Sears Has Only 12 Stores Left in America

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 11, 9:15AM EST

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Sears Has Only 12 Stores Left in America — © Sears (CC BY 2.0) by Mike Mozart

Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck started Sears in 1892. In its early years, it was primarily a catalog company. By 1969, it was the largest retailer in the world. Five years later, it moved into Sears Tower in Chicago, which, at 110 stories, was the tallest building in the world. Today, only 12 Sears stores are left.

What happened? Walmart, Amazon and poor management. In 2004, Kmart bought Sears for $11 billion. Hedge fund manager Edward Lampert engineered the deal. The debt load taken on in the deal was unusually high. When measured against the company, renamed Sears Holding, the debt leverage was too burdensome to carry. Within five years, Sears Holdings began to cut stores to remain in business. Lampert tried to bail Sears out financially. However, the sums he put into the company were insufficient to halt a sharp revenue and store count decline.

Sears filed for bankruptcy in 2018, still $5.6 billion in debt. Leverage, it turned out, was only part of the problem. (See 29 iconic brands that completely collapsed and we forgot.)

Another challenge was Sam Walton. Founded in 1962, Walmart had a store count of 51 in 1972 when it went public (at about the same time as Sears Tower was completed). The store count reached 1,928 in 1992. Today, that figure is 4,616 in the United States and 10,500 worldwide. The core of Walmart’s success was discounts. It undercuts the pricing of items sold in most department stores. It was accused of putting local stores out of business, but the same pricing philosophy also hurt major chains.

Amazon also badly hurt Sears, as well as many other American retailers. Starting in 1994, it sold only books before broadband internet connections were available. The inventory of available products grew to consumer electronics. Today, it sells products across every retail category in the country. It is the fourth most-visited website in America, behind Google, YouTube and Facebook.

Only 12 Sears stores remain. Even experts wonder why there are any at all.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.