If Kmart And Sears Stores Close Without A National Press Release, Does Anyone Notice?

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Last week, department store chain Macy’s announced its holiday season results and its plans to close 40 stores in the coming months. Shoe retailer Finish Line announced plans to close 150 stores by the year 2020. Yet what you never hear about in the national news anymore is how many stores Sears Holdings, corporate parent of Sears and Kmart, is planning to close.

Today, Sears Holdings caught the attention of the Los Angeles Times by announcing that three Kmart stores in the state of California will be closing. If your local store is staying open (or is long gone) or you don’t run a Google alert on the subject, you might not even realize that the company is closing any stores at all. Yet Sears Holdings has actually shed a lot of stores in the last half-decade.

Their annual report from last year shows that they ended fiscal year 2010 (which ended on January 31, 2011–yeah, finance is weird) with 3,949 stores, and ended fiscal year 2014 with 1,725 stores. That number may seem artificially high because Sears department stores with Auto Centers counted as two stores.

There’s nothing wrong with closing stores, or closing them without announcing it nationally. Sears Holdings had too many stores, many of which are too big for its current needs. It’s disruptive and terrible when people lose their jobs, and can be very inconvenient for customers, but closing underperforming stores or giving up a location when the lease is up is how a business survives. (Sometimes not closing stores dooms a business faster: ask Radio Shack.)

The lack of store closing list releases means fewer “Sears is doomed!” news stories, which is better in the long run. Yet once we noticed this pattern, we had to add it up. Sears doesn’t announce how many stores they’ve closed until the release of their annual report, which will later this winter. However, by putting together local news reports, we can find most of them: let us know if your local Kmart or Sears has closed in the last year, and we’ll put it on the list.

KMART

April: Wicker Park, IL
April: Pocatello, ID
May: Colonial Heights, VA
June: Wauwatosa, WI
June: Hopewell, VA
Schuylkill Mall, Frackville, PA
June: Greenville, NC
July: Ontario, OR
July: Mount Pocono Plaza, Mount Pocono, PA
July: Mobile, AL
July: Tulsa, OK
August: Bel Air, AL
August: Bellevue Center, TN
October: Vineland, NJ
October: Atwater, CA
November: Parkville, MD
November: Sturgis, MI
November: Spearfish, SD
November: Los Banos, CA
November: Davenport, IA
November: Lake Park, FL
December: Belvidere, IL
April 2016: Citrus Heights, Chula Vista, and San Mateo, CA

SEARS

June: Missoula, MT: Sears and Auto Center
July: Sangertown Mall, Utica, NY: Sears and Auto Center
Sikes Senter Mall, Wichita Falls, TX: Sears and Auto Center

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist