What Will Become of Sears?

Sears Holdings Corporation plans on closing another 120 stores, due to poor performance in the Holiday season. The company owns Sears and Kmart. Sears still has over 2,100 stores in America, and 500 in Canada, but the brand seems to be unraveling with each passing year.

The history of Sears is rather interesting. The Kmart corporation actually owns Sears, not the other way around. However, the name Sears Holdings Corporation, suggests that it is Sears that owns Kmart. In reality, the Kmart name is what has changed, but not Kmart itself. So the Sears Holdings Corporation is actually a new name, for Kmart, which owns Sears stores, and Kmart stores.

Since 2004 the Kmart Holdings Corporation, has been operating as the Sears Holdings Corporation. Part of the problem with Sears, is that there are entirely too many subsidiaries. You have the traditional Sears department stores, Sears hardware stores, outlets, Sears Grand (a supermarket and department store combined into one), Sears Essentials. There are other subsidiaries not worth mentioning, as well as Land's End, which are stand alone Land's End stores that carry items you might not find at the Sears department stores.

Allstate insurance used to be part of Sears, Discover used to be part of Sears, at one time Sears had a license to create their own verison of the Atari 2600. Sears is a huge corporation, and at one time had the tallest building in the world. Sears owns a 25% stake in a sports arena that bears their own name. Sears still owns a large amount of real estate in America, outside of their stores.

There are plenty of Sears stores left in America. However, Sears suffers from a serious image problem. The store has not been chic since the eighties. Sears has consistently been, one of the ugliest department stores I have ever walked into. Sears seems to struggle with the latest brands, always trailing behind J.C. Penneys and Khol's, neither of which ever carried interesting brands to begin with. Sears rarely discounts their merchandise as aggressively as J.C. Penneys and Khol's.

Sears, or Kmart, or Sears, depending on how you look at it, still has a few good decades left, regardless of how outright pedestrian and utilitarian their stores continue to be. After all, Sears Holding Corporation still has cash from other revenue sources it can always pump into deteriorating Sears stores. Just how long they could do this is anyone's guess. The irony of both stores, is that despite how hideous they are, the look and feel of both stores is so ingrained into the American psyche that is difficult to resist the temptation to walk into a location, just out of morbid curiosity, you know, to get it out of your system. Walking through a store is its own experience, and Sears, Kmart, and J.C. Penneys are the only retailers still offering that "eighties" shopping experience. I am shocked that Sears still sells electronics.