New York
cnn business
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Tracy Easterling spent nearly an hour Sunday shopping at Sears, which used to be one of her favorite stores. He has nothing left to show for it but 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,” she said as she browsed the shoe selection, where the shoes were still boxed instead of on display.
“I just came looking for sales. But it’s so empty, and there’s not much to choose from,” she said. “Back in the day you could walk in and get everything you needed in one store.”
Easterling said that when she told friends she would be stopping at Sears, their reactions were: “Is there still a Sears open?”
“Look at this. It’s as empty as can be,” she said without looking at any of the other customers, looking down buyers are moving out on the weekend after Thanksgiving.
Most of those who shopped at the Jersey City store on Sundays were older, and like Easterling, could remember Sears in its heyday.
Many people quickly left without finding what they were looking for. Some young shoppers said they stopped by simply because they remembered visiting as a child.
“I used to shop here with my great-grandmother years ago,” said 23-year-old Razia Surel, who was looking for a pair of pants while shopping with her friend, Taryn Reczkowski, 22. 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 phenomenal inventory and anchor position in many malls across the country once made Sears the Amazon.
(amzn) And the Walmart of its day.
When Sears and Kmart merged In 2005, they counted 3,500 US stores between themselves and more than 300,000 employees. But both brands were already on a downward spiral. After the merger, the company focused on selling its more lucrative real estate assets. buy back stock in an attempt to prop up its declining share price, rather than investing in modernizing the stores to make them competitive.
As of 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, took the remnants of the business out of bankruptcy in early 2019. , unprofitable stores and less attractive leases.
company that emerged from bankruptcy As of early 2019 — with the overly optimistic name Transformco — it owned 223 Sears and 202 Kmart stores nationwide. But less than four years later, it’s barely on life support, as evidenced by the modest brick-and-mortar footprint and lack of shoppers.
Now experts say there’s basically little or no reason why a handful of stores are still open.
“Sears has been going down the drain for too long. It has no potential for revival,” said Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail. “No one except Eddie Lampert knows why he’s keeping these remaining stores open You just can’t make the economics work with that amount of stores.”
As for Sears not yet pulling the plug, Saunders said, “It could be that there’s a penalty in some contract or agreement if it closes all the stores. Or maybe they’re open because Eddie Lampert has a very strange view of the business. It seems he’s still under illusions that he can turn it around. A lot of it may be about ego.
Although the company’s demise seems inevitable now, it didn’t need to be that way, insists Mark Cohen, director of retail studies at Columbia University and former CEO of Sears’ Canadian unit before the Kmart merger.
He added that Sears’ experience operating a catalog that had a broad list of products left it better positioned than other traditional retailers to take early steps in selling online. And he said Sears had better lease agreements than competing department store chains.
“It could have rivaled Amazon. It was the Amazon of its time,” Cohen said. “There is no doubt that Sears will need to close stores and consolidate holdings, but their real estate holdings would not have been an albatross. which they were for other department store chains. Nothing could stop him from getting a second life as a world champion. At the end of the day, it was all about the incompetence and malfeasance of his leadership.
If — or perhaps when — Sears closes its last store, it will join a long list of retailers radio Shack, shoe free, gymboree And American Apparelwhich emerged from bankruptcy and subsequently went out of business in short order.
It is difficult to accurately count the remaining open stores in the company. The total of 15 remaining Sears outlets is down nearly a third from 23 at this time last year. But those numbers are listed in the store locator on the company’s Web site. Spokespeople for the hedge fund of Sears, Transformco and Lampert did not respond to questions about the number of stores remaining, the company’s profitability or plans going forward.
The Sears name may live on even if the last full-line store closes.
After emerging from bankruptcy, Transformco bought out the holding company it had previously abandoned, consisting of a chain of franchisee-owned stores operating under the name. Sears Hometown, The stores are a fraction of the size of full-line Sears and focus on selling tools, equipment, and outdoor equipment.
There were about 700 of those stores just before Transformco’s re-acquisition of Sears Hometown in 2019, but they’re also closing steadily. about 100 stores closed Opened earlier this year, today there are just over 100 open.
Kmart has shrunk to an even smaller size.
were a year ago Six Kmart Stores on the US mainland, and six more in Puerto Rico, Guam and the US Virgin Islands. The store has since closed in Puerto Rico and only three stores remain in the mainland, one each in Florida, New Jersey and Long Island, New York, according to Dick Barta, a former Kmart employee who closely followed the store closings. Have kept an eye on year. The Kmart website backs up those numbers.
the holiday shopping season is over strong start, and that might help Sears breathe a little longer. but if the American 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 internal think tank at the Kearney consulting firm.
“It’s hard to make the case that consumers will go to those stores if they’re holding back spending,” she said. “I think that [a recession] Could be the last nail in the coffin.”
As for whether Sears could eventually close the remaining stores, Cohen said that doesn’t really matter at this point.
“The time of death was 2005,” he said, the year Lampert took control of the company.