u/FileStrict2957

Do you think Lampert always wanted to use Sears and Kmart as his own personal piggy bank? I would argue that he went in with the intention of making the combination a success and compete with Walmart. Of course this was when Amazon had a very negligible share of the retail market. He came into this deal with some retail investment success with Autozone. He was being called the next Warren Buffet. And he had some success with Sears initially. Then the 2008 Great Recession began and Sears never really made a profit after that, But it wasn't really until the mid- 2010's that Eddie began to sell off a lot of Sears assets. I will say his unorthodox managing style and his inability to listen to people with more experience in retail did the company in. While he didn't invest in the stores adequately, he did spend quite a bit to advertise Sears through the media and had some effective ad campaigns such as the Blue Crew, spent some money on new technology and improve some stores, This to me is not someone who always intended to bleed both companies dry. So I do believe he was making a good effort in his own way to turn the ship around up until I would say 2014/2015. At that point, after years trying with his pigheaded ideas: such as the useless Shop Your Way program, and nothing was working he said screw it and decided then to extract as much as he could out of the company. This is not to say I don't think the guy isn't a greedy scumbag, I'm just saying he fooled a lot of people, myself included, and deluded himself into thinking it would be successful. But because he had to be the smartest guy in the room, he fell flat on his face but still made billions,