Sears's Long Goodbye

@ Finally out of bankruptcy, it faces a changed retail landscape and an uncertain future

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Barely three decades ago, Sears was the world’s largest retailer. And this time of year its stores, once a fixture in malls across America, would be crowded with holiday shoppers snapping up clothing, home goods, appliances or toys that their kids had carefully circled on the pages of the retailer’s venerable Christmas Wish Book. 

This holiday season the company barely exists, with fewer than two dozen full-size stores in operation, compared with the more than 3,500 Sears and Kmart stores operated by Sears Holdings Corp. at its height. In most malls the chain’s once- hulking emporiums have been subdivided into smaller spaces for other stores, refashioned for non retail operations such as medical offices or gyms, or simply left vacant. The Sears estate in late October finally wrapped up its acrimonious four-year-long bankruptcy, but the company’s diminished size and uncertain future are an ignominious comedown for a company that for more than a century defined American retailing.

It wasn't supposed to end this way. Yes, Sears had long been in decline. And a changing retail landscape had seen the rise of specialty apparel chains, discounters, big-box stores and most recently e-commerce giants such as Amazon.com Inc. all eat away at the company's hold on consumers. But years of underinvestment and dismantling under the stewardship of its would-be savior, hedge fund manager Eddie Lampert, also helped bring the company to this moment: signature brands including Craftsman and DieHard gone, as well as most of the jobs that Lampert's purchase was supposed to preserve.