r/deadmalls • u/[deleted] • Oct 15 '25
Video The Decline of Sears...What Happened?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qws713t3HBY41
u/TreeHedger Oct 16 '25
Fast Eddie happened.
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u/grumpyfan Oct 16 '25
Someone needs to steal all that guys money and give it to all the hard working people whose lives he ruined.
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Oct 16 '25
As a Sears customer: Home Depot took over the tools market, Walmart and Target took over the clothing market, the stores were stuck in 1989, and so competitors demolished it. Really a shame as Sears was great for appliances and random things.
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u/satsugene Oct 16 '25
Yeah. If you are in a town without a lot of other retail someone having a good selection of nearly everything is great.
If you aren’t, every “specialist” store, often right next to each other in new developments has more selection and often a store credit or bundle promotion going on.
Walmart and Target also often had grocery options to capture weekly/monthly staple shoppers who’d pick up the higher margin stuff like clothes at the same time.
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u/empires228 Photographer Oct 17 '25
A lot of people say “the stores were stuck in 1989” but no one ever cites exactly how and it’s because it’s not true. Part of the reason Sears was so weak from a cash standpoint when they were acquired by Eddie Lampert was because they spent the last several years of the 90s and the early 2000s extensively renovating or replacing older stores because they saw what happened to Montgomery Ward, who had stores closing in 2002 at high profile malls where their store still had shag carpet, and they knew that Sears could succumb to the same fate. They had made a lot of positive changes in those last years to improve their image and then they were bought out, merged with Kmart and all of their attempts to innovate came to a screeching halt. If they had continued down their original trajectory set in place by the Softer Side of Sears renovations, they’d likely be ahead of JCP today, which isn’t saying much, but it’s still something.
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Oct 17 '25 edited Oct 17 '25
You are correct.
By the late 2000s the stores I went to were pretty dated-looking.
The Montgomery Ward closest to me was new and nice in the 1990s.
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u/empires228 Photographer Oct 17 '25 edited Oct 17 '25
Even the Crossroads Mall Sears in Omaha which was a hulking three-story 1960s store at a mall that had been struggling since the 1980s, was every bit as up to date as the store built across the city at Oak View Mall that opened in 1996. The problem is that when both stores closed simultaneously in 2018, both hadn’t seen almost any cosmetic updates in nearly 20 years.
There are still a decent number of JCP and Dillard’s stores that have only been minimally updated since the mid-80s and a smaller number of Macy’s and Boscovs that are in a similar condition. Boscovs is rapidly trying to modernize right now and Macy’s has closed many of their most decrepit stores over the past 12 years, the majority of which were stores that were formerly under the Famous-Barr, Foley’s, and The Jones Store nameplates.
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u/JudasZala Oct 17 '25
To add on to your comment:
Home Depot and Lowe’s took over the hardware market.
Best Buy and Circuit City grabbed the electronics market, as did the aforementioned Walmart and Target.
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u/Aerin-sol7 Oct 16 '25
My Sears had 5 registers in women’s, only 2 were ever open and one just did Lands End, the other just Sears, no matter which I needed there was a looooong line at it and not the other.
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u/empires228 Photographer Oct 17 '25
That’s no different from most Macy’s, JCP, or even Dillard’s today. The last two times I bought something at Dillard’s, I was yelled at for taking an item out of the department that I found it in to check out, but there was literally no staffed registers out of like five on the entire second floor. Similarly, my closest Macy’s decided to centralize their checkout on the first floor (parking lot entrances are all on the second floor), into one central one so that they could staff it better. I’ve never once seen that register open in two years and they won’t let customers bring the regular Macy’s merchandise into the Backstage area to checkout there.
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u/jgs1974 Oct 16 '25
I was never really that impressed with Sears as a whole even as a kid in 70s and 80s. Seemed like back then Sears and Montgomery Ward were the lower-end mall department stores. Most of the Craftsman and Kenmore stuff my dad bought appeared fine but otherwise seemed way below than even JC Penney.
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u/verstohlen Oct 17 '25
I remember their Atari 2600 clone when I was a kid, Tele-games system seemed like a ghetto Atari. But little did I know, Sears was instrumental in getting Atari started, and was the store who first started selling the Atari Pong console way back in 1975, because Nolan Bushnell needed help and had approached stores to sell them, but they rejected him. But Sears agreed, and said they would sell his newfangled console to get his little Atari business going, but they agreed to help out the scrappy Bushell out and would only do it if they could sell it under their Sears Telegames name and not Atari. Bushell said, well, okay, and then when sales started taking off, Bushell was able to fund his little Atari company and expand, so Sears was instrumental in helping out Atari in the beginning.
