Photograph by Jeff Kowalsky/Bloomberg

Rubble remains by the back door of what used to be a Kmart

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Attention, Kmart Shoppers: Flat-Line Special

By Roben Farzad on November 14, 2012

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Kmart, the discounting pioneer owned by Sears Holdings (SHLD), is in the throes of a mass shutdown of stores. After a bad 2011 Christmas, Sears Holdings said it would close up to 120 Sears and Kmart locations; as of January, there were just over 1,300 Kmarts in the U.S. and territories, 800 fewer than a decade earlier, when Kmart slid into bankruptcy as an independent company. In February, the parent posted its biggest quarterly loss in at least nine years. It lost $132 million in the July quarter, and analysts expect another loss, on a 10 percent drop in sales, when the company reports on Thursday. (Update, Nov. 16, 1:45 p.m. ET: Sears Holdings’ stock price is down 18 percent, to $47.75, after the company reported a wider, $498 million loss on lower sales.)

Today, as Amazon (AMZN) wallops all of retail, discounting’s old Big Three has been duopolized down to Wal-Mart (WMT) vs. Target (TGT). According to Bloomberg Industries, department stores now make up less than half the share of the retail industry’s core “general merchandise, apparel and accessories, furniture and other” sales than they did 20 years ago. As for the subject of 30 years ago, that’s when Kmart’s rights to Charlie’s Angel Jaclyn Smith’s clothing line (it still exists) might have been worth something.
It must be asked: Are Black Fridays numbered for the Blue Light Specialist?
“If you’re Kmart, there’s no reason for being,” says Howard Davidowitz, chairman of Davidowitz & Associates, a retail consulting and investment banking shop in Manhattan. “Are they building stores? No. Are they improving anything for the customer? No. Sears Holdings as a company is in liquidation.”
Not that the stock and debt of the parent company exactly scream liquidation. Sears Holdings, the brainchild of hedge fund owner Eddie Lampert, has soared this year as the company has raised cash, bought back stock, and shuttered and divested stores and subsidiaries. But this comes amid the retailer’s fifth straight year of declining revenue; in the latest quarter, Kmart’s comparable store sales were down 4.7 percent.
Sears Holdings was recently kicked out of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. It was removed from the Dow Jones industrial average in 1999.
Lampert, in his letters to shareholders, has chafed at the idea that Sears Holdings has to spend more on marketing and store upkeep at Kmart and Sears.
“Despite what some believed, increased marketing spend and increased inventory dollars do not automatically generate higher sales or higher profit,” he wrote in February. “More marketing and inventory dollars are not required to generate higher sales or profits, especially in a company that already spends over $1.5 billion in marketing and has over $8 billion invested in inventory on a consolidated basis. In fact, if you were to compare the amount of space and inventory we invest in our Sears apparel and home fashions businesses to other significant softlines retailers, you would agree that it should be possible to more than double sales and generate significantly higher profits without any additional investment in inventory, marketing or physical space. To do this, however, requires changes in our thinking and our processes, some of which are currently under way.”
To wit: Sears Holdings is subdividing existing, operational store space so it can be subleased to grocery stores, health clubs, and a Forever 21 fashion apparel store. The company openly lists its available square footage.
“I think Eddie is trapped in a no-win situation,” says Steven Platt, director of the Platt Retail Institute, a Hinsdale (Ill.) consultancy that publishes the Journal of Retail Analytics. “He can’t turn around the stores and he can’t sell the chain. He can dump assets to generate cash. But Sears Holdings is a retail dinosaur.” Last year, Platt put out a note titled “Sears acknowledges that it is in the real estate liquidation business (sort of),” where he said he was vindicated in his suspicion that Lampert was chiefly interested in “milking” the venerable, but moribund, retailers for cash.
Survival for Kmart, says Platt, “is a matter of degree. The store is irrelevant and its customer base is hurting. But with some 1,300 or so stores and $15 billion in revenue, they are not likely to go away quickly.”

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Friday, November 16, 2012 FG to float national carrier with 30 aircraft by Chukwudi Akasike

Minister of Aviation, Mrs. Stella Oduah advertisement

The Federal Government said on Thursday that a new national carrier with at least 30 brand new aircraft would soon be established.

The Director of Operations, Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria, Mr. Henry Omeogu, disclosed this while speaking with newsmen during his visit to the Port Harcourt International Airport.

Omeogu explained that though the new national carrier would be private sector-driven, fairly used or old aircraft would not be allowed to be among the fleet of its airplanes.

