In the aftermath of the recession, the retail industry has been scrambling to find new and interesting ways to entice shoppers. Sears’ Cyber Monday Now Sale, however, exemplifies what happens when retailers fail on the new and interesting and settle for old and repackaged.
Running from July 22-25, the Sears sale features online-only discounts on hundreds of items. The deals range from an extra 5% to an extra 15% off, so shoppers can expect to score the best savings when combining this Cyber Monday sale with other Sears coupons.
Hundreds of Cyber Deals
Clicking on the link “Shop Hundreds of Cyber Deals,” we arrive at a page with 108 items, from TVs to cameras to backpacks. This page is definitely not a compilation of all the items marked down 5-15%, and does not contain hundreds of items either. All of the items are either marked down or included in a promotion such as free delivery.
Upon further inspection, however, the deals aren’t consistent with the 5-15% off Cyber Monday sale. A Garmin NUVI1370TREFURB Refurbished Nuvi 1370T 4.3 in. thin GPS w/Bluetooth sells on the page for $89.99, down from the original listing of $399.99. We’re not complaining about $310 savings, but it’s obvious that Sears is just redirecting shoppers to used clearance items.
Free Shipping
The Sears homepage lists free shipping on cameras and camcorders, GPS devices, and computers, laptops, and tablets. Up front, this sounds pretty decent, especially if you can combine free shipping with any other Sears discount code.
Looking closer, however, we notice that for computers, digital cameras, camcorders, GPS devices, and more, the free shipping promotion is good until September 1. Sears appears to be aggregating a lot of their pre-existing deals under the Cyber Monday name.
15% off?
Only one category qualifies for 15% off, and that category is tools. When we visit the tools page from its link in the Cyber Monday graphic, we find a large banner advertising a Red Tag event on select tools.
Article comments
1 - Richard Hohn
Sears reminds me of a fish out of water struggling to breathe in a completely foreign environment. To think at one time nearly twenty years ago the folks at Sears saw so much potential in the cyber world they formed the original Prodigy network. The idea of putting the enormous Sears Catalog on line was thwarted by management and in so doing left the hole that would eventually be filled by Amazon.