 Welcome back to the FeeCast, your weekly dose of economic thinking from your friends at the Foundation for Economic Education. I am Richard Lawrence. Today with an abbreviated and abridged panel, we have Anna Jane Perle and Mary Ann March. Dan Sanchez has decided that he actually wants to get some work done today. He has a beard to grow. He's very busy. It takes a lot of concentration to get that going. Yeah, absolutely. I get it. I want him to focus on that. Eat a lot of protein, biotin. We'll continue with Beard Watch 2018 next week when he's back on the show. So this week, we're going to talk about something that's been in the news, and it's the possible end of an era for a company that many, many people throughout our American history in the past century or so have patronized, and that's Sears, which was formed as Sears Roebuck and Company 132 years ago. They have declared their bankruptcy. Well, what does that mean? Because I feel like since I was maybe 10 or 15, I've been hearing kind of, oh, they're scaling back there. Right. You know, they're scaling back their, I guess, business processes. So this means they are officially as an entire company saying that we're done. Not quite. Right. So they haven't had a profitable year since 2010, and they announced in August that they were closing around 46 stores, but things haven't been good. It's hard times. They merged with Kmart several years ago, and now they're planning to close another 142 unprofitable stores. So we should definitely note that there are still going to be hundreds of stores all over the place. Okay. How does that work? Yeah. I mean, like if there's still, see, when I hear bankruptcy, it's like they're shutting all the stores down. That's what I thought it meant for Kmart, too, and that happened to Kmart. And so I thought it meant like Sears is going to be gone. So they filed a debtor and possession loan, which means that they just need enough liquidity to keep the business going. So they, but they also had a big debt, $134 million debt payment coming up, and they were reportedly saying that they weren't going to be able to cover it. They didn't do it on Monday, which is why they filed what's called Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which basically allows them the debtor and possession kind of situation. They can reorganize their debt so they can continue to operate and they can continue to have money coming in, continue to have that liquidity, like Marianne said, to continue operating businesses. I think they had something on the order of 1200 stores even as early as this spring, and they've scaled down dramatically, and they plan on operating a reduced number of stores through the end of this year, through the Christmas and holiday season. And then I suppose we'll see where things are at the beginning of 2019. Assuming that those are profitable stores still. I mean, that's what I don't understand is at what point do you just cut your losses and say, this business model is not working anymore. People aren't going to come here for their eyeglasses and their tires and their drills. Well, the CEO, Eddie Lampert, has been pouring his own money into the company for years and he's been trying to financially save it for a long time. But they are still going to have 680 stores remain, and that's including Kmart locations. And we'll have to see if they can manage to save it and come up with something new. If only they had thought to maybe follow the Amazon model and take their stores online. Yeah, like is that what's taking over here? Is that really, it's just everything's much easier to get online. I know it's true for me. It's interesting because I was trying to recall the last time I've been in a Sears location. And honestly and truly, I can't remember, but on a regular basis here in Atlanta, we have a place called Ponce City Market that used to be the big distribution center for Sears in Atlanta and it's right along the Beltline. That's a huge warehouse. Yeah, it's this beautiful brick building and over the past five years or so, it's been converted into a whole mixed use retail food and residential and office space. And it's gorgeous and you go in there and you see some of the callbacks to when Sears used to be running a big warehouse out of that area. It's right on the Beltline, which is the old sort of circular railroad that was here in Atlanta. So you'd get shipments and then they would go in that sort of circular railroad, drop them off there and people would pick up what they ordered at the distribution center or have it delivered. It's impossibly huge, the Ponce City Market. And it is Ponce City Market is celebrated as one of those ways that we see us moving away from early 20th century to now is that we're making mixed use buildings that are really cool and I think represent diverse interests, diverse needs and also like the increasing. I mean, to me, I don't know, it represents like luxury in America is like these upscale restaurants and stores are becoming more to me publicly accessible. It's right in the heart of Atlanta and we're moving from just like a giant