Sears to Let Those Who Lose Jobs Stop Payments & Still Keep Appliances

Woo hoo!

Free Homes (many have stopped making mortgage payments years ago) Hyundai & Saturn car payments, and now this!

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601213&sid=arGRzYBsWFaI

Sears to Let Jobless Stop Payments, Still Keep Fridge (Update2)
Share | Email | Print | A A A

By Lauren Coleman-Lochner

June 29 (Bloomberg) -- Sears Holdings Corp., the largest U.S. department-store chain, will let customers who lose their jobs suspend payments and keep appliances bought with store credit cards in an effort to bolster sales in the recession.

Customers who spend at least $399 on appliances and related merchandise between July 6 and Aug. 1 will have one-twelfth of the purchase price credited to their account for every month they are out of work, said Larry Costello, a company spokesman. Those who are jobless for more than a year will have the full debt forgiven, he said. The offer period may be extended, he said.

“We thought this would be a way to get folks to jump in where they’d been a little reluctant,” Doug Moore, president of Sears’s home-appliance unit, said in a telephone interview.

The retailer, based in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, is running the trial program to spur spending on refrigerators and washing machines as consumers hold off on bigger purchases amid declining home values and mounting job losses.

Customers who lose their jobs between 60 days and one year after having made the purchase qualify for the offer, Costello said. The program also covers delivery, service and installation costs, he said.

Sears advanced $2.77, or 4.3 percent, to $67.67 at 4:30 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The stock has gained 74 percent this year.

Same-Store Sales

Last month, Sears said a drop in purchases of appliances and other home goods in the three months ended May 2 drove an 11.7 percent decline in sales at stores open at least a year. Sears didn’t specify appliance sales.

Sears, the largest appliance seller in the U.S., gained market share for the past four quarters after seven consecutive years of declines, Moore said.

Best Buy Co., the world’s largest electronics retailer, said June 16 that appliance sales at stores open at least 14 months fell 20.1 percent, compared with a 4.9 percent overall same-store sales drop in the three months through May 30. The chain is based in Richfield, Minnesota.

Same-store sales are considered a key measure of retail performance.

“It’s a differentiated program, and we believe that that’s going to get people to choose us over the other guys,” Kevin Brown, Sears’s chief marketing officer for home appliances, said by telephone.

The debt-forgiveness trial follows offers by carmakers allowing buyers who lost their jobs to stop payments. In January, Hyundai Motor Co. began offering the option of returning vehicles and abdicating some loan payments without penalty. General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. subsequently introduced similar programs.

“It is much different than the Hyundai-GM-Ford models that we’ve all seen out there, in that you keep the appliance,” Brown said. “We’re the only ones with a program of this kind in this industry.”

Citigroup Inc.’s credit-card unit is managing the program. Sears will run a Web site, http://www.searsbuyerprotection.com, with details.

To contact the reporter on this story: Lauren Coleman-Lochner in New York at llochner@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: June 29, 2009 16:43 EDT

 

"Citigroup Inc.'s credit-card unit is managing the program."

lol

 

This is just getting really pathetic now.....



Sears by the way will probably be going chapter 11 soon.

 

“We thought this would be a way to get folks to jump in where they’d been a little reluctant,” Doug Moore, president of Sears’s home-appliance unit, said in a telephone interview.



FOLKS TO JUMP IN....This guy is a complete idiot.

Doug moore better wake up and take notice this kind of business model is just going to bite them in the a$$ in months and years to come. We are in a crisis and all these companies think of is offering people who lose there jobs more fuc$ing Incentives, it seems the worse the economy gets the better the deal is for the consumer. When companies start to offer programs like this it becomes a drag on the entire retail sector.

 

searsbuyerprotection link doesn't work. LOL.

 

Probably if it didn't cost so much to throw the appliances away, Sears would probably dump them.

Fixed costs are too high across all sectors of the economy, if Sears has a warehouse full of Refs and washers, there are insurance costs, storage costs, future trucking costs. An appliance sitting in the warehouse is evaporating in present and future value.

On the flip side, the program is blue collar welfare.

 

And they say "deflation is BAD"...

 

Can we just get back to, if you want something, you buy it and pay for it? Was that really a difficult concept?

 

All I know is Obama my father and nancy my mother never said that.

 

There's a new motto Bernake is considering instead of 'green shoots.'

'Free stuff.'