Sears Store Closings 2019: 100 Stores Closing Down, 60 Kmart Stores To Follow

The iconic company that began life as Sears, Roebuck & Company in 1893, and which was for decades the world’s largest retailer, is seeing its lifeblood ebb away with a relentless wave of store closures.

Bankrupt since October 2018, Sears now operates as Sears Holdings Corporation. Sears also owns Kmart Corporation, the big box department store chain founded in 1899.

Sears Holdings closed 142 stores by the end of 2018. It earlier closed 46 stores as part of the bankruptcy. At the start of 2019, Sears retained 506 locations, including 482 full-line department stores. It also operates 360 Kmart stores. Store closures since then have significantly cut these numbers.

Sears has closed, or will close, anywhere from 30 to 100 stores this year throughout the U.S. This will slash the remaining number of stores to fewer than 200. On the other hand, Kmart has closed, or intends to close, about 60 stores this year. This will leave fewer than 100 Kmarts in existence.

This latest round of store closures comes only weeks after an announcement 26 Sears and Kmart stores would be shut down in nearly two dozen states.

Sears and Kmart stores are still being shuttered despite it emerging from a bankruptcy designed to salvage the company. Sears employees have long blamed former chairman Eddie Lampert for destroying the company.

Lampert established Sears Holdings by merging Sears, Roebuck & Co and Kmart Holdings Corporation in 2006. He is Sears’ largest shareholder.

Sears lost over $11.7 billion from 2010 to 2018. The year 2010 was the last year Sears became profitable.

Sears’ sales plummeted 60 percent from 2010 to 2018, but Lampert who is infamous as Wall Street's "Hedge Fund King," insists Sears can regain profitability.

"That Sears is closing stores now, before the important holiday trading period, shows that the company's business model still isn't working," Neil Saunders, managing director at GlobalData Retail, told CNN Business.

"This isn't surprising, as Sears never really had a credible plan for survival: it has always been about making cuts to help the bottom line, rather than being about how to grow the top line."

He said the company has made few efforts to revitalize the brand or bring in new customers.

"It still comes across as a tired company that has little to offer. In today's cutthroat retail environment that's not good enough, and it suggests that Sears is still on a journey where the ultimate destination is failure."

Last April, Sears Holdings Corporation sued Lampert, his hedge fund ESL Investments and others investors like Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, claiming these persons stole billions of dollars in assets leading to its bankruptcy in 2018.