Sears is closing its last department store in Illinois, the retailer's home state
Sears will shut the doors on its last department store in Illinois come fall; the state in which its first retail store opened in 1925. The Sears department store in the Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, a Chicago suburb, will close on November 14.
Transformco, which acquired Sears Holdings after the company filed for bankruptcy in 2018, confirmed its plans to redevelop the property. Transformco said the company is focused on growing sears.com and the Sears Home Services business.
Sears will still have a presence in Illinois. There are 11 Sears Hometown Stores in the state, operating primarily in small towns by independent dealers or franchisees of Transformco affiliates. The stores are typically between 6,000 to 8,000 square feet — far smaller than Sears department stores which were each more than 100,000 square feet — and sell mainly hard goods and appliances. Transformco's strategy is to operate more stores like the Hometown Sears.
There currently are 300 Sears and Kmart stores still open in the US, down from nearly 700 in October 2018, when Sears declared bankruptcy. At its peak, the company operated more than 3,000 stores. Once the nation's predominant retailer and its largest employer, Sears opened its first retail store in 1925 in Chicago and closed its last location there in 2018.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/18/business/sears-store-closing-illinois/index.html
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