Did you know Sears was even open? One of few remaining stores in California is closing.
Sears, once a retail giant, has been described as the 19th-century Amazon.com for the way it revolutionized how Americans bought goods from its ubiquitous catalog and sprawling brick-and-mortar stores.
Now, Sears appears to be closing its Stockton outlet, one of its few remaining California stores. At its height, Sears had more than 30 stores in California.
The Stockton Record reports signs announcing "store closing" and "everything must go!" at Sears' Weberstown Mall location.
Sears has not announced an official closing date for the Stockton location. However, a Stockton Sears employee told The Record that the store will close in mid-August.
Transformco, the parent company of Sears, did not respond to The Record's multiple requests for comment. The Washington Prime Group Inc., owner of Weberstown Mall, also declined to comment on the closing.
With the Stockton Sears closing, California has only three remaining locations: Whitter, Concord and Burbank. Nationwide, the once-retail giant has nine locations left in the mainland US and one in Puerto Rico. At its peak, Sears had more than 3,000 stores nationwide.
The decline of Sears
After years of declining sales and underperforming store closures, Sears filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2019, hoping to use the debt-cutting process to eliminate burdensome leases, financial liabilities and costs.
The bankruptcy came after Sears failed to adapt to digital competition, struggled to keep pace with nimble physical competitors, did not reinvest in its stores, and crumbled under pension costs.
Related: A timeline of the rise and fall of Sears
"Sears once was a history-making company for the ways in which it sold its products and the audiences it reached," said Melissa Jacoby, bankruptcy law professor at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, told USA TODAY in 2019. "In recent years, it has become more notable for financial engineering that may have enriched certain investors but left the company even more vulnerable to failure and the loss of tens of thousands of jobs. Those steps delayed bankruptcy but also made reorganization less viable."
The Sears bankruptcy reorganization failed to stop the downward spiral. Since the desperate financial move, Sears has closed all but about a handful of its stores and cut about 250,000 jobs.
The history of Sears
Richard Sears started selling watches in 1886 to supplement his income as a station agent at North Redwood, Minnesota, according to Sears Archives.
A year later, Sears settled its first Chicago location and hired Alvah C. Roebuck, a watchmaker. The Sears Archive website states that its earliest catalog, from 1888, only featured watches and jewelry.
The corporate name became Sears, Roebuck, and Co. in 1893. In 1925, the first Sears retail store opened in a catalog center on Chicago's west side. The archive timeline states that in 1986, Sears celebrated 100 years.
According to the Sears Archive website, at the close of the 2000 fiscal year, there were 863 mall-based retail stores, most of which were co-located Sears Auto Centers, and 1,200 additional retail locations, ranging from hardware and outlet stores to independently owned stores.
In the early 20th century, Sears, Roebuck & Co. was America’s dominant company in the home delivery of merchandise. It ran this catalog-based business for decades before it opened its first store in 1925.
Like Amazon, Sears used its retailing strength to expand into related industries. It launched its own merchandise brands, such as Kenmore and DieHard, created Allstate Insurance, and even ventured into stock and real estate brokerage businesses.
It once owned and occupied the tallest building in America, the Sears Tower in Chicago. It even had the foresight to partner with CBS and IBM in an early Internet portal known as Prodigy.
Record reporter Angelaydet Rocha covers community news in Stockton and San Joaquin County. She can be reached at arocha@recordnet.com or on Twitter @AngelaydetRocha. To support local news, subscribe to The Stockton Record at https://www.recordnet.com/subscribenow.
This article originally appeared on The Record: One of the few remaining Sears stores in California is closing