He said the move was part of the transformation agenda of President Goodluck Jonathan for the aviation sector, adding that the Minister of Aviation, Ms. Stella Oduah, was determined to turn around the industry.

Explaining that the Federal Government was interested in raising the standard in the aviation sector to a world-class level, Omeogu disclosed that the government had begun the renovation of 11 airports across the country.

“We are going to have about 30 brand new aircraft and they (aircraft) will be our national carrier. The effort will be private-sector driven. We will insist that others who would want to be part this should come with brand new aircraft,” Omeogu stressed.

The FAAN director gave an assurance that by 2014, the Federal Government would have achieved nearly 100 per cent of its plans to transform the aviation sector.

He said improved security within and around airports across the country was part of the arrangement for a new aviation industry, adding that over 50 policemen had already been moved from Abuja to the Port Harcourt International Airport.

“The President has signed performance contracts with all the sectors, and at the end of the day, any person that cannot key into the new vision of the Federal Government will naturally leave the system,” he added.

Omeogu explained that the ongoing transformation of the country's aviation sector would provide many employment opportunities for the citizens.
He said materials needed for the renovation of some of the airports in the country were available, while the contractors had been paid to avoid any delay in the completion of the projects.

Fake Geek Girls: The Geeks Have Inherited The Earth, But What’s Next? By Alyssa Rosenberg on Nov 16, 2012 at 10:33 am

I’ve always found the controversy over so-called Fake Geek Girls more than a little preposterous, given the variety inherent in geekdom. My midichlorian count may be off the scales when it comes to Star Wars, but I’ll freely admit that my favorite Star Trek movie is the one with the whales, in part for its SDS references. I haven’t read the Wheel of Time, but I’m probably the mainstream feminist critic who’s spent the most time over the last few years writing about A Song Of Ice And Fire. And for anyone who doesn’t want to stamp my geek card until I’ve satisfied his or her knowledge of his favorite franchise, I’ll show you mine as soon as you break down the treatment of social inequality in Tamora Pierce’s Tortall novels. There is no Grand High Geek Council issuing citizenship papers, no border fence, and that’s one of my favorite things about joining the particular voluntary communities that have been so important to me over the years.
But it’s become clear that there are a lot of people who would like there to be. And the debate over whether there are women who are “fake geeks” or not has become a proxy for the conversation. The thing is, though, at the root of this conversation isn’t really about the inclusion of women, or certain kinds of women, in geekdom. It’s about a slow and uneven shift in which some geeks and some kinds of geekdom have accumulated an enormous amount of social capital. And that shift has revealed that we don’t always know how to spend it wisely, magnanimously, or in ways that don’t repeat the ugly marginalization of geeks that came before.
In a post on io9, Rachel Edidin, who is an associate editor at Dark Horse Comics explains why some geeks, like those who complain that female cosplayers only want attention—by which, of course, they mean those women only want certain kinds of attention and want to draw certain boundaries about how they’re treated in costume—explains why fandoms and geek communities can be so resistant to change:

Geek culture is a haven for guys who can’t or don’t want to fall in step with the set of cultural trappings and priorities of traditional manhood in America. At least in theory, geek culture fosters a more cerebral and less violent model of masculinity, supported by a complementary range of alternative values. But the social cost of that alternative model—chosen or imposed—is high, and it’s often extorted violently—socially or physically. The fringe is a scary place to live, and it leaves you raw and defensive, eager to create your own approximation of a center. Instead of rejecting the rigid duality of the culture they’re nominally breaking from, geek communities intensify it, distilled through the defensive bitterness that comes with marginalization. And so masculinity is policed incredibly aggressively in geek communities, as much as in any locker room or frat house.

It’s tremendously difficult to make the transition from being culturally powerless to being culturally powerful. And it’s even harder when a societal shift happens, when Steve Jobs is everyone’s favorite CEO, J.J. Abrams can do whatever he wants in film and television, when hackers become heroes and supervillians, and those social inversions don’t actually filter all the way down. Just because lots of geeky traits, like knowledge about technology, obsessive interest, and superheroes, have become assets doesn’t mean that, say, our preferred male body types have radically shifted, or that, movies like 21 Jump Street aside, high school’s shrugged off the quarterback of the football team for the captain of the Mathletes, or that on OkCupid, a figurine collection is suddenly more valuable than a job on Wall Street. Geeks are getting asked to be magnanimous, to be self-reflected, to open up communities as if they possess privilege that it may not always feel like they do. Of course, the question of whether you feel like you have privilege isn’t solely determinative of whether you do, and whether it’s acknowledged or not, having your cultural fantasies catered to is a kind of privilege. But the point remains: the range of how much social capital and privilege individual geeks have is gigantic. And that makes it very hard to move a community as a whole.

