Is Sears Still In Business – Importers and retailers are predicting supply chains of ‘future shortages’, said Salvatore Steele, founder of Alba Wheels Up International.
Sears Holdings has emerged from bankruptcy after more than 10,000 court filings and four years of layoffs that have reduced the department store chain from nearly 700 stores to less than two dozen.
Is Sears Still In Business
The bankruptcy estate’s plan of reorganization took place on October 29, marking the end of Chapter 11 and the start of the liquidation process for its remaining assets.
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Sears Holdings is a shell company. It sold the store to ESL Investments, an affiliate of former Sears president Eddie Lampert, in February 2019. Sales of $5.2 billion include more than 400 retail locations.
Ray Weimer, a professor of retail practices at Syracuse University, does not expect the remaining 20+ Sears stores to remain on sale. “It doesn’t have an attractive value proposition for consumers and the amount of competition that offers similar items in the retail market will eventually come to a point,” he told FOX Business.
Customers shop at a Sears store at Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, Illinois on September 17, 2021. (Scott Olson/Getty Images/Getty Images)
Sears once advertised itself as “Where America Shops” and boasted lines of merchandise by supermodel Cheryl Tiegs and “Charlie’s Angel” star Jacqueline Smith.
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At its peak, Sears, Roebuck was the world’s largest retailer with nearly 3,500 Sears and Kmart stores, 2,350 full-line and off-mall stores, and 1,100 specialty retail stores. Sears also owns a portfolio of well-known brands and operating businesses, including Kenmore, Diehard, Craftsman, Sears Home Services, Sears Auto Centers and Innoville.
A Kmart sign still stands above a shopping center in Lawnside, New Jersey on October 29, 2022, a decade after Kmart closed. The property will eventually be sold in 2022.
Lampert, chairman of Kmart Holdings, bought Sears for $11 billion in March 2005 to eliminate Walmart and e-commerce rivals Amazon.
At the time of the merger, the Sears-Kmart combo, known as TransformCo, had annual revenue of $55 billion, a fifth of Walmart’s fiscal 2004 total of $256 billion.
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Amazon’s annual revenue is $2.54 billion. Since then, the world’s largest online retailer’s sales have grown to $469.8 billion, while Walmart’s ended 2021 at $572.8 billion. Transformco is private and does not report financial results.
Sears tried to emerge from bankruptcy by closing stores and selling assets. Sears sold its Craftsman brand to Stanley Black & Decker for $775 million in 2017 and closed 300 stores in 2018.
The company went bankrupt in October 2018 with 687 stores. Like many brick-and-mortar retailers, department stores are experiencing a decline in sales. Revenues fell 53.8% in the five years before the bankruptcy, prompting some vendors to insist on unfair payment schedules, cut subsidies or demand cash in advance as a condition of continued delivery of goods.
Lampert purchased the remaining Sears assets in a January 2019 bankruptcy auction and acquired Sears HomeTown and Outlet stores in June. It sold Diehard to Advance Auto in December 2019 for $200 million.
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Transformco continues to sell stores and closed the last 15 Sears Auto Center locations in January.
Based on what Professor Weimer has seen, he expects the Sears store to die a slow death, so it is unlikely that anyone would be interested in buying one of the Sears properties. If Lampert is interested in selling, the rest of the store will be offered. The footprint is small.
Aside from the small-format Hometown store, Sears currently has fewer than two dozen stores, according to Brostax and the Sears website. An incredibly shrinking Sears/Kmart business entered 2021 with fewer than 100 locations still open for business between the two names. But based on recent attrition rates, that number could be halved by the end of the year.
Two brand stores — each once the nation’s largest retailer but now defunct — have been closing locations at an alarming rate over the past few years, which underpinned our ownership’s emergence from bankruptcy nearly two years ago. From parent company Transformco. The entity is owned and controlled by Edward Lampert, the principal shareholder and CEO of the company’s previous incarnation, Sears Holdings.
