What Happened to Sears?
used to be one of my favorite places to shop … long, long ago. Are you old enough to remember when Sears would send out their annual sales catalog? You know, the one that was thick enough to serve as a child’s booster seat. As an eight year old, I remember the excitement of reading their sale tome because it had Dennis the Menace cartoons sprinkled throughout. Now that I think about it, what better way to train young, potential customers to eagerly go through every single page of their catalog, searching for cartoons hidden amongst thousands of products. Eventually the Dennis the Menace cartoons disappeared. Still, as I hit my adolescent years, I discovered other reasons to search through the Sears catalog. Fortunately, no one was spying on my pages of guilty interests.
Yes, those were kindlier and simpler times. I don’t know what has happened to Sears. Apparently, times have been tough on this once mighty company. So tough, Sears took to installing spyware on those who visited their site this past holiday season. Officials for company say that they were up front about this installation in their user agreement. But as with all vague user agreements, visitors to the Sears site had no idea that they were installing software that could record all of a user’s online activities — including logging in to bank accounts.
So, if you have visited Sears.com in the past few months and signed up “Sears Holdings Community” (“My SHC Community” or “SHC”), I highly recommend that you run Spybot, Ad Aware, and any other anti-spyware software that you have. It’s bad enough that Sear’s motto has become “Satisfaction Guaranteed Or We’ll Charge You a 15% Restocking Fee.” Do they really need to resort to such invasive practices to stay in business?
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