Marcia Layton TurnerKmart's Ten Deadly Sins: How Incompetence Tainted an American Icon

K-Mart's rapid descent into a near corporate oblivion has been well captured by Turner in this excellent piece of business analysis. From a falling market share, poor store layout, employee dissatisfaction, customer trust lost, lack of vision in corporate strategy and marketing, as well as no advances in technical innovation for supply chain management led to the failure of the company. Each one of these problems is detailed in clarity with great examples and a wide range of both business and academic sources to supplement Turner's analysis. While there is no one quick fix for K-Mart (and in fact if there is any lesion it is that quick fixes need to stop) there is a clear need for improved strategy and technological integration of the supply chain (especially at the store inventory level). For those who really want a solid business analysis of K-Mart's problems this is an excellent place to start.

Very informative as of the day it was published. Since the book was about the history (failures of upper management strategy) of Kmart, Ms. Turner could have spoken with more former employees to get the REAL inside story, rather than relying so much on current articles that were available at the time.

I worked for Kmart for many years and was interested in seeing the author's perspective presented in this book, as to why Kmart failed. Interesting read......

I was not impressed with this book. I found much of the actual text to be copied/pasted elsewhere in the book. There could have been so much more said about Kmart that was simply not there.

I worked in retail for many years so the info in this book is interesting to read but dated.I missed the part where this book was published in 2003 when I ordered, so the information is a little dated. Pub date is clearly stated on Amazon.com so my fault.

I shold have guessed from the title that this book would be totally one sided...but I didn't follow my gut. This book is written by Kmart nay sayers who have never even worked for the company and I don't think even looked too far into the real story before writing it. I loved working as a manager for Kmart for many years and even though I lost my job after the bankruptcy I am still a firm backer of the company and wish them the best.

Not a great book but that is not the vendors fault. They are five star.

Some interesting information here, but the book is really poorly structured, repetitive (literally almost word for word in parts), sometimes contradictory (sometimes it was a good thing they wanted to focus on higher-spending soccer moms, and sometimes it was a bad thing because they should have focused on their core customer of low-income people), and -- despite being well-researched and -footnoted -- much more reliant on outsider, academic analyses rather than inside accounts from former execs, employees, customers, and suppliers (there's some of that, but not enough). I learned a bit from this book, but not much, and had trouble trudging through to the end.

KMart hit the buffers some years ago and went into Chapter 11 Bankruptcy. This book systematically lays bare the reasons for that. An interesting book into how NOT to run a retail chain. Well worth a read if you have an interest in retail.