warehouse of goods at Sears. The brick and mortar model is outdated and that's what's making Sears suffer right now because you mentioned Amazon and Amazon is just sort of taking everything by storm, right? You can order anything from there. But there was a time when that was Sears and that was pretty much the place you could go to for everything. Like you said, drill bits, tires, clothes. It's Sears. My parents tell these amazing stories. My dad's very, he loves, you know, the bootstrapper story. He talks a lot about being very kind of, I mean, him and my mom were on their own when they were first married and they got a Sears credit card and they used it for everything, including dental care, which I think is absolutely in the Sears. Yeah. Yeah. So it was set up in this little, like there was nothing but a partition between you and like the shopping of the clothing that's on the racks. So you're like in this little sort of cubby between the sweaters and the jeans. Yeah, supposedly, but also you know. Yeah, yeah, apparently this is where he got his fillings. They got their fillings there for years and put it on their credit card and would pay it off and it kind of Sears represented an opportunity for people who are trying to make their lives better. Yeah. Trying to do good things for themselves like dental care that don't necessarily have, you know, the money on them that don't have the liquidity but essentially wanted to improve their lives. And I thought that that was such a cool, to me, a very meaningful, like my dad loves that story. He's like, you know, you just have to, Sears represented kind of giving someone an opportunity who may not have otherwise had an opportunity. Oh, totally. And we'll get into that a little bit more in a bit. But I sort of wonder from your perspective, each of you, is this bankruptcy, which is not the end of Sears. It is a serious reorganization, so they're going to have to really look at what their business model is in the Amazon era. But is this bankruptcy, this this next chapter of Sears, a good thing or a bad thing in today's sort of society? Good for who? I'll leave that up to you. I mean, is this good for, let's say, the consumer? I mean, I'm going to skip over you, Anna-Jane, and answer and answer myself and say that I think that there is probably a net positive for the consumer. I think that it's sad and we have a lot of nostalgia for four Sears similar to how we feel about, I think, Toys R Us, which has gone through a similar hard time. And they've closed totally. So Toys R Us ain't coming back. Yeah. But I think that if people were getting enough value out of Sears that people would still be going there. I myself haven't been inside of a Sears in a long time to purchase anything. Sometimes I'll cross through one on my way to a different store in the mall, but department stores in general just aren't my bag, baby. And well, that's what I was saying. Maybe it's not to me. It's not a positive for the consumer because it's like, why are we still? Why are we even? Why do we still have stores for Sears at all? It's like, why are people using them? Is that even beneficial to us as a society? Is anyone out there using these stores anymore? I don't know. Well, I think that's a question that could be extended beyond just Sears to stores selling anything that maybe you don't need on demand. Yeah. So I think of maybe like Home Depot, that might be a store that you would actually want to go in and buy it right then and there and not have a shift, but I could be wrong. And I think with Sears with the clothes and I don't. Where do people buy their washers and dryers now? Though, I guess that's my. I can buy it on Amazon. Well, yeah, you can buy it online. Best Buy, that's where I think of when I think of washers and dryers. I don't know. Yeah. So it's an interesting question, right? Because obviously Sears existed until today and still does, right? So there's some role for a department store. And in many places in the country, the Sears Auto Center is one of the only reputable garages, right? So the only real place you can go to buy tires or get your car serviced. And many of those locations are closing too. And so I think it's important for us to just take a step back occasionally from our sort of urban Atlanta kind of framework that we operate through and say, you know, Sears has existed and has provided a lot of value in the past few decades even even since Amazon and internet retailing hit sort of the consumer world, right? So I think it does provide some value, but I think we'll get into later why this might in the long run, maybe even the medium run be a net benefit for consumers even more. So I want to go real quickly, because I think this is this is an interesting topic to talk about some of the history of Sears. Sears made a huge impact on America and the wealth and the ease with which we enjoy that wealth in this country. And one of the biggest ways was the Sears catalog. Yeah, that was like you said, like you said earlier, it's to me, Sears is the Amazon of yesteryear. It is very it represents just access to an immense array