Dec. 14—Sears at Frederick's Francis Scott Key Mall — one of the final remnants of a once great department store empire — is going out of business.

The last day customers can shop at the store will be Jan. 15, a manager, who declined to provide her name, told a Frederick News-Post reporter on Tuesday afternoon.

Bright yellow signs advertising the store's impending closure in red block letters are plastered on the store's windows. More hang around the building's interior.

"Everything must go!" one sign shouts.

"Everything at least 25% to 75% off," another says.

At around 2:45 p.m. on Tuesday, few customers wandered the store's cavernous — but sparsely stocked — aisles. Two mall walkers strolled from the exit, then continued their circuit around the 755,000-square-foot mall.

In the department store chain's heyday, Sears was the largest retailer in the world. It towered over the industry — literally. When construction on the Sears Tower was finished in 1973, the 110-story building was the tallest in the world.

There are now fewer than two dozen full-line Sears stores remaining in the country. The location in Francis Scott Key Mall is the last one in Maryland.

Last month, the shop had about 14,300 visitors, according to Placer.ai, an analytics company that collects data on consumer foot traffic through partnerships with third-party mobile apps that provide location-based services.

The entire Francis Scott Key Mall had about 192,700 visitors in November, according to Placer.ai.

The last Sears in New Jersey, about 235 miles away from the one in Frederick, had about 8,000 visitors last month, according to the analytics company.

The now-hollowed-out retail chain grew from humble roots.

Richard W. Sears founded the R.W. Sears Watch Company in 1886 as a mail order watch company based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The business offered its first catalog the following year, according to the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, which Sears also once owned.

The company opened the first Sears retail store in 1925 in Chicago. After surviving the Great Depression, the chain flourished in the economic boom following World War II.

When Kmart acquired Sears in 2005, both companies became subsidiaries of the Sears Holdings Corporation. Sales at both chains continued to decline in the following years, and in 2018, Sears Holdings filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Under Chapter 11, a business can continue operating while it reorganizes its debt.

The next year, ESL Investments — the hedge fund owned by Sears Holdings' former CEO, Edward Lampert — acquired the corporation's remaining assets.

Today, the privately held company, Transformco, owns the Kmart and Sears stores that are left.

As of April, there were three Kmart stores in the United States that remained open, according to USA Today.

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