Sears Store Workers Denied Severance While Execs Collect Millions

According to a recent story from Vox, Sears execs – including former CEO, Eddie Lampart, who pretty much singlehandedly nailed the once great retailer’s coffin shut – are set to make millions off the company’s bankruptcy, while former store employees are being denied their previously promised severance packages.

As Vox explained, “the slow and painful death of Sears can be partially attributed to the rise of e-commerce and the ultimate decline of the American department store,” but ultimately, experts have placed most of the blame on Lampert, “who stepped down in October in conjunction with the bankruptcy filing.”

“Lampert has been accused of purposely profiting from Sears’s decline,” the story said. He “sold off valuable assets… to keep the company afloat, but then failed to invest in any store improvements.” Instead, he went with a series of “flopped retail experiments” described by experts as a “slow-moving train wreck.”

And yet, despite his role in bringing down the company, the former CEO is “walking away from the Sears bankruptcy even richer, while over 175,000 retail employees have lost their jobs and tens of thousands more are still on the line.”

What’s more, Vox found in the Sears bankruptcy filings that remaining execs are “hoping to allot up to $25 million in bonuses” to themselves.

As Vox said, “It was this news that triggered employees to get involved with Rise Up Retail” and the experts interviewed seem to think that a fight is on the horizon.

If this all sounds utterly reminiscent of the Toys R Us saga, that’s because it is. It turns out that the only thing more lucrative than running a big-time company in America is running that same company into the ground.

You can read more about it at Vox.

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