Other day I heard that Sears had a disappointing black friday weekend. Now I held Sears stock and tools because I appreciated the equity in the brands like Craftsman and Kenmore and Sear’s excellent parts and service network. But after finding out that the rest of the company was buried in debt from buying K-Mart I sold the stock but kept the tools, and they’re currently shaking down the Illinois taxpayers for $400,000,000 to keep them from moving. IMHO, Sears should quit pretending to be a full line department store and concentrate on their successful brand franchises. But that probably won’t play in the Wall Street casino…

So I whip out what passes for home broadband here on the Buffalo Ridge, my “smart”phone, and surf over to Sear’s website in search of tool bargains. Up pops a more than the usual dumbed down “mobile” site, which offers me only random sale items from the whole store. Now I suppose I could have spent all day surfing through the random items in search of tools, but even out here on the Buffalo Ridge we don’t waste the whole day. Escape to the regular site? No way, and attempts at drilling in via google and other means only brought me back to the same dumbed down “mobile site”.

So Sears had a sale, including Craftsman tools, and probably half their customers couldn’t get through their busted website to find it… No wonder Sears had a bad weekend.