The Sears at La Cumbre Mall closed in 2018. After this photo was taken, its sign was removed.
The Sears in La Cumbre Mall is closed. OK, this is not “breaking news” but this is a way of me sharing the lessons the building offers, especially at Christmas time.
Christmas time in my childhood included faces pressed against the back window of our 1947 Pontiac, the one that my brother tested the cigarette lighter against my arm (it worked) on our drive from the very suburban town of Haddon Township, N.J., up the Admiral Wilson Boulevard to Camden, N.J.
After we arrived at our destination, we experienced the kaleidoscope of colors and shapes in the Sears store, where the linoleum floors led us past the appliance and tools to the toy department. Even I knew it was much smaller than the Christmas displays in the Market Street department stores in Philadelphia. Wanamaker’s was so big that my father would say that if we got separated, I should go to the giant statue of an eagle on the first floor.
The Santa Barbara Sears may well have played the same type of prominent role in Santa Barbara as it did in Camden, and in the lifestyle of many in the southeastern parts of our country, as illustrated in the legendary career of the Georgia politician Eugene Tallmadge.
In D.C., Mr. Talmadge was known as the essence of style in his Italian suits. However, this was far from the image he presented while campaigning in bib overalls with what I call an “A-men Charlie,” based on the name of the man saying “Amen” at the end of each sentence in a church in Surgoinsville, Tenn.
Mr. Talmadge’s “Amen Charlie,” whenever Mr, Talmadge stopped for a breath, would be a chant of, “That’s right, Gene.” This built into climaxes of Mr. Talmadge yelling, “You have but three friends in this world: the good God above, the Sears catalog, and me, Eugene Talmadge, vote for me.”
You can see the importance of the Sears catalog in the Santa Ynez Valley, where the Lincourt winery was constructed from kit bought from that catalog.
Sears and Christmas merged during my first semester in graduate school at Clemson University, when before finals, to buy Christmas presents, I started work at Sears.
My “orientation,” one might say, in the philosophy at Sears began on my first day of employment, when an attractive sales lady walked into the small, almost intimate, employee lounge and said, “There are no more seats.”
Being a Jersey Boy, rather than offering her my seat, I said “You can sit on my lap.”
To my surprise, she did, although I never even asked, or learned, her name.
After Sears’ training program consisted only of advising me on their policy on “lap sitting,” I was turned loose on customers in the men’s and boys’ department, where I improvised.
For example, when a man wanted to trade in a well-worn pair of jeans for a new pair, I learned about Sears’ policy of guaranteeing jeans for life. A female customer did not know her husband’s size but said he was about my size, which is 6 feet. It turns out he was 5 foot 6 inches, so while the man filled his wife’s vision, he would not have filled my shirt.
I learned how to measure a teenager for a suit by asking his mother to measure me and then using the same points of reference to measure her son.
Sears taught me the value of understanding the ever-changing needs of your customers and training employees to satisfy them and that it is more difficult to look busy than to actually be busy.
Santa Barbara, like Sears, has not been immune from the ever-changing times, as the internet replaced the importance of the Sears catalog as well as the risk of not adjusting physical locations. For Sears, this meant having too many unprofitable stores.
When Eddie Lambert acquired control of Sears, he leveraged it in the same way that had been fabulously successful at his investment fund ESL Investments. This approach to retail led him down the path described for another executive as “He remained the same, but the posse moved.” Indeed, the “posse” of consumers moved from catalogs to the internet, layaways were replaced by credit cards, Sears credit cards were competing with other cards, and competitors, such as Home Depot, started specializing in the high profit items like appliances and tools.
Employees, like those in Costco, were trained to better understand — and satisfy — customers. The interior of stores was upgraded, such as by replacing linoleum floors.
Sears, however, under Mr. Lambert, continued to focus on acquiring and levering assets. After Kmart emerged from bankruptcy by reducing its stores from 2,100 to 1,400, he acquired it for Sears through his holding company Transformeo.
The Santa Barbara Sears store mirrored the other Sears in not adjusting to the changing times in Santa Barbara and elsewhere, as reflected in the much more upscale interior of the Robinson May store acquired by Macys in the same La Cumbre Mall as Sears.
Sears in Santa Barbara was fortunate to avoid the ever-changing “posse” of customers moving, as happened when the Sears store on Admiral Wilson Boulevard became surrounded by neon signs featuring the movements of topless dancers and the nearby Campbells Soup Co. started locking its employee parking.
Sears in Santa Barbara apparently decided against the risk of the approaching Christmas of 2018, and closed.
Terrific malls like Paseo Nuevo and La Cumbre, as well as State Street, are rejecting the Lambert-Sears approach to the “posse” moving, by heeding the words of Ben Franklin: “Sometimes the greater risk is delaying, or not taking, a risk.”
Brent E. Zepke is an attorney, arbitrator and author who lives in Santa Barbara. His website is OneheartTwoLivescom.wordpress.com. Formerly, he taught law and business at six universities and numerous professional conferences. He is the author of six books: “One Heart-Two Lives,” “Legal Guide to Human Resources,” “Business Statistics,” “Labor Law,” “Products and the Consumer” and “Law for Non-Lawyers.”