of goods for the average consumer or something like one in every four households had a Sears catalog in it in the early 1900s. I think that is, you know, at fee, we love innovators, we love entrepreneurs. Sears was an incredible entrepreneurial effort. One thing I heard that was more anecdotal that I think is really charming is that Mr. Sears, he believed that his catalog should be just like a half inch smaller on both, you know, on both on all sides. Then the it was the other it was the other department store that was really popular than Montgomery Ward. Yes, that's what it was. So just a slightly smaller catalog like height and width wise so that when people are cleaning their houses and they stack their catalogs, it goes on top on top. Yes, I love that story. That's Steve Jobs in attention to detail and sort of thinking through all that kind of stuff. Well, one of the things I think is most interesting about the catalog, because I think back to our conversation earlier about the Ponce City Market rate, so that wasn't an actual store people went to. They mostly placed orders through the mail and then the items would arrive at the distribution center by freight train and then go out and be delivered by whomever at the US Postal Service or whatever private delivery service Sears had employed at that point. One of the most interesting stories about Sears, I believe, is the impact that catalog shopping had on racism during the Jim Crow era. Yeah, yeah, because when you think back to that time, the sort of turn of the 20th century, you can think back to the way in which in the South, at least, where we are in the Jim Crow South, you know, people would have to go to the general store or another store most likely owned by a white person. Sometimes that person might not be as willing to sell to a black person and maybe even just introduce delays into the sales process. And so you're a black person, you're coming in, you want to buy something. Maybe you have to wait a while. These are big, big concerns. So not only not selling to black people at all, but also making it much more difficult for them. The Sears catalog actually made it much easier for people to both order anonymously without, you know, showing up and making someone make the decision to discriminate or not. But it also gave them something much more powerful than the ability to buy from retail. It gave them dignity. They could access all of the things that otherwise privileged non-black people, i.e. white people in the South could access. This was an amazing innovation that made it possible for black people to rise up economically in their own living standards. Yeah, and subvert racial hierarchies that were still in place at the time. They're really as amazing. I can only imagine. It's just equal access to goods for all, right? And that's what's so cool about it. And especially, I mean, it's not that, you know, this company's not saying, well, I care about equality. They're saying, I want to make a profit. I care about getting goods to as many people as possible. And in that way, like you said, we give dignity to all. We give access to all. And I think that that's a really cool idea. They were making something something like so Sears by 1907. I think they were making what is the equivalent of today's one point three billion dollars worth of profit. Wow. And and that's just insane to me if you compare it to like what we're doing with Amazon now or like what we see with Amazon and everything now. So Sears was just just this to me, like a monster of a I think of a provider of goods and of goods. And like you said, I think that it just it provided access to goods in a way that people used to not have. They used to have to go into town, go to a store, and hopefully they had one of the two different sewing machines that were available at the store. So in some ways Sears was a disruptor to those small country stores in the same way that Amazon is a disruptor to Sears. Right. That's right. You know, it's also interesting because just going back to the disruption factor, many of these black people who typically had to go into general stores, they were sharecroppers and the people who owned the general stores were in many cases the people who owned the land that they were working on. So it kind of added another sort of dimension of hierarchy that they had to go against. Another one of the things I think was sometimes under misrepresented, let's just say misrepresented about the way in which Sears had an impact on the American economy was there were so many things that they offered. Yeah, houses, houses. That's the coolest thing. I love I love I love looking at pictures of Sears houses. They sold just like IKEA sells, you know, you can build your own bed frame. They sold houses you could build from scratch with your bare hands. And then you had a little guide about how to build it. And you go pick up all of your wood and all of your pieces and you just build a house from scratch. And it is the DIY house from Sears. Yeah, yeah, and it was it was shockingly affordable to at the time. It was something like 2000 