I hope it stays alive. Sears was THE anchor store for The New England Mall on Route 1 in Saugus, and remained that way after they tore down the mall and built a new one on the same site, Square One Mall, which now has other anchors (the Sears building wasn’t touched at all during the change). They’ve shut down the upper floor, but the downstairs is still going.
I actually visited the store eons ago, while a student in Boston. The guy I bought my house from apparently bought everything at Sears, including his major appliances.
Thought I’d revive this thread (which is more than I can say for Sears) because Sears announced they’re selling the DieHard line to Advance Auto Parts.
The reason Advance is big enough to buy DieHard is because Sears sold the remnants of Western Auto to Advance back in 1998.
Current wife and I set up housekeeping in 1979. Our power tools, kitchen and laundry appliances, and most clothes and bedding for the next 15-odd years came from Sears. Some of my favorite SLR lenses are marked Sears (original US importer of Pentax). I last entered the small local Sears (now gone) about 5 years ago for a Craftsman hydraulic jack but they were out. I last hit the local KMart (also now gone) a couple years back but could find nothing worth buying.
That empty KMart is right across the road from a bustling WalMart. Nobody will want that property for any retail enterprise. Population within a 10-minute drive: 9000, alas. A shuttered auto dealership nearby has already been converted into a church. Derelict Sears and KMart real estate isn’t worth much if nobody wants it.
I love perusing my reproduction 1900 catalog. House kits; galvanic belts (that didn’t work); firearms, parts, and handcuffs; patent medicines; wagons and horse gear; band and folk instruments; theater systems with multimedia shows; hairpieces, and hats-a-rama. Multiply the listed prices by 30 to accommodate inflation, and much still looks cheap. A couple years later came Sear automobiles. Of course, original catalogs also served as toilet paper. Much more utilitarian than online options.
Q: Is there any way for Sears to reverse their decline or be salvaged?
A: I doubt it. That horse has sailed.
I know I’m replying to an old post, but I don’t think the outlook was as bad for Sears’ keeping up catalog sales as this makes it look. Sears was losing money on its mail order business, but that doesn’t mean that the business model was obsolete - Cabela’s was making good selling outdoor gear and clothing via catalog all through this time period and made the transition from mail to online quite successfully. I think that Sears’ management lost interest in working to keep the catalog going, but I don’t think that the model of mail order sales and transitioning that into online sales was busted. The fact that Amazon started up only a year after Sears dropped mail order entirely says a lot about the actual viability of the market I think. Also while Amazon wasn’t showing a profit until 2001, they were making money hand over fist before that - they just chose to keep investing the money into expansion.
IMO, ditching the Sears catalog when other mail order businesses were still going strong and the online market was about to open up was a huge, huge mistake. They could have leveraged their brand name and people’s nostalgia a lot if they had someone interested in doing something like what Amazon ended up being.
I was buying stuff from Lands End, LL Bean and other specialized catalog stores back then (along with buying from showroom stores like Service Merchandise) so the catalog business was not a guaranteed money-loser. Basically Sears has been mismanaged for decades.
