Sears Will Finally Go Out of Business

Sears, once known as Sears, Roebuck and Co, was founded in 1892. Its store count peaked at over 3,000, and it was the largest retailer in America for decades, until Walmart topped it in 1990.

By 2005, Sears had weakened so much that hedge fund manager Eddie Lampert bought it for $11 billion, using his ownership in Kmart to complete the transaction. The combined business declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2018.

The current Sears store count is five. CNN recently reported that this year’s Black Friday will probably be its last. A former Sears executive, Mark Cohen, told the cable channel, “Someone unlocks the door in the morning and locks it at night, but there’s actually nothing to sell in the stores.” In a world in which most even modest-sized retailers have hundreds of stores, and Walmart has almost 5,200, five locations means a retailer already has more than one foot in the grave.

The debate about what killed Sears is endless. One reason is how much debt Lampert had to take on to buy the company. This led to an inability to update aging stores. Another is that Sam Walton ran Walmart so well that hordes of retail customers moved to its stores. Walmart has also been blamed for the demise of Kmart, which was founded in 1899 as S.S. Kresge.

The most convincing case is that Sears lost most of its traffic to Amazon, which grew rapidly after Jeff Bezos started it in 1994 and it went public in 1997. The company expanded from an online bookstore to a massive retailer of almost anything available at a brick-and-mortar retailer. Sears never had much of an online presence.

Clearly, Sears could not defend itself from startups Walmart and Amazon. That was enough to put it out of business.

Amazon Stock Price Prediction and Forecast 2025–2030