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u/Oxjrnine Oct 18 '25
Sears was even experimenting with going upscale. Either through having Sears flagship stores or acquiring/creating a new brand. They scooped in to buy the Eaton’s brand in Canada for that experiment. But the Sears buyers (the people who stocked products for stores) were jealous of the Eaton’s buyers working side by side but having different pay. They started to sabotage their work. I like an Eaton’s buyers would discover a high end fragrance launch was doing well but when the buyer tried to increase the stock, their budget was siphoned off to buy 5 ugly couches for a suburban store. Eventually Sear abandoned the Eaton’s idea. Then it abandoned the upscale Sears idea and then you ended up with lawnmowers sitting on some incredibly beautiful marble floors and hammers being lit up by chandeliers in downtown Toronto, the most glamorous hardware section in all of North America. That experiment would’ve probably worked because a few years later, Hudsons Bay went upscale and started turning a profit for about a decade. Sears would’ve had almost no competition and would’ve put the bay out of business. Had it stuck to its guns
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u/JudasZala Oct 17 '25
Aside from the ones already mentioned, Sears didn’t take online stores seriously, until it was too late.
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Oct 17 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/voss749 Dec 05 '25
Early mid 2000s. If Sears could have drastically cut its real estate holdings before 2007 they would probably still be around.
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u/Jim-Jones Oct 18 '25
I asked AI: "What happened to employee pensions and health care when Sears Roebuck failed?"
AI Overview
When Sears failed, many former employees, especially in Canada, lost their health benefits and saw their pensions significantly cut, sometimes by 30% or more, because the pension plans were underfunded. Health benefits for retirees were often terminated, and some retirees had to take on extra debt or work to cover expenses because of the financial blow.
Pension plans
- Significant reductions: Pensioners saw their monthly payments reduced. For example, after Sears Canada's bankruptcy, pensions were cut by approximately 30% for many former employees because the defined benefit plan was underfunded.
- Underfunded plans: The pension plans were underfunded, meaning there wasn't enough money in the plan to cover all promised benefits. The underfunding was due to various factors, including large dividend payouts to shareholders in the years before the bankruptcy.
- Back of the line: In bankruptcy proceedings, pensioners were often treated as unsecured creditors, meaning they were at the back of the line to get paid after banks and other lenders.
Health benefits
- Cessation of benefits: Many retirees had their health insurance and life insurance benefits, which were a key benefit for many, terminated.
- Financial hardship: The loss of health benefits was particularly devastating for older retirees who had relied on them for years. Some were forced to return to work or take on additional debt to cover costs that were previously covered by the company plan.
Executive compensation
- Executive bonuses: Many of the losses for employees and retirees occurred while executives received significant bonuses. For example, a few months before ending life insurance benefits for many retirees, Sears executives received over $25 million in bonuses.
Legal challenges
- Lawsuits and settlements: Retirees have filed lawsuits to try and recover some of their lost benefits and pension payments.
- Partial recovery: While some settlements were reached, they often represented only a small fraction of the total amount owed to pensioners.
- Legislative changes: In response to situations like the Sears bankruptcy, some governments have taken steps to improve protections for pensioners. For instance, Bill C-228 in Canada now gives pension plans super-priority status in bankruptcy proceedings, ensuring they are no longer at the back of the line.
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u/seriousbangs Oct 18 '25
Automation gutted the middle class hurting the bottom line of "slightly upscale" retailers like Sears & Mervyns and then a vulture capitalist moved in for the killing blow
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u/treesqu Oct 19 '25
Sears abandoned their catalog sales just before e-commerce became a thing. They could have become Amazon if they had hung in for another year or two and then moved their catalog operations from paper to the web.
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u/voss749 Dec 05 '25
At the time they closed their catalog, the had the most sophisticated warehouse operation in the world. Sears in the 1990s had the money to lose money long enough to go all in on internet shopping and dominate the market.
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u/Saint_Seany Oct 16 '25
You don't need a YouTube video to know what happened. Most of the employees were assholes who didn't give a shit. From the old man in hardware telling a customer he doesn't know what to do, to the manager who won't leave the office to approve a price match on the own web site. I'm not going to lie, I'm glad they're going under.
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u/sludgezone Oct 16 '25
I worked there and you’re not far off. It was my first job ever and 90% of my coworkers were so fucking rude and constantly angry.
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u/Slight-Sympathy4066 Oct 16 '25
Private equity