bucks, which in 19 in the early 1900s would have been like $50,000, $55,000. So you have a piece of land you put up a house. Yeah, yeah. And that's the coolest thing. So it also something that people note that it was really Sears was critical in undermining institutional and and governmental racism in red lining. Right, through zoning. So where they said basically that certain types of people can't go into these areas or buy homes. Well, yeah. So is that what you mean by red lining? Well, red lining is basically it's the name given to systematic disadvantage. And specifically, people refer to when the National Housing Act was the National Housing Act of 1934 created the Federal Housing Association. And they basically said they were they were created to put a stop to, you know, a run on mortgaging and like being able to provide mortgages to anyone at any time in theory to stabilize the economy. But what it really created was a situation where the government then created an entity that could say which neighborhoods, mortgage companies, banks were allowed to insure or were allowed to provide mortgages for and which insurance companies were allowed to provide insurance for. So they would say you've got type A neighborhoods, which are the best neighborhoods, i.e. the most rich and typically the most white. Right. And then you've got all the way down to, you know, type D, which is the red line neighborhoods because this was also color coordination system, which is why they call it red lining. Those were oftentimes the most the most impoverished neighborhoods, but but also African American predominantly African American communities. And so what it created was a system where banks and insurance companies were de-incentivized to provide mortgages to to black people because the FHA wouldn't insure them. I mean, it's just it is systematic national racism. So how did Sears impact that? So Sears basically said, not only can you buy a house from us, you can also buy, you don't have to pay up front for that entire house. You don't have to pay us all $2,000. You can get on a mortgage system with us. Sears was providing private mortgages. Yeah. Oh, wow. And almost anyone could get one. And it was it was I've seen ads again. Like I'm fascinated by by the by the houses that Sears offered at the time. You could buy houses for payments as low as $25 a month. And it's like, wow, that's so cool. Yeah. So they were offering private insurance as well on your house. So it's like you get insurance and mortgages through Sears. And so it disrupts red lining. So obviously those policies were horrible that were limiting people and their ability to buy a house. But I think that in the time between being able to eliminate policies like that, because sometimes when these things get enacted, it's really hard to weed them out that in that time, we can say that those policies are bad and that we don't approve of them. But before they could be eliminated, there were options for people of color to get housing. That's really powerful. Yeah. And it was I mean, it's private. It was privately provided. And I think that that's so cool. And it's basically to me also like redlining or thinking about neighborhoods as undesirable neighborhoods or desirable neighborhoods. Is so static and it's it completely washes us of any opportunity to change that and to say I want to improve my neighborhood. And I think that Sears came in and said, or I mean, Sears existing empowered people to say, I want to stay in my neighborhood. I don't want to have to move to be to be insured. I'm going to build a house here and it's going to be beautiful and I'm going to stay here and I'm going to make this community better. I just I just love Sears in that way so much. It's such a cool thing. And when you're again in Ponce City Market, that old distribution center for Sears Roblox, you can see some of the ads for these things. And they're really cool to pull them up online. You can see some of the images of these. Some of these houses are actually selling for a million dollars these days. So they've retained their value. Oh, yeah. And it's like there's like clubs now where people get together and like hunt for Sears houses. They just go around the neighborhood and like see if they can find compared to the designs that they had. And it's very, very cool. So they started selling them in the catalog in 1908. There were over 400 variants. And some estimates put the number of units sold at between 70 and 75,000. So it's not a gigantic number. One of the thing, but but still significant, of course, one of the things I think is most interesting about this, among the 400 plus models, many of them included accommodation for things such as central air conditioning and electricity and plumbing. Now we're talking. This is, you know, all the niceties and luxuries at that time of life were being brought to the masses through Sears. And so and these were, you know, easy to assemble. You didn't have to mill anything. You didn't have to be, you know, a blinkin in the woods, cutting down the trees, putting the cabin together to hire anyone to do it