Only five Sears stores still open

For those who remember the Sears store at the old La Plaza Mall along the expressway, and who may have grown up when Sears was one of America’s top retailers, the news made public last month that the company is down to only five stores remaining open is probably hard to imagine.

Of the five still open, by the way, four are in malls owned by the Simon Group, which owns today’s La Plaza, still the gem among malls along the border.

Founded in 1893 by Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck, the Sears-Roebuck company grew to become a giant in American commerce. Up until the early 1980s, it was the largest retailer in the U.S.

Things turned ugly in the 1990s, when some bad divestment decisions (Discover Card, Dean Witter) proved detrimental to the company’s bottom line.

In 2004, the Kmart Holdings Corporation bought out Sears and changed its name to Sears Holdings Corporation. Apparently, according to one Forbes columnist, that’s when things went really downhill.

Kmart was controlled by a Wall Street (Goldman-Sachs) wunderkind named “Eddie” Lampert, who once served as the protégé to Robert Rubin, who would later to become the secretary of the U.S. Treasury during Clinton’s two terms.

Approximately 20 years ago, Lampert, in his early 50s, was chairman of Sears Holdings Corp. In 2004, he became the first Wall Street financial manager to exceed $1 billion in income in a single year.

In March 2012, Forbes listed him as the 367th wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated fortune valued at $3.1 billion.

Today, Forbes estimates Lampert’s wealth at approximately $2 billion.

In a magazine article published in 2013, Forbes columnist Adam Hartung described Lampert as the second worst CEO of any large publicly traded American company, saying he has “destroyed Sears” after taking over what was once “the most critical force in retailing.”

Today Just a Ghost

The five sad, lonely Sears stores still standing are located in Braintree (MA), Concord (CA), El Paso (TX), Orlando (FL), and Coral Gables (FL).

Such a fall from its peak as a retail giant, past shades of Montgomery Ward, with experts predicting its imminent closure due to financial unsustainability and the company's failure to adapt, as reported by CNN, MassLive.com, and The New York Times.

Among the four still in Simon Property Group malls, the Coral Gables location is slated for housing development, with reports from late 2025 and early 2026 suggesting these 'phantom' stores are essentially operating on borrowed time, lacking meaningful inventory or profit potential, according to analyses from Forbes, MSN, and thestreet.com.

The irony, as printed in other stories about Sears, is that they gave up on its annual “Sears Catalogue” at just the wrong time.

The company, run by a Wall Street guy with no real experience in retail before acquiring Kmart out of bankruptcy in 2003 and later merging it with Sears in 2005, did indeed discontinue its iconic “Big Book” general merchandise catalog in 1993, roughly one year before Amazon was founded in 1994 and began operating as an online bookstore.

While often cited as quitting too soon, the decision was driven by the catalog's declining profitability and high distribution costs at the time.

Still, one has to think, what if Sears had continued its catalogue and moved its inventory online as well, going head-tohead with Amazon?

Seems that one would have had the advantage over the “start-up.”