Sears And Kmart Will Close 76 Stores By End Of 2014

(Scott Miller)

Sears Holdings, the parent company of Sears and Kmart, needs to lose less money. Their current plan includes closing underperforming stores, renting out vacant space, and borrowing money from its manifesto-writing CEO. These are all very sensible things to do, but will they be enough to save Sears?

The company no longer announces rounds of store closings, instead releasing that information to local news outlets. Investment research site Seeking Alpha instead combed through local news reports, contacting reporters and Sears and Kmart employees on the ground to figure out how many stores will close by the end of this calendar year.

Sears Holdings isn’t about to release a definitive list: “We disclose our store counts at the end of each quarter,” a spokesman told Seeking Alpha. That isn’t helpful when you’re trying to figure out which stores will close in the future, so the site made its own list. You don’t need to register to see it.

Depending on how you count, either 76 or 107 Sears outlets are going to close. The discrepancy is because 31 Sears Auto stores are also slated to close: the total depends on whether you consider these to be separate from a Sears store or not. Some locations are closing while the Sears they’re attached to remains open, but no Sears Auto locations that we know of are staying open while the associated Sears store closes.

Pennsylvania will lose seven Sears and Sears Auto locations and one Kmart, and Indiana reverses that pattern, losing seven Kmarts and one Sears and Sears Auto. In Michigan, there are two Sears and Sears Auto locations closing, but notably six Kmart stores. Michigan, specifically the Detroit area, was the ancestral home of the S.S. Kresge company, the variety-store empire that eventually became Kmart. The first Kmart in Garden City, Michigan remains open for now.

Seeking Alpha estimates that more than 5,000 people will lose their jobs once all of these stores have liquidated and closed.

Exclusive: Sears Laying Off 5,000, Closing Over 100 Outlets [Seeking Alpha]

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist