Sears' Lampert Talks Recession, Not Real Estate

In his annual letter to shareholders yesterday, Sears Chairman Ed Lampert has a lot to say. In a Chicago Tribune article about it today, one reporter bothered to check the behemoth note’s word count, and it clocked in at 8,500.We’ve looked it over with the intention of saving Counter Culture readers some time, trying to find what would be of most interest the retail real estate community, and we found the future of Sears’ real estate summed up in one unsatisfying sentence: “We will be closely monitoring stores throughout 2009.” 8,500 words and that’s all we get?Oh, he also says that they might close some unprofitable stores and, in some cases, not renew some leases. But we aren’t really given any kind of specific forecast for Sears’ real estate strategy in the coming year.If you’d like, you can read all of it here and see if we missed anything. Just scroll down a bit. What you’ll mostly find is a thorough examination of the economy and how we got ourselves in this recession thing with some interesting observations. We particularly like: “When oil goes from $50 to $145 and then back to $35 all within a year, what type of strategy can contemplate and manage that?”A bit more on Sears’ strategy would’ve been nice, though. As one analyst puts it in the Tribune article: “As for enlightening investors with specifics about his merchandising strategy and fiscal 2009 outlook, we guess he ran out of room.”