NEWS V.

The Shop Your Way model essentially bribes SYW members to shop more often. To do so, SYW members have to put up with online orders that are too often incorrectly fulfilled with wrong items. They have to put up with returns to a non-local Kmart or Sears that can cost a huge amount in return shipping deductions because of per-item ship label deductions that are taken even if all items fit in the same (original) shipping box and come from the same order.

SYW members stand to save money but the perks of the rewards program comes with a growing share of headaches. If, for example, it becomes necessary to update the name on a SYW account, customer service reps will insist on speaking to whomever is named on the Membership Card even if all linked payment information and contact information are linked to yourself and/or are incorrectly linked to someone else due to death, divorce, marriage or clerical error. Logging into the SYW website isn't any better because there is no way to see, short of choosing to print a new member card, who in your household SYW actually regards as the member. (This is problematic if the information in their database is incorrect as they don't allow for joint members and will not change the name even if the person listed calls them as my own spouse has done many times in the name of getting my SYW membership to correctly reflect that I am the only one actually making use of the account.)

Sears and KMART recently made a change that diminishes the benefits of SYW membership. SYW points were formerly redeemed like cash. Now the presence of discounts of any kind, including earned Points, will mean that many customers miss the minimum order target to qualify for free shipping. SEARS also instituted a higher order minimum to qualify for free shipping as compared to competing retailers, which makes them less competitive and attractive to shop. This also makes SYW Points redemption into a mathematical ordeal at checkout.

The entire SYW program flies in the face of the old KISS axiom: Keep It Simple, Stupid. In contrast, I am also an Amazon Prime member and thus far I don't need to meet ANY minimum to get free shipping with Prime whereas now I have to spend $59 above and beyond any redeemed Points and applied discount codes to qualify for Free Shipping with SYW. Worse, the high Minimum Order Requirement applies even though I am a MAX (premium) member!

On one recent attempt to check out with a Sears online order I was just 13¢ shy of meeting the requirement for free shipping so I reduced my Points redemption by about 20¢ because I had already "stocked up" on numerous things I wasn't planning on buying to qualify for the free shipping in the first place. Frankly, I was tired of bouncing in and out of my shopping cart for nearly TWO HOURS to accomplish what Sears' minimum order requirements have made overly complicated when SYW Points are also at play during checkout. Backing off my redemption of Points by less than 20¢ should have put me in position to spend just over $60 after redeeming my Points at a lesser-than-eligible amount --- but Sears nonetheless slammed me with an additional $21 of shipping fees on a sub-$100 order, which falsely implied I had redeemed enough Points for my subtotal to fall under the minimum order! (As a MAX member they advertise Free Standard Shipping so for the life of me I don't even know why I'm being forced to pay shipping fees to begin with!)

I share this to make the point that the Shop Your Way program has become too complicated to continue on as a consumer-facing program. Because prices at retailers such as Sears and Kmart are already low to begin with, my proposal is that Sears and Kmart return to basics and focus on NO GIMMICKS PRICING and Quality Customer Service driven by an incentives program aimed on improving employee performance. Employees will perform better if they stand to earn quarterly bonuses and/or In-Store Credits providing their real-time Customer Feedback Score merits the "perks". (One of those ranking criteria would be tied, as an example, to the accuracy with which employees fulfill and ship online orders, which sadly has amounted to a lottery in recent years as to whether Kmart/Sears shoppers will even get what they ordered online in the size, color or item they expected. Incorrect order fulfillment is perhaps THE single biggest disincentive for people to continue to shop the Sears and Kmart brands.)

My proposal would simplify shopping for consumers, meaning everyday low prices sans the SYW gimmicks, and it would give employees incentive to provide top tier service because they would be on the target end of the "bribes" (incentives) that are currently aimed at SYW members. Better yet, it would allow Sears to par down their operating costs by getting rid of their cruddy overseas SYW customer (no) service team and all related overhead.

BOTTOM LINE

If Sears management, who has control of SYW but treats it like a separate entity, has any sense, they will take my feedback under advisement and restructure the entire retail operation around customer-incentives to provide feedback on existing transactions as opposed to a bunch of over-complicated Points redemption rules, exclusions and the like at the Point Of Service. As an example, supply every Sears and Kmart with in-store customer kiosks or a web link on the receipt and treat the entire Feedback Solicitation System like Vegas Slots. The customer is informed up front that a low ranking of their in-store experience or online order will NOT impact their ability to "win". (This is so customers will provide HONEST feedback.) In effect, the only way customers can "earn" Cash Bonus and Discount-Off offers is if they participate in a feedback lottery with a guaranteed discount or bonus point "payout" for their trouble. Under my proposal, there would be no more SYW Points awarded solely because a customer shopped a store or placed a website order. Customers who obtain discounts will have obtained them not for shopping but for each and every FEEDBACK they submit on a transaction-by-transaction basis, which in turn would track the employees they interacted with in a store or the employees who fulfilled or processed online orders (and returns). My model --- and folks, you read it here on SiteJabber first! --- appears in the hope Sears and Kmart will rediscover their A-game and begin to deliver where the retail rubber meets the consumer spending road: Competent Customer Service. If CEO Eddie Lampert wants to save SEARS and KMART, it's going to come down to out of the box thinking. And that's just what this review is all about.

Mr. Lampert, if you are interested in an out-of-the-box, college-educated Gen-X thinker, this Sears shopper is available to talk.

RawStory TOS indicates that it is possible to write and obtain an explanation about what may account for being banned. I did that in October and re-sent my inquiry twice. I never received the courtesy of an explanation.

I am not one to abuse the comments section on any website. My biggest crime online is that my posts may go into more detail (length-wise) than others care to read. I'm Right-leaning on some things, Left on others. Overall, I consider myself a political agnostic because I'm not heavily partisan.

Perhaps the biggest irony is that I used to work as a journalist and earned my degree in the same. So imagine my surprise when, without any apparent violation or explanation, I found myself banned?

RawStory writes in their TOS: "A good rule of thumb is that if you are writing it to piss someone off, stop." That's rather ironic if you consider that their own writers and editors don't pull any punches. It's nearly impossible to be "hard hitting" and "nice".

In the few comments I posted in 2016 on RawStory, regulars there slammed me with ad hominem attacks. In hindsight, it appears that *some* of the regulars intentionally troll (bait) newcomers into defending themselves. This allows them to run off anyone they don't like for the RawStory violation of self-defense per the TOS: "If the other person 'insulted you first,' stop and flag their comment for a moderator and/or email *******@rawstory.com instead of replying with another insult."

Some of the regulars on the site seem to enjoy RawStory mod impunity insofar as they are permitted to put their combative style on full display for all the RawStory-reading world to appreciate without consequence. Would it really be so hard for RawStory mods to see where the insults started and ban *everyone* who piled on as opposed to singling just one individual out?

It's a mystery to me why, specifically, I am banned. But I am hardly alone. There are many reports of people who have been banned on RawStory.

I would suggest that anyone who has been banned without any obvious TOS violation such as threats or hate speech take to Twitter using the hashtag #RawStoryBanned. I'd like to see a true count over time, on Twitter, as to how many RawStory readers have been run off the site for less-than-clear reasons. With any luck, the hashtag #RawStoryBanned will send a message to management that the selective enforcement of their TOS is bad for business.