores perform at $800 a square feet and average out at 100,000 square feet with 9 locations). My point is that it would be hard for them to take on the amount of debt (as they probably already have existing debt) to finance an acquisition without a partner - Simons seems to be reticent at involving such partnerships as per this Globe article:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/repo...at-a-time/article14148615/#dashboard/follows/
 
What Canadian chain is hugely profitable, has deep pockets, and is constantly looking to expand?

Hmmmm.

The answer is obvious. The Sears stores will all be converted to really big Tim Hortons.
 
Someone at work is leaving to take a IT position at Sears. A couple of us asked, WTF?? Why they would do that I have no idea.
 

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