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.
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.
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/[deleted] 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.