On Thursday, December 27, 2018, the storied 125-year-old American retailer Sears faced a fork in the road. Chairman Eddie Lampert put forth a $4.6 billion proposal for a buy-out to save Sears from bankruptcy, funded by his personal hedge fund, ESL Investments. ESL was the lone bidder with the capacity to preserve the company in its entirety, and Sears's only hope to survive intact. The alternative would have been to split the company into multiple pieces by liquidators. The brands and intellectual property aggregated under Sears retains value and will sell for money, even after liquidation. Sears has also announced that it will close an additional 80 stores by March of 2019.
Before this current moment in the Sears drama, the Sears-Kmart duo - with Sears Holdings Corporation (OTC: SHLDQ)as the parent company of both chains - saw many more store closings, leaving a headcount of approximately 400 stores nationwide. It had roughly 3000 stores during its heyday, after the merger of Sears and Kmart in the early 2000's.
As of December 30, 2018, Lampert's bid still stands alone. It is still pending approval from the Sears Holdings' board, which it hopes to receive come January 2019 -- although rejection is also a possibility. The company had filed for bankruptcy on October 15, 2018.
Lampert claims that if it is accepted, the bid will protect 50,000 of the 68,000 total jobs in Sears, although the technical details of this feature of the bid are still unknown. The average employee headcount at a Sears store is approximately a dozen or so workers. On the opposite end of the company spectrum is the clear news of the guaranteed executive bonuses, amounting to approximately $442,000 on average per executive. Ironically, these bonuses will be going to the set of individuals under whose leadership Sears amassed $2 billion in losses in the past year. Furthermore, the company is offering another $17 million in retention bonuses for the 315 members of management to stay. This is true now, in spite of the fact that the members of management who left in previous stages of the company's downturn were compensated with far less.
Informed observers of the Sears downturn can generally agree on one thing: the bid will likely be unsuccessful, and this once-iconic American company's run will soon come to an end.