Sears filing bankruptcy on Monday - Boomer store somehow still alive *sips*

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https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/14/sea...tcy-later-tonight-in-fight-to-stay-alive.html


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People walk by a Sears store in a nearly-empty Westfield Meriden shopping mall in Meriden, Connecticut.
Sears Holdings plans to file for bankruptcy protection after midnight in the East Coast, culminating the collapse of what was once America's largest retailer, people familiar with the situation tell CNBC.

As part of the bankruptcy plan, Sears will immediately close roughly 150 of its stores, people familiar with the matter have said. It has approximately 700 stores, one of the people said.

It is unclear how the closures would impact Sears' workers, which totaled roughly 90,000 in February 2018.

Sears will aim to stay in operations through the holidays, during which it will seek a buyer. That buyer could include its CEO, Eddie Lampert, or others that wish to make a higher bid.

The retailer has secured roughly $500 million to support its holiday operations, the people said. As of Sunday evening, negotiations were ongoing, two of the people said.

The people, who requested anonymity because the information is confidential, cautioned no plan is definite until the retailer formally submits its bankruptcy paperwork. Sears did not immediately respond to comment.

Sears has a $134 million debt payment due Monday it will not meet.

The retailer's last profitable year was in 2010. It rang up less than $17 billion in sales in fiscal 2017, half of the roughly $40 billion in revenue it brought in five years earlier, according to FactSet.

Sears wasn't immediately available for comment.
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Better late than never, I suppose. Sears probably holds the Guinness world record for highest number of ghost towns in America:



Kmart will probably follow suit soon since it's owned by the same company.
 
Sears has been on a slow decline and the KMart merger (which bolted them onto another failing chain) crippled them even worse. Even as a kid the local Sears always seemed to be empty and the same went with KMart.
 
And with that, my hometown mall has lost its final anchor.

F to my adolescence.
 
Again? I thought Sears went through this like five different times in the past decade
 
I was actually suprised the sears where i live does pretty good business. Let this be a reminder that nothing is permanent we will all die one day and our legacy's will be nothing but distant memories that only few will know and non will care about.
 
ForgedBlades said:
And with that, my hometown mall has lost its final anchor.

F to my adolescence.
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Yeah, that was the final one here too, following close on the heels of the Bon-Ton. Come to think of it. I haven't been inside the local mall here for almost 8 years.... I wonder if anything is left, I don't dare go look because I'd rather remember the happier times I spent there as a kid.

Though I'm amazed it took this long, Sears had been a retail hospice case for a decade and the last of the old traditional "department" stores to bite it.

Forget Sears, malls themselves are about to go on the pile, I haven't seen one around here in years that wasn't partially converted into office/community service use, like becoming the home of cheap walk-in medical clinics, barely-legal enterprises like gold-4-cash operators or the local WIC office.
 
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Well I've seen firsthand the Canada Branch go down the shitter. Was just a matter of time before the US branch joined it.
 
end of an era. up until the late 90's they did very well. the growth of on-demand internet ordering largely killed the catalog business, which was Sears bread and butter, and they came too late to the online retailer game to make it impactful (KB Toys and EB were late but managed to hang on with exclusives). the client base of Sears tended to not use internet retailing products or tools, but with that demographic dying off it's no surprising that a failure to adapt to the new method of shopping spelled the death of the company.

Sears has always been a decent store and had alright brands though - appliances, tools, furniture, even clothing and various goods like sporting equipment or pots and pans. however with more durable goods lasting longer, being less expensive, and more often than not either found in thrift stores, gotten as gifts from parents, cohabiting meaning less impetus to buy products, and the rise of online retailers like Amazon or eBay; Sears couldn't really compete effectively without leveraging their primarily brands and product lines... even then it would have been a price war and quite painful since traditional brick and mortar is very expensive to remain in operation without incredibly high product turn over (women's fashion chains abuse this function of their market - it's a lot harder to sell a television or stove that way).

i hope they break up in such a way as to preserve their brands. Land's End, Craftsman, Kenmore, DieHard, et c are all decent brands, and much of it worth keeping.
 
A job I had years ago required us to wear hi viz stuff if we went outside the building. I bought a few hi viz coats on Amazon where the reflective material didn't last more then a few months, ended up getting a craftman's coat from my local sears, it is still in good shape today and offered an removal layer for extra warmth for the same price as the ones I got on amazon.

Honestly there is no reason why Sears is in the position it is in today, it was amazon before amazon. They had the logical heritage and experience to rival or even exceed amazon (Sears sent houses to people ffs back in mail order days and when things were harder/more expensive to transport), but yet their execs didn't embrace the internet until it was far too late.

Craftman also by people with way more experience then me in tools also have been taking huge hits in quality since Sears bought them out.

Their Exec teams for the past 20ish years fucked up hugely on this.
 
They aren't the only one...

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Claires has been having trouble, too and theyre a staple for any mall.
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