TACOMA — Less than a year after it reopened, a Washington state Sears store is closing again, as the retailer’s national vanishing act has become more stark in recent months.
The Sears store at Union Gap’s Valley Mall recently announced it would be shutting down. Sears had reopened the store in Yakima County on Nov. 6 after closing once before in December 2022.
“Every thing must go … even fixtures,” the store said in its Facebook post.
A store employee who did not give her name because she was not authorized to speak for the company told The News Tribune the last day “of the store being open to the public” is Sept. 22.
As far as traffic, she told The News Tribune that it had “been pretty good on the weekends, a little slower on our weekdays.”
When asked if she were surprised about the closure, she replied, “No.”
A different experience was recounted by another employee last December shortly after the reopening, who told The News Tribune the store was “No. 2 in sales” among Sears sites.
The closure leaves one remaining Sears presence in Washington state: at Westfield Southcenter in Tukwila, one of about 9 left in the United States according to one estimate as of July 2024, along with two Kmarts and a handful of sites in Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
When Sears merged with Kmart in the mid-2000s, they had nearly 3,500 stores.
Recent days have brought more accounts of the brand’s physical presence being on the brink of extinction.
Sears’ former headquarters in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, was once home to about 9,000 employees with 2.4 million square feet of office space. It also was one of the 30 largest structures in the world in terms of square footage.
The sprawling, 273-acre office campus was sold last year to Dallas-based Compass Datacenters, and demolition of the office buildings is underway, the Daily Herald, which covers suburban Chicago, reported Wednesday.
It it set to become home to a $10 billion data center campus.
Stores still owned by the retailer’s parent company are continuing to be auctioned off, including in Manchester, Connecticut. Meanwhile, another store site in Meriden, Connecticut, failed to attract “acceptable bids,” according to online news site CT Insider/Record-Journal in June, and was taken off market.
‘REDISCOVER SEARS’
The Union Gap store reopening was part of a “Rediscover Sears” campaign parent company Transformco launched last year. A Sears site in Burbank, California, launched along with the Union Gap store, remains open, according to an August job posting for a sales associate at the site.
Tyler Kusma of Arlington, Virginia, is writing a book about the history of Sears. He told The News Tribune in a brief interview Thursday that he discovered the Union Gap planned closure as part of monitoring Transformco’s job boards for new positions.
“Every two weeks, I check Sears’ job site to see if stores are closing,” he said. “Because ever since they filed for bankruptcy and went private, they no longer do press releases or anything like that.”
In this case, temporary position for “backroom associate” was posted in mid-July by Transformco with “store closing,” mentioned in the description.
The $18-hour position called for “assisting the liquidator with clearing out the stockrooms, moving and condensing merchandise & fixtures on the sales floor as well as taking apart stockroom shelving, store fixtures and tossing signage and trash.
“Must be able to lift at least 50 pounds,” it added.
Kusma said his book, which he’s been working on for the past few years, will reflect the history and continued shrinking of the once-dominant retail giant. Sears is not only shedding storefronts, but by Kusma’s estimates, sells very little directly from itself online amid its Sears Marketplace program.
“I would say most stuff on there is listed by third-party sellers,” he said. “If you search for something, you can filter to be only sold by Sears, and that will bring down their search results from hundreds to single digits or zero.”
The website offers a $10 off coupon on orders of $75 or more, or $50 off orders of $750 or more once you enter your email as a “first-time subscriber.”
“Sears sells a lot of OK stuff,” Kusma noted, but likely would continue to struggle against Walmart’s reach and prices, Target’s product lines, and Amazon’s size and convenience.
“Where is their advantage? For Sears, they haven’t answered that question,” he added.
