Since , Sears has shuttered more than half of its stores nationwide. More recently, Sears told employees it will be closing another stores in Once the Sears in La Jolla turns the lights off, the San Diego area will be left with just three outposts of the department store chain.
In many parts of the U. As a kid, I paged through the famous Wish Book at Christmastime, and when I moved into my first apartment I bought a mattress from the store.
But it had been years since I set foot in a Sears, let alone bought something there. Given all the doom and gloom surrounding the company, I was preparing myself for a bleak shopping trip. I pictured vacant aisles and empty shelves. No one wants to shop at department stores anymore. People want experiences, not things. The parking lot of the University Town Center mall was packed, and I had to circle a few times before finally finding a spot on the top level of the parking structure.
Dead malls may be a big problem in some places, but this one was clearly thriving. It was squat, windowless, and constructed of sandy-brown brick. Nothing about it was particularly inviting. The ongoing construction was one reason it was so hard to find parking, I later realized. The store was humming with shoppers in search of a good deal, and lines at the few open registers were long.
I started my Sears shopping trip in the department that once drew many people to Sears: tools. Many of the shelves had already been stripped of merchandise, and there were plenty of other people buying what was left.
The line at the register in this section was half a dozen people deep. My husband searched through the piles of denim for pants in his size and preferred number but came up dry.
So much for scoring a bargain. He also looked at socks but decided to pass. Even after accounting for the sale price, he thought he could get a better deal online. However, if we had been in the market for novelty gloves and mittens in Christmas colors, we were in luck. After the new closings, it appears there will be 19 Sears department stores and 15 Kmart stores remaining.
The majority of those stores are Hometown Stores, "primarily operated by independent dealers or franchisees of an affiliate of Transformco. For shopping news, tips and deals, join us on our Shopping Ninjas Facebook group. Facebook Twitter Email.
Sears and Kmart closing more stores. Is your location holding a liquidation sale? See the list. Show Caption. Since Eddie Lampert acquired the last Sears and Kmart stores out of bankruptcy in early — over the objections of unsecured creditors — both banners have continued their seemingly never-ending decline that started more than a decade ago.
At the time of the acquisition, Lampert took control of Kmarts and Sears department stores through the new company, Transformco aka Transform Holdco. By then, the Sears and Kmart banners were mere fractions of what they were even a few years earlier. The number of Kmarts and Sears stores has since become an even smaller and starker fraction of the one-time giant.
According to a Retail Dive count of Sears' website, there were 40 Kmart stores and 39 Sears full-line stores including Puerto Rico and other territories as of May Those counts are based on how up-to-date, or not, Transform's websites are and might not reflect the company's store count exactly. Other counts differ. F inancial analysis firm Creditntell lists 38 Kmarts and 87 Sears stores based on a variety of datapoints.
Writing for Forbes, Michael Lisicky estimated earlier this year that there would be just 21 Kmarts and 28 Sears stores left by this summer after the latest planned closures. A spokesperson for Transformco did not respond to Retail Dive's request to confirm the company's current store count and make an executive available for interview. Jim Rice, a senior vice president with Creditntell, said in an interview that Transformco's current Sears and Kmart footprints might not be enough to support overhead costs for the banners.
Moreover, Sears and Kmart's supplier base has likely diminished along with their footprints. Rice said he has received fewer inquiries from those interested in selling to Sears in the time since it emerged from bankruptcy. Customer traffic remains severely depressed as well. Diminishment seems like an eternal state for Sears, defying mathematics and logic. Surely if Sears and Kmart keep closing stores they will reach zero eventually — right?
Older generations can recall a very different trajectory for Sears, which was formed out of a partnership between Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck, originally to sell watches and jewelry to America's far-flung towns. By the early s, the Sears catalog sold women's garments, guns, fishing tackle, bicycles, baby carriages, musical instruments and even houses, along with a whole lot of other things. It was also an early pioneer in consumer credit plans and launched its own iconic brands, including the Craftsman brand of tools.
Starting in , Sears began building brick-and-mortar stores, adding hundreds within just a few years. By , retail sales passed its catalog revenue. Erik Gordon, a professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, noted in an interview how Sears "early on, saw suburbanization and shopping malls as an opportunity — and they saw it as such a big opportunity they built malls.
Sears developed into a multifaceted mammoth. Along with its catalog and retail business, and private brands, it housed among other units an insurance company, a real estate company and a credit card Discover , all of which were eventually spun off.
You look at it and think, 'Oh my goodness, they were Amazon. Not long after Lampert and his hedge fund ESL Investments took over Kmart, following the latter's bankruptcy in the early s, he merged the discount store with Sears in a move to expand the product range of both stores and accelerate Sears' off-mall strategy.
But both banners went into the merger with longstanding existing issues. Sears was tied to a department store sector in decline amid the rise of big-box players and off-mall shopping. Sears' decision to fold its catalog business in the early s was also a fatal mistake, coming as it did right before the rise of e-commerce, a form of digital catalog retail, in Egelanian's view.
Or as Gordon puts it: "They knew about fulfillment. Sears had management issues back then as well, long before the arrival of Lampert. Meanwhile, Kmart had been thoroughly out-competed by Walmart in its sector over the preceding decade. Egelanian attributed this to Walmart's more efficient distribution system, which the low-price leader invested in while Kmart was making ill-fated acquisition bets on box retail in the s. Once Lampert came on as chairman of Sears Holdings, and later took over the chief executive role, the company undertook some of the most complicated and thorough financial engineering the industry has ever witnessed, and which has now become infamous among retail observers, as well as the target of litigation.
The company spun off the Lands' End brand, which ESL now majority owns and has wound down its relationship with Sears. About five years later, in , Sears Canada went bankrupt and liquidated. Sears also spun off hundreds of its choicest owned properties into a real estate investment vehicle, Seritage Growth Properties, in which ESL holds a substantial interest.
Over time, though, Seritage has leased out properties once rented by Sears to other retailers. As of the turn of the year, Seritage has no locations leased to Sears or Kmart.
Litigation and Lampert remain its only ties to the Sears name. Lampert also loaned Sears Holdings hundreds of millions of dollars on multiple occasions, and took in money from the company on interest payments and fees. Along with the web of assets, Sears Holdings — back when it had money — regularly doled out millions to shareholders in the form of buybacks and made substantial financial bets with its cash. A good case can be made that the buybacks left Sears with less cash to invest in its business when the industry started undergoing rapid technological and competitive changes.
Lampert is a "mastermind of the corporate rule book," in Egelanian's view. Many share that view, and it has fueled court fights. Lampert and a host of associates and controlled companies are defendants in a lawsuit filed by Sears Holdings and unsecured creditors to the old Sears.
With the creation of Tansformco, Lampert cut ties with Sears Holdings.
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