Posted on 09/16/2021 4:05:17 PM PDT by American Number 181269513
The last Sears department store located in the retailer’s home state of Illinois is getting ready to close its doors for good.
The shop, located in Simon Property Group’s Woodfield Mall, is scheduled to shutter on Nov. 14, the company confirmed to CNBC.
A spokesman for the department store chain’s parent company, Transformco, said it will look for ways to revive the space with another tenant because it also manages the real estate.
“This is part of the company’s strategy to unlock the value of the real estate and pursue the highest and best use for the benefit of the local community,” Transformco said in a statement.
Sears Holdings, which also owned Kmart, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in October 2018. Transformco later acquired Sears out of bankruptcy and has since closed dozens of the remaining Sears and Kmart locations across the United States.
Kmart’s last location in Manhattan recently shut. It will be replaced by a Wegmans grocery store.
A spokesperson for Transformco declined to confirm how many Sears and Kmart stores are still open.
The company’s websites list 35 Sears locations, including the one at Woodfield Mall, and 22 Kmart stores.
Sears was founded in Chicago in the 1890s. Its business blossomed through much of the 20th century, as it sold everything from homes to apparel. Sears was once the largest retailer in the nation, boasting thousands of stores.
The company had about 700 stores, many of them barren of goods, when it filed for bankruptcy protection.
Scott Carr, president of Transformco’s real estate division, said in a statement that the company plans to maximize the value of the Woodfield Mall property through a redevelopment.
They were fun. Our local store, when it existed, had a Viewmaster display with literally DOZENS of 3-disk packs of different subjects. I had others, but they disappeared over the years. I think I had the Seven Wonders, too.
I was wondering the same thing. Whirl pool made some of the products that carried the Sears Brand Name. They had said some time ago that they would continue to make some of those.
Had one of those also! I was nerdy as a kid.
My wife got me a huge rolling toolbox before they closed.
That buyout was financial move more than anything.
Sears had a defined pension plan and had a lot of money invested for the purpose of paying those defined pensions. It may not have been funded at 100% but it was still a substantial amount. By selling themselves to Kmart (which was internally treated as a Sears takeover of Kmart) they could terminate the pension plan and recover the money for themselves. They took the cash and left the employees without the pension money then set up a 401K plan.
Older employees who had been working at Sears for decades had to start from scratch to try to make a retirement for themselves. I have a relative who was one of them and after another sellout the older employees were given a choice of a small amount to leave or face being sent hundreds of miles to another store/location. My relative walked out after 30 years with only $50K. When she started working for Sears her defined pension benefit was for around $2K/month.
During Blockbuster's heyday, a construction worker of new Blockbuster stores foretold their future perfectly. Even the hard hats saw that one coming. But a pivot is the same as starting a new business from the ground up, and like all startups, that normally has a 90% failure rate. Blockbuster's failure was pretty much as expected.
"Amazon is selling entire houses for less than $20,000 — with free shipping"
Sad to see. My grandfather bought my
first .22 rifle at a Sears store when I
was 12. Back then, you could purchase
just about anything in one location.
Wal-Mart wiped them out
Sears/Roebuck was an American institution.
But they had a very strong brand name, which would’ve given them a huge advantage. They could’ve just stopped the VHS and moved there operations to large regional warehouses and use the web as their storefront to mail CDs out. They could’ve eventually had their own movie app. They just didn’t seem to have visionaries on their board with enough voice to see the methods of their business were changing. Sometimes, the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” rule comes back to bite us.
Ace Hardware sells them now.
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