Here's a long one - deep personal history with Kmart - my father's only company and where his pension came from. Plus so many bonus checks that it was embarrassing for him sometimes. One year, his bonus was 150% of his salary. But he managed to deal with it
My father was an incredibly successful store manager for Kmart for 35 years. He used to say that it was a simple business...you put stuff on the shelves and people buy it. Go into one of the stores today and see if that still holds true. For the past 25 years, the shelves have been half empty or filled with crap you don't want. Today, the prices are the highest of all the "discount" retailers.
When he was a few years from retirement, they closed his store and built a new super Kmart across the street. But, new store, new blood. They pulled him back into a rotation schedule to fill in places. They put him at one store where the manager had quit because he couldn't make sales bonues. Dad went into that store, fixed a few simple things and blew the bonus numbers out of the water for about 2 years - the store is one of two that are still open in Raleigh. The super Kmart lasted about 10 years and then was closed and has been empty for years now. They used the building as a staging area for power crews for the recent hurricane.
Then they sent him to Durham, in the bad part of town.
Need to pause here and inject - Dad's first Kmart store as manager was in DC, H street NE from 1967 until 1969. It's not a good part of town, but he treated everyone fairly and with dignity. When the young kids would come in to shoplift, he would see them and cut them off - they'd say "Oh man, I didn't know YOU were working today" and they'd turn and leave. If you are familiar with history then you know that area was also ground zero in 1968 when Dr Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated. Not to say they knew the riots were coming, but two of the area leaders came to him that afternoon and said "Mr Flynn, we have great respect for you. But you need to not be here right now". So he closed the store, locked it up and got a police escort out of the area. He got home early and called his regional manager and said "here's what's going on, I don't know if we'll have a store tomorrow". The next day, almost the entire section of the city in a multi block radius was burned EXCEPT for the grocery store, the pharmacy and the Kmart.
Needless to say, getting a store in the bad part of town was no big deal for him. The store was losing money and they expected to shut it down within 12 months. Before he went in for his first day, he went in and shopped the store...easy for a 30 year veteran to identify the issues, the major one of which was no stock on the shelf...simple business. First day he laid down the law - there is a uniform, white shirt with a red vest. If you do not have a red vest, we will give you one. If you do not have a white shirt, come see me. We have a whole store and somewhere out there is a white shirt for you. He identified the few trouble makers and got rid of them and the culture got better very quickly. He asked his boss about cleaning up the book - hey, the inventory levels are way off because of years of shrinkage and they're going to have to be corrected before shutting down. Got clearance to do that, but he knew better what would happen. Once the inventory correctly showed the stock level was low, the computers kicked in and automatically generated replenishments for the store, plus allocating extra work hours to the store to receive the product and stock the shelves. So the good people left at the store were happy because they got more hours to stock the shelves, the shelves were full and suddenly people started buying the stuff. In 3 months the store went from deep in the red to healthy in the black (and Dad AGAIN blew away the bonus numbers). His district manager was shocked...but it's an easy business, you put stuff on the shelf and people buy it. That store stayed open for another 10 years after Dad left it.
What I described here is what I think is the primary missing ingredient from the company. I worked there too a long time ago and I'd be willing to bet that nobody there has the same appreciation for how to be successful. It will stumble along but look for them to fail again in the next 5 years.