Gonna be a few pieces of equipment on the market soon. The Sears franchises are bankrupt. 15 or so trucks,rug plant and a whole bunch of stuff. $25 a room just doesn't pay....
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I'm Kinda amazed that their still in the game nationally, considering the shape of Sears in general, it's probably one of the few profitable ventures for them (apparently not in this case)
They're so smart they even bought Kmart, now they own 2 loozers. Who remembers the candy counter at Sears?
Sears just contracts with other firms to do work under the Sears name. Sears funnels jobs to them and they'll need to upsell like crazy to make any money. If a customer complains about the quality of the cleaning Sears just drops the charges and doesn't pay the contractor for the job. Some contractors figure out a way to hang on for years, others turn over regularly.
The Canadian company that went out of business has probably already been replaced by another company.
That's what I meant by contractor. Sears puts the 'contract' to be the local Sears cleaning company out to bid and chooses from the applicants. The last time I talked with the locals the contractor was a company called Keystone. Any Sears work required Sears logoed trucks and Sears uniformed employees, but the employees said they also did subcontract cleaning under other company names using plain white vans.I don't know if this is true everywhere. The Sears guys that I know owns his stuff and promotes the Sears badge on all of his stuff.
Sears Carpet cleaning is a leased department and is operated by an independent company. There was a time when a lot of the big department stores had carpet cleaning departments. As far as I know, they were all leased departments. Sears in the Detroit area was leased by 4 different companies in a 10 year period back in the 1980's.
I actually got my start with a company, Adler and Son, that ran leased in home cleaning departments for MANY different stores through the United States and Canada. I think at their peak they were in 35 different cities and represented Macy, Boston Store, JC Penney, Federated Stores, Carson Pirie Scott, G Fox, The Bay, Eatons, etc. There were some cities where they were representing 2 and 3 different stores at the same time. You just had to be careful what you said when you answered the phone.