either. It's like you were doing it yourself. You could. I mean, some assembly required, but you can hire someone to help you out with that, do a whole house raising if you lived in that type of area. So another thing, another item that Sears sold aside from the houses that's just so interesting to me is steel string guitars. And this is actually referenced in a very specific. It is. And this is, of course, with me, I'm a musician amateur wise. I always wanted a double bass player. Oh, yeah. I was going to say, never mind you, I knew that. I thought you meant like guitar player. No, no, no, no, no. But string instrument, nonetheless. And in fact, the double bass is a member of the guitar family. So really sort of related. But anyway, there's an article at Reason Magazine, our friends at Reason Magazine in 2012 by Chris Curness, and he wrote that because Sears offered steel string guitars for $1.89, which was essentially about $50 in today's money. Sears really inspired the creation of the entire musical format of the Delta Blues, which was another African American sort of art form that emerged mostly because of the easy availability of the steel string guitar. I just think that's such a cool thing. Yeah. Yeah. I think that is a really, really interesting. I didn't know that story. I didn't know that that that was. So they made the Delta Blues possible. One other story that I really love is there was someone who actually bought out Mr. Robux shares in Sears Robux. His name was Julius Rosenwald, and he became a part owner in 1895. And he ended up becoming a very well known philanthropist for the African American community. And he ended up donating four point three million dollars through his entire philanthropic efforts, which would be more than seventy five million dollars a day to start these Rosenwald schools for African Americans in mostly rural areas in the South. And these were new schools with big open windows, you know, a lot of light coming through. These were so unlike anything else that would have been available before the end of segregation for African American students. And in fact, so many people of note ended up going to these Rosenwald schools, including John Lewis, the famous civil rights leader here from Atlanta and Maya Angelou. Exactly. Yeah. Oh, wow. And these really ended up phasing away pretty quickly once segregation was. Wait, was the intention specifically the customer base was African American students? Yes. Oh, wow. That is really cool idea. And, you know, think about seventy five million dollars and how many schools that can open. And it was a huge philanthropic initiative by someone who made a lot of money off of the Sears enterprise. Yeah. Thinking back to what we're talking about as Sears as a disruptor to those small country stores, there was there was backlash against Sears from those stores. There was they felt that Sears had an unfair advantage that they were able to essentially buy in bulk and sell things at a lower price. And so there were campaigns of a sort for for merchants who were encouraging people to collect the catalogs and they would have bonfires and is that not exactly how people feel about Amazon today? It's like, you know, small businesses are like complaining that Amazon has power. I mean, the Stop Bezos Act that we talked about previously, it's that. That's crazy. And wasn't there something, Marianne, that Sears and Roebuck themselves had to end up posting pictures or publicizing pictures of themselves to prove that they were white? Right. So that was that was another part of it, was that a lot of racist merchants would say to try to discourage people from buying from Sears. They said that it was founded by by blacks. And really? Yeah. And so that's which it weren't. And yeah, but like that that that that was even a conversation is interesting to me that a business had to address something like that. But that's. Yeah. But there were there were implications implications for policy where there were antitrusts and kinds of loss pushed through to try to try to stop these terrible companies from even our lives. So even policy, because typically when I think about antitrust or I think about when I think about any sort of government involvement in business goings on, I typically picture them siding with the larger company. So you're saying that smaller businesses were encouraging policy that that basically undermines Sears. Right. OK, right. I mean, that's, you know, we think of that as being pluralism when people get together with similar interests to to stand up against their Goliath, whether it's a large or tiny Goliath, I guess, it doesn't really matter. But yeah, they were using their power to try to suppress them. Well, these Goliaths, as you have referenced, come and go, right? Right. So we have an article on feed.org talking about the Fortune 500, the largest 500 publicly traded or maybe not even only publicly traded companies in the United States, comparing the 1955 Fortune 500 to the 2016 Fortune 500, there are only 60 companies that appear on both. Isn't that amazing? I mean, you just sort of have to