Sears Is Finally Going Out Of Business?
You likely have fond memories of the Sears holiday catalog if you are past a certain age. And while we watched store front after store front close down, the iconic store managed to hang on. Unfortunately, in sad news, there is a strong likelihood that Sears is going out of business.
Historically, Sears was a force to be reckoned with. It was the largest retailer in the US by far. And it set the gold standard for shopping experiences.
After the retail giant began struggling, it merged with a failing KMart in 2005. At the height of the merger, over 300,000 employees were working at 3,500 stores in the US. Company leadership made a series of questionable decisions when it opted against modernizing its stores.
Instead, Sears began selling off real estate, hoping to recuperate some of the money it was hemorrhaging. And then, in 2018, the first fear that Sears may go out of business took hold. The company officially filed for bankruptcy.
However, in 2019, Sears came out of bankruptcy … with a new corporate name, Transformco. At that time, there were only 202 Kmart locations and 223 Sears stores. And given the nature of retail these days, that is simply not enough of a footprint to get your company off life-support.
Multiple industry experts attribute the downward spiral and news that Sears may go out of business imminently, to company leadership. Mark Cohen was the CEO of Sears Canada before the merger with Kmart. He told CNN that the company could have rivaled Amazon.
Cohen said, “No doubt that Sears would have needed to close stores and consolidate holdings, but their real estate holdings would not have been the albatross they were for other department store chains. Nothing would have stopped it from having a second life as a world-beater. At the end of the day, this was all about the incompetence and malfeasance of its leadership.”
And the GlobalData Retail managing director, Neil Saunders, sees a similar leadership vacuum. He questions why the company has not shuttered completely yet. Additionally, he does not see anything saving Sears from going out of business.
Saunders speculates that “perhaps they’re open because Eddie Lampert has a very strange view of business. He still seems to hold onto this illusion that he can bring it back. A lot of it could be about ego.”
But how many stores is Lampert trying to hold on to? Not many. The number of Kmart stores still open on the mainland totals a whopping three.
It is harder to get a true number of Sears brick-and-mortar stores that remain open. The store locator app shows only 15 Sears outlets still hanging on. And the number of Sears Hometown locations has steadily declined, leaving only about 100 stores remaining open today.
With the holidays approaching, analysts believe there may be a reprieve before Sears goes out of business. And that is good news for anyone wanting a nostalgic shopping experience. So if you live near one of the open locations, consider popping by for what may be the last time.
