The Las Vegas Valley is about to say goodbye to its very last mall-anchored Sears store.
The parent company of Sears Holdings Corporation, Transformco, has announced that it will be closing 96 Sears and Kmart stores, including the Sears at the Meadows Mall.
The store is set to close by February 2020, with closing sales beginning on December 2, leaving just two Sears locations left in Southern Nevada.
This is the company’s second round of closures following the shuttering of Boulevard Mall last December.
Speaking to Fox5, senior vice president of the Retail Association of Nevada Brian Wachter said, “You think about the irony that the Sears catalog was probably the precursor to Amazon itself.
Now a digital transformation and digital revolution is changing the face of retail and Sears is kind of on the losing end of that.”
Adding to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, he said, “Retail is changing and evolving because our consumers are changing and evolving. It’s the same story. We’ve seen this play out a million different ways with other firms — how well are you organizing online and in-store and how are those two seamless? I think we’re seeing Sears adapting to this (concept).”
The remaining Sears stores in Las Vegas Valley can be found at 1437 W. Sunset Road in Henderson and 4854 W. Lone Mountain Road in Las Vegas.
While the Meadow Mall Sears currently fills around 48% of the 139,200-square-foot building, its real estate investment trust Seritage Growth Properties sold a portion of the first floor to Japanese amusement store chain Round One Entertainment. ROE opened its doors this month.
Shoppers have little sympathy for the closure, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Henry Guevara, a shopper roaming the center last week, said he remembers visiting as a kid with his parents but doesn’t shop there now.
He said, “I just grew up. Sears was more like for our parents. There’s so many other stores like Best Buy (and) Walmart. I’m not surprised … another chain store going down.”
According to a release from Transformco, the company had been looking to revive the department store change but faced a “difficult retail environment and other challenges.”
Despite receiving around $