you go through these cycles of, you know, companies that reach massive success and then eventually they become outmoded. And, you know, in economics, we sometimes refer to the notion of when some of these older type of businesses go away as creative destruction. Joseph Schumpeter actually came up with this notion that when resources aren't being used efficiently or they're being underused, then a bankruptcy or a business collapse, the destruction of a company actually frees those resources to be used in a more creative, valuable way. And that's what's happened, we hope, with Toys R Us. That's why the investors in the Toys R Us have closed the shops because they have, in theory, a better idea of what to do with it. And possibly, if Sears isn't able to compete in the Internet era, they will be another example of creative destruction. And the idea is that that is better for consumers, right? Eventually, that does end up creating a better situation for them because obviously department stores weren't doing it for them. It was an inefficient use. So you're saying, so like when we talk about those, freeing those resources, an inefficient use of the resources as it stands is ultimately more costly to the consumer. Yeah, yeah, because you're tying something up that could be used much more effectively, otherwise. So we're pushing out the old outdated methods and new production methods are coming in. And basically, everybody's just chasing profits. And the good thing about that for us as consumers is that by them chasing profits, it makes things better. And then in the long run, it makes things cheaper. And we all benefit from that. I always love referencing the quotation from the economist in Noble Laureate, F.A. Hayek. He said, profit is a signal that we're serving well people who we don't know. So thinking about chasing profits, some people might say, yeah, that's not good. That's just sort of money-grugging, short term interest for, you know, business owners or shareholders. But, you know, actually by generating profits, we're showing and demonstrating value that's being created for people on the consumer level. And so, yeah, in the end, when you end up seeing these old brands and old stores closing, you begin to wonder, well, maybe that heralds something new that can be done. Not only with those resources, but with the resources that you're putting into your retirement, into the stock market, right? And so hopefully when you're, you know, investing, you're investing in places that are possible to get higher return. And we don't want that being locked up in sears. Right. I hope this doesn't sound heartless, but I just think of we have to clear out the old brush sometimes of our economic firms to make way for the new ones. What are the next advances going to be? They're not going to have room to grow if there's a lot of. Deadwood. Yeah. Well, not to derail the positivity here, but my question is, and this is, I think, an argument here sometimes is that, OK, well, yeah, but like a bunch of Toys R Uses are closing. What are all the people that work at Toys R Us going to do now? Well, hopefully they can work at the at the next, you know, giant to come along or or not. They could use their skills to to do something else. I wish them well and hope that those people will be able to rebound quickly and find new new fulfilling work. It's just it doesn't make sense to burn through a lot of resources to to keep things things alive. I am doing some reading and I found that billionaire Isaac Larian, who is the founder of the toy company that makes Bratz dolls, started a GoFundMe campaign to save Toys R Us. And they raised a lot of money, but it didn't work. It didn't didn't save Toys R Us. So if you need a chair, if you need charity to save you, then you're not a big you see what I mean? Like it's then it's not a then it's a business that doesn't make sense anymore. No, you're absolutely right. People aren't willing to give you money because you give them something good. And then then why why exists and it could sometimes come across as heartless to say those people are going to find new jobs. And of course, that doesn't come without pain and cost and training. But but the major point that I'm trying to convey here is a business is not an employer first, right? A business is only an employer in as much as its employees are creating value for the consumers, it all comes back to the consumer. You should not and cannot subsidize something for very long if it's not actually producing value for the end customer. And that's really the only reason that a business exists. Well, and it's I so I teach Boy Scouts, I teach them entrepreneurs to get their entrepreneurship badge through some of my work. And one of the one of the things that we repeat over and over again to them about entrepreneurship and innovation is that you can serve yourself, you can be selfish, you can care about profit, but you only serve yourself well when you serve others well. And that's it. And that's the lesson that we take from from creative destruction is that we serve we serve ourselves well when we serve others