Sow's Ear - Silk Purse

Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble.

Welcome to Sears.  A company that appears to have figured out how to make silk purses.  I was with an advertising agency for a while that handled this account before they collapsed mind you (and I also worked the K-Mart account actually when they were in bankruptcy - talk about bad karma!) and they did spend money hand over fist in making sure you know about them.  That's what advertising does - actually - it informs. No complaints here.

The double double here is there is a "Craftier" side of Sears and it is boiling up outside Chicago right now.  Sears recognizes that the country is in hot water economy with the unemployment issue so they have taken up the side of keeping jobs (not creating them mind you but just keeping them) as a "cause".  They also recognize that some politicians have tied job sustaining to either lower taxes or less regulation or a double bubble of both.

Sears, when bought out of the hole, emerged as Sears Holdings headquartered just outside Chicago in Hoffman Estates.  When the dead and dying  K-Mart took over Sears in 2003 - and talk about double double - trouble or "two wrongs make a right", a lot of folks figured that the second cement block and been chained to the victim and the race to the bottom of the sea was on. ...well anyway, to the point of this.  Sears needs money that they aren't making in the retail business in order to survive - that is the heart of it and they figure that with the cry of job creation or retention they have the trump card.

They are threatening to pull out of Hoffman Estates, Illinois unless the state government gives them some hefty tax incentives to stay.  They are pressing all the political buttons - job loss, lower taxes....and in taking this stance of perfect republican logic, they hope that we forget that this company - a double double of KMart and "Sears" - have both been massacred by the Walmart behemoth and half a dozen chains that don't try and carry both lawmowers and fashions and are eating their lunch.

What one hopes for here is that other companies don't threaten to pull out of a state when they have the cards stacked in their favor.  Illinois can ill afford to loose Sears Holdings and its 6000 jobs but it can ill afford to keep them as well.  If "Sears Holdings" goes belly up which is likely anyway, the mess will be worse than the loss.  The problem is that companies that can survive will look at this drama and figure that they can threaten to go elsewhere and pull needed jobs from a city/state and get what they want - need it or not.   In a state like Illinois 6000 jobs is a hit but not a killer and you have to figure out if this is a bluff or not and second is it worthwhile for someone in the downstate to help subsidize a company in Hoffman Estates.  Not that it will happen but what if Wal-mart told Bentonville, Arkansas that famiil tradition or not, Texas offered us a better deal - NO TAXES for 50 years - if we relocated to near DFW.  Arkansas would roll over like a pig on a spit as the saying goes and give them what it wants even if they became revenue neutral - that means that their loss from the tax rolls would be the same if they stayed or left - but the ace up the sleeve is "jobs"...a gotta have.

Let the wage earner pay the taxes...employers will just play liars poker.