Sears and KMart were some of the leading retailers throughout the 20th century.  Both brands have fallen on hard times, and it seems very much like they will pass on to retail heaven someday.

Market forces and a lack of innovation is what started Sears and Kmart on its slide towards irrelevance. But what made these two brands  zombie was one man: Eddie Lampert.

Lampert was born the same year Kmart started: 1962. The CEO of a hedge fund, he bought Kmart in the mid-aughts and then merged it with another struggling retailer, Sears. What has happened since is hard to watch: more and more stores closing, the selling off of valuable parts of the merged company and little if any money put into revising the aging stores. Most companies would have sacked a CEO that hasn’t turned a profit since 2010 and who will go down in history for wrecking not one, but two storied brands. But he remains the captain of the retail Titanic as it continues to sink.

There maybe a reason that he is still in charge: he might be able to cash in on Sears and Kmart’s slow demise. In March 2016 CNBC reported the following:

USA TODAY estimates that the value of Lampert’s Sears stock has declined by roughly $519 million since the end of 2014. That estimate was derived by calculating the value of his Sear’s holdings at the end of each year since 2010, using Sears closing stock price for the year and the number of shares Lampert owned at the time, culled from S&P Global Market Intelligence data. Using that methodology, the highest year-end value of Lampert’s Sears holdings was $760.3 million.
But Lampert won’t lose it all.

“If they go bankrupt, he remains in control of the company because, though he loses his equity stake, he’s their principal creditor,” former Sears Canada CEO and Columbia Business School Professor Mark Cohen said an interview. But Lampert has cordoned “off an enormous amount of assets through the loans he’s made, which have essentially protected him from what is eventually (going to) occur.”
He has spun off divisions, provided secured financing in exchange for real estate collateral and transferring valuable properties to an investment trust, all while retaining ownership stakes in those assets.

Other news outlets, such as the New York Post report the same thing: Lampert is stripping the company of its assets and also making sure he makes something off the demise of Sears and Kmart.

Lampert is killing off the two stores by a thousand paper cuts, little by little. The stores look shabbier and shabbier and more and more stores close, and more parts of the company are sold off. It would be better if the stores just closed all at once, but that would probably not benefit Lampert. So what we have is this slow death, where the two brands becoming retail zombies, shambling through the retail market, slowly disintegrating.

We are asking that the board of Sears Holdings considers either selling itself to someone who is willing to revamp and change Sears and KMart .  Or, we ask that the board consider firing CEO Eddie Lampert because of his failure of leadship.