well. Yeah, we also do ourselves in the economy of vast disservice when we ignore price signals. We saw this in communist Russia when they were lifting prices actually out of the Sears catalog, because they didn't know what the price mechanisms of any kind. Yeah, exactly to clue them into what the demand was or even the supply for these things that they would just name an arbitrary price. And they would have to stick to that for a year because their prices were rigid. So regardless of how much it cost to make, regardless of how many people wanted it, regardless of what changes happen in the economy. If people were desiring pens instead of pencils, it didn't matter that pens were, you know, less than pencils. They were still that price for the entire year. And that just goes back to the sort of comprehensive nature of this year's catalog, that it was a single source that you could go to in a country to look up the prices, however flawed that approach was. But isn't it kind of funny that they looked it up in a market driven context in the Sears context to see what they should be selling nails for over in a country that didn't have a price system? Yeah, I wonder if if there are any of these giant companies that could stand the test of the time, is that even possible? Because we do see even a company like Sears that has been in our historical memory at least for over 100 years. Is it possible that one could last longer, could last 500 years? I mean, yeah, that's a really hard question just because even we as a country are very young, so it's really hard to picture what a what a company that lasts looks like. I think that, I mean, you know, I hate we talk about Amazon all the time, but Amazon sold books and now they sold they just sold me socks right before we started taping. Now you can buy containers that you can live in on Amazon. So they're selling houses too. See, that's what I picture Amazon moving into. Like, how can we fully inform someone's life? Yeah, but I guess I just wonder 100 years from now when, you know, name a name a company that doesn't exist yet. And would they be in the same boat of kicking themselves for saying, dang it, why why didn't we as Sears just put our catalog online? Why didn't we just and they did it was just too little, too late. They didn't have the infrastructure to be able to do that. Marianne, when you ask that question, I think of brands more than companies, right? Because you think of, well, maybe one big company and brand is Coca-Cola. They've been around for quite a while now and, you know, they are thriving and they're one of the most recognized brands. So they're probably an example of something with staying power, but they only do one thing. They make beverages, right? And they've really just changed the conversation around the beverage from, oh, it's occasional treat to you need this with every sandwich or hamburger you eat. Yeah. Sure, Coke. Coke is life. Coke makes happy. Whatever the marketing blitz is today. But I also think of other things, you know, such as craft foods. Who knows who owns them today? Maybe Procter and Gamble owns craft. I'm not entirely sure. But you've got brands that exist for a while because people are loyal to those because they know those brands, but they have to be in my estimation, they have to be very, very focused if they're going to survive. And the problem with Sears is that they did everything. Yeah. So possibly later down the road. How's the dental work tires? All of it. So possibly later down the road when you've got so many entrants coming in to the internet commerce side of things, Amazon might need to go back to the basics. I mean. Jack of all trades versus master of none. Exactly. So I guess, and I think this is a question that applies to companies besides just Sears and to malls in general is what do we think is going to happen to malls? Because Sears is a large anchor store and a lot of malls. And I know from working in retail that anchor stores basically control the malls. They decide what days they're open and closed. And if in the future, we see a lot of anchor stores shutting down, I mean, are those malls going to turn those spots into gymnasiums? You know, what they do is they turn them into sites to film movies from the 1980s, including Stranger Things, which is something you can imagine when you visit the closing mall near where I live, the North DeKab Mall. It's like one of those places totally empty. It's got a movie theater. It's got maybe like a Belk or something like that. Otherwise empty. So they're movie sets now for a bygone era. Well, this has been a really, really good discussion, but we're going to have to call it here and maybe talk about malls. Maybe talk about some of the other stuff to talk about malls all day. Be mall rats ourselves. We will do something from a mall at some point. Oh, awesome discussion. Very much enjoyed having the two of you here. We miss Dan, but you know, we'll see him again next week. And his beard. And we'll see his beard too. At least half of his face. We'll see everyone back here next week on The Feetcast. Have a great weekend.