Sears, once a pillar of American retail with thousands of locations coast to coast, now operates just five stores in the entire country, a collapse driven by failed deals, poor leadership, and a refusal to adapt.
The five remaining locations sit in Braintree, Massachusetts; Concord, California; El Paso, Texas; Orlando, Florida; and Coral Gables, Florida. Transformco, the company that currently operates the remnants of the Sears brand, also manages the redevelopment and sale of former Sears properties. Two of the five surviving stores are in Florida. The rest are scattered across three other states, each one a lonely outpost of a chain that once anchored shopping malls in virtually every mid-size American city.
The chain filed for bankruptcy in October 2018. Since then, it has shed stores by the hundreds. The Sun reported that the retailer's decline accelerated through a series of bad bets and structural failures, including a botched deal with Seritage Growth Properties, a retail investment firm. Sears attempted to sell a portion of its stores to Seritage, but the deal collapsed due to problems with Seritage's finances. Hundreds of stores closed in 2015 as a direct result.
That same year, Sears sold off roughly 250 stores. Experts pointed to online competition and the growing convenience of home delivery as forces the company never figured out how to answer.
The Burbank, California flagship store briefly reopened in 2023 after Sears exited bankruptcy. But shoppers who walked in found a shell. One visitor described the scene bluntly:
"There are a lot of empty shelves, with most of the shelves lining the outer walls of most of the Sears barren, outside of a few specific places like bicycles and toys."
A second shopper called it "the saddest thing I've ever seen." The Burbank store closed again last August. It had been one of the chain's most recognizable locations, and its shuttering marked another step toward what increasingly looks like total extinction.
Mark Cohen, a former Sears executive who later spoke to CNN, offered a grim summary of what the stores had become. He described Sears locations as "phantoms in the night" with "nothing to sell." That assessment came not from a competitor or an outside critic, but from someone who had worked inside the company.
The broader retail landscape has only made things worse. The Washington Examiner reported that from January 2021 to November 2023, real disposable income dropped 7.5 percent, consumer prices rose more than 17 percent, and Americans' monthly savings fell by over 81 percent. Retailers across every sector have buckled under the weight of inflation and rising costs. Macy's announced the closure of five stores and layoffs of 2,350 employees in early 2024. Tuesday Morning, Christmas Tree Shops, David's Bridal, Foot Locker, CVS, Walgreens, Pizza Hut, and Boston Market all closed locations or filed for bankruptcy in 2023.
The trend has hit American malls especially hard, as anchor tenants like Sears vanish and foot traffic dries up. What remains are cavernous spaces that developers scramble to repurpose, or simply demolish.
Sears is not the only once-dominant chain reduced to a handful of holdouts. Kmart, which merged with Sears under hedge fund billionaire Eddie Lampert, has followed a nearly identical trajectory. At its peak in the 1990s, Kmart operated more than 2,300 stores and employed 350,000 people. The New York Post reported that the last full-size Kmart in the continental United States, in Bridgehampton, New York, closed in October 2024. Lampert's aggressive cost-cutting after acquiring Kmart in 2003 failed to restore profitability. Instead, it produced poor customer service, outdated facilities, and bare shelves, the same symptoms that plagued Sears.
A single small Kmart location in Miami remains on the U.S. mainland, along with a few stores in U.S. territories. AP News reported that the Miami store sees almost no foot traffic. Mark Cohen, the same former Sears executive, told AP that "Kmart went down the drain because it was led by incompetent managers." Cohen, who also served as former director of retail studies at Columbia University, did not hold back about the leadership failures behind both brands' collapse.
Some aging malls that lost their Sears or Kmart anchors are now exploring radical reinvention. One Long Island shopping center has floated a $200 million proposal to become an open-air lifestyle center, scrapping the enclosed-mall model entirely. Others have not been so lucky.
The pattern extends well beyond department stores. Fossil Group recently closed seven mall locations with more cuts expected, part of a deepening retail contraction that has reshaped the physical footprint of American commerce. Vacated spaces sit empty for months or years, or get filled by discount brands stepping into the gap, a process playing out in malls from former Forever 21 locations to shuttered anchor wings.
Sears began as a mail-order catalog company in the late 19th century and grew into one of the largest retailers on the planet. For decades, a Sears store in the local mall was as reliable as the post office. Families bought appliances, tools, clothing, and tires there. The Craftsman brand and the Kenmore label were household names. The company's Roebuck catalog was, for millions of rural Americans, the original Amazon, a way to buy nearly anything without leaving home.
That history makes the current state of affairs all the more striking. Five stores. No clear path to growth. No indication from Transformco that expansion is on the table. The company's public posture, to the extent it has one, is focused on selling and redeveloping the real estate it still holds, not on rebuilding a retail operation.
The Sears story is not primarily about online competition, though that played a role. It is about leadership that failed to invest in the business, cut costs instead of innovating, struck deals that fell apart, and left stores in such poor condition that customers who walked in walked right back out. The shelves were bare. The floors were empty. The brand name meant nothing if the store had nothing to sell.
Macy's outgoing CEO Jeff Gennette acknowledged the pressure even on better-positioned chains. "Despite our strong and tangible progress over the last few years, we remain under pressure," he said as his company announced its own round of closures and layoffs.
If Macy's, a chain that still operates hundreds of locations, feels squeezed, Sears with five stores is not fighting for survival. It is managing a slow, quiet exit.
Sears did not fall because Americans stopped shopping. It fell because the people running it stopped earning their customers' trust, and in a free market, that is exactly how it is supposed to work.