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As of February 2018, there were about 1,000 separate locations under the two nameplates but that dropped to 400 stores when the company emerged from Chapter 11 a year later. Later that year, in November, a statement from Transformco — the last time it publicly commented on its store count — put the number at about 190.
A December report on the future of Sears by CNN Business put the current number at 122, including 74 Sears and 48 Km. “They are closing up shop where possible and listing all other locations with commercial real estate brokers,” according to CNN.
But the company tracking the number of Sears locations still operating is even lower. Brostocks.com, which bills itself as an information service – “We’re not financial advisors, some stock bros.” – Confirmed reports that only 60 Sears and 32 Kmarts are still open for business. He confirmed CNN’s information that stores will continue to close and that others are available for lease and may close when new tenants are hired.
Given the pace of closings over the past three years — half of the company’s stores close in a 12-month period — 45 or 50 stores could still be open by the end of the year.
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“It’s a slow liquidation,” Reshmi Basu, a retail insolvency expert at Debtwire, told CNN. In addition to closing stores, Transformco sold other assets, including the Die Hard brand and Sears’ Anvil Solutions logistics operation. It is said to still be looking for a buyer for the Kenmore brand name and a possible auto repair unit. Again, Transformco did not respond to previous requests for comment on its status or future plans.
Even though neutral outsiders have been predicting the complete demise of the Sears/Kmart business for years, all of these could be disputed at one point or another. Could it finally happen in 2021? At least Mark Cohen, director of retail studies at Columbia University and former CEO of Sears Canada, told CNN, “It’s over for all intents and purposes. We’ll be back struggling to survive from 2022. Sears Holding Co. through a merger between Sears, Roebuck & Co. and Kmart Holding Corp. Last year, about 16 were built. The company filed for bankruptcy three years ago, and only a handful of Sears store locations operate.
The merger, which executives from both retailers hoped would breathe new life into the combined company, was disappointing. Sears Holding Company filed for Chapter 11 in 2018.
In 2005, Sears also merged with struggling retailer Kmart. Prior to the merger, Kmart Holding Corporation was publicly traded on the Nasdaq Exchange under the ticker symbol “KMRT”. Sears, Roebuck & Co. It is a public company and trades on the NYSE under the symbol “S”.
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The merger of the two retailers created a new corporation, Sears Holding Corporation, which is listed for trading on the Nasdaq as “SHLD”. At the time of the merger, Sears Holdings became the third largest US retailer with annual revenues of approximately $55 billion.
In October 2018, Sears filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy with approximately 700 Sears stores in the US compared to a total of 3,500 Sears and Kmart stores at the time of the 2005 merger.
Part of the bankruptcy deal includes closing the remaining 142 store locations, most of which are located in shopping malls that have lost their appeal to American shoppers.
In 2018, CNBC reported that several CEOs of other retailers had failed mergers before filing for bankruptcy. Former Sears Canada CEO Mark Cohen said at the time that the company was “toast the day after it closed.”
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Another former retail executive, former Toys “R” Us CEO Gerald Storch, said Sears has long lacked a “sustainable competitive advantage.” However, game retailers have seen their share of struggles. Storch says it is not succeeding in consumer-related areas.
Dana Telsey, CEO of Telsey Advisory Group, told CNBC during the Sears bankruptcy that it was “a long time coming.”
In 2021, Sears still owes $80 million to administrative creditors. Also, legal bills for bankruptcy proceedings have reached nearly $250,000, according to DebtWire data.
Kmart President Edward Lampert engineered the Kmart and Sears merger. It acquired the remaining Sears and Kmart stores in 2019 through a new company called Transformco. Sears, once a “multidimensional retail giant,” has shed many of its most profitable business divisions.
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Sears and Kmart store numbers continue to decline after mergers and bankruptcies. Competition with big-box and e-commerce retailers, for example
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