New York
CNN Business
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Tracy Easterling spent about an hour Sunday shopping at Sears, one of her favorite stores. He ended up with nothing to show for it but the memories.
Easterling was at Sears in his hometown of Jersey City, New Jersey, one of only 15 full-line Sears stores still open. Sears was once the world’s largest and Most important retailer.
“This is the first time I’ve been here in a while,” he said while browsing the shoe selection, where the shoes were still kept in boxes rather than on display.
“I just came looking for sales. But it’s so empty, and there’s not much to choose from,” he said. “Back in the day you could come in and get everything you need in one store.”
Easterling said when he told friends he was going to stop at Sears, their response was: “Is Sears still open?”
Look at it. It’s as empty as it can be,” he said, looking down, detached, not seeing any other customers Buyers are being forced out The weekend after Thanksgiving.
Most of the shoppers thronging the Jersey City store Sunday were older and, like Easterling, could remember Sears in its heyday.
Many quickly left without finding what they were looking for. Some of the younger shoppers said they stopped simply because they remembered visiting as children.
“I used to shop here with my grandmother a few years ago,” said Rajeah Surel, 23, who came to hunt for a pair of pants while shopping with her friend Taryn Reczkowski, 22. They hurried after what Surel couldn’t find. was looking for.
“I walked in and said, ‘Wow, that’s sad,'” Reczkowski said.
It’s been a slow, quiet death for an iconic chain whose groundbreaking catalog and anchor position in many malls nationwide once made Sears both Amazon.
(AMZN) And the Walmart of its day.
when Sears and Kmart merged In 2005, they counted between them 3,500 US stores and more than 300,000 employees. But both brands were already in a downward spiral. After the merger the company focused on selling its more attractive real estate and Buy back stock Instead of investing in modernizing stores to make them competitive, in an effort to support its declining share price.
By 2018 the company had filed for bankruptcy. Eddie Lampert, the hedge fund operator who engineered the disastrous Kmart merger and served as CEO of the holding company, bought what was left of the business out of bankruptcy in early 2019. He promised to turn everything around after paying off many debts, unprofitable stores and less attractive leases.
The company that Emerging from bankruptcy As of early 2019 — the overly optimistic name Transformco — owns 223 Sears and 202 Kmart stores nationwide. But less than four years later, it’s barely on life support, as the tiny brick-and-mortar footprint and lack of buyers show.
Now experts say there’s essentially no reason to keep the handful of stores that are still open.
“Sears has been going down the drain for a long time. There is no chance of reviving it,” said Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail. “Nobody but Eddie Lampert knows why he’s keeping these remaining stores open. You can’t make the economics work with that amount of stores.”
As for why Sears hasn’t pulled the plug yet, Saunders said, “It could be that some contract or agreement has a penalty if it closes all the stores. Or perhaps they’re open because Eddie Lampert has a very strange approach to business. He still held onto the illusion that he could bring it back. A lot of it can be about ego.”
While the company’s demise now seems inevitable, it didn’t have to be this way, insists Mark Cohen, director of retail studies at Columbia University and former CEO of Sears’ Canadian unit before the Kmart merger.
He said that Sears’ experience managing its catalog, which includes a comprehensive list of products, positions it better than other traditional retailers to make an early move into online sales. And he said Sears had better lease deals than competing department store chains.
“It could rival Amazon. It was the Amazon of its day,” Cohen said. “There is no doubt that Sears needed to close stores and consolidate holdings, but their real estate holdings would not have been an albatross for other department store chains. Nothing could stop it from living a second life as a world beater. At the end of the day, it was about the incompetence and flaws of his leadership.
If — or perhaps when — Sears closes its final store, it will join a long list of retailers Radio shack, Unpaid shoes, Gymboree And American ApparelThat arose from bankruptcy only to subsequently go out of business in short order.
A precise count of the company’s remaining open stores is difficult to obtain. The total of 15 remaining Sears outlets is down about a third from 23 at this time last year. But those numbers come from being listed in the store locator on the company’s Web site. Spokesmen for Sears, Transformco and Lampert’s hedge fund did not respond to questions about the number of remaining stores, the company’s profitability or its plans.
The Sears name may live on even if the final full-line stores close.
After emerging from bankruptcy, Transformco purchased a holding company that it had previously spun off, including a chain of franchise-owned stores operating under the name Sears Hometown. The stores are a fraction of the size of full-line Sears and focus on selling appliances, tools and outdoor equipment.
Just before Transformco reacquired Sears Hometown in 2019, there were about 700 stores, but those, too, have been steadily closing. related to 100 stores closed Earlier this year, today has more than 100 openings.
Kmart has srivelled an even smaller size.
It was only a year ago Six Kmart stores Six more on the US mainland and across Puerto Rico, Guam and the US Virgin Islands. The Puerto Rico store has since closed and only three stores remain on the mainland, one each in Florida, New Jersey and Long Island, New York, according to Dick Barta, a former Kmart employee who has closely monitored store closings. year. The Kmart website backs up those numbers
A close of the holiday shopping season Strong start, and that might help Sears breathe a little longer. But if the US economy does Fall into recession As many economists fear, this could be the final straw that leads to its demise, said Katie Thomas, head of the Kearney Consumer Institute, an in-house think tank at the Kearney consulting firm.
“It’s hard to make the case that consumers will go to their store if they bring back the cost,” he said. I think that [a recession] Could be the final nail in the coffin.”
As for when Sears might eventually close the last remaining stores, Cohen said it doesn’t really matter at this point.
“The time of death was 2005,” he said, referring to the year Lampert took control of the company.