At Badass Digest, Devin Faraci has some suggestions for how geeks could productively clean house internally and exert our collective cultural privilege as supporters of a giant consumer industry. He writes:

The gender issue in nerddom is deeper than women dressed like Emma Frost. There are many more dangerous poseurs in the nerd community, many of whom have risen to the tops of our favorite properties and franchises. Phoniness abounds. There are fake geek girls and there are fake geek boys. But this sexism has to stop.
So instead of worrying about Fake Geek Girls, let’s celebrate Real Geek Girls. Let’s tell comic creators that we want female characters who are more than just excuses for cheesecake. That we want female comic characters who are rounded beyond their breasts and butts, who aren’t spin-offs or namesakes or girlfriends of existing male heroes. And when comic creators provide these characters, support them with your dollars.

These are fantastic goals, if we could get people to agree on them. But that requires people to start wanting better in ways that are substantive. On a creative level, geeks can nitpick a production to death, but just as often, we’re guilty of circling the wagons and defending even products that have dramatically fallen off. Rather than dismissing Twilight fans, for example, as “fake geeks,” it would have been fascinating to see fantasy fans point out to Twilight fans how they were shortchanged with rotten special effects, lazy rather than inspired directing a la the Harry Potter franchise, and careless casting in the movie adaptations and to help them mobilize to demand movies that would be both better genre pictures and more energized adaptations of Stephenie Meyer’s quartet. But there wasn’t anything close to a consensus for that. And as much as I wish it did, I’m not sure that there’s a consensus deep in the readership of comics (as opposed to the consensus of many critics) that the depictions of female characters need to change.
The thing is, if geeks want to consolidate our cultural power, the best thing we can possibly do is be as magnanimous and as forward-thinking as possible. Conventions are at the cutting edge of this recognition, financially if not experientially: there’s a reason they’ve had big Twilight panels but not instituted strong sexual harassment policies. Want to meet women at conventions? Think about why the kinds of interactions you want aren’t happening or why women aren’t turning out beyond the level of “she’s a bitch,” or “all the geek girls are fake.” Want to see your expertise count? Use it like you’re teaching padawans, rather than looking to knock off as many points as possible on someone’s Kobyashi Maru exam. Stop acting like everyone else has something to prove and recognize you have something to offer.

Louis C.K. And The Best News Ever By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jan 30, 2012 at 2:52 pm

This makes me exceedingly happy: CBS just bought a recession-themed sitcom pilot from Louis C.K. and Spike Feresten. Not a lot of details yet on anything other than the fact that that the show will apparently be about “young people who are trying to achieve their creative dreams.” But I’d follow C.K. into a burning building at this point if he promised me that content was inside it and I’d get to consume it before I succumbed to smoke inhalation.
I also think this is an interesting experiment in whether C.K.’s deeply compelling brand of honesty and moral comedy can find a mass audience, and whether he can do it without the explicitness that’s made Louie such a wonderful discussion of sex and gender from a man’s perspective. I hope the former will be true — I’d love to see a show that combines the sometimes-painful optimism of something like Parks and Recreation with the class consciousness of Raising Hope and the lived-in friendships of Happy Endings do well. On the second, while C.K. may (outside of race) get the most attention for his routines about sex and sexual humiliation, his up-front approach to things like buying a house, or having his daughters prefer their mother to him, or professional failure would translate extremely well to the networks without requiring him to compromise the material at all.
I’d also really like a show from him (or really, from anyone) to continue the trend that Southland started of having the characters talk like real people of those backgrounds and in those circumstances would, but bleeping them out. We’ve seen a bit of this on Parks and Recreation, where the generally clean-spoken characters occasionally lapse into real-world profanity, and on other shows, but I think it would be decent practice to do a bit more of it. Television doesn’t just capture characters in the least-stressful moments of their lives — quite the reverse. I can understand why we’ve got some limitations on speaking words aloud in prime time (even though I think its the job of parents to keep their kids away from content they find generally objectionable), but I think it would make sense to find a compromise that keeps the kiddies’ ears clean while trusting adults to know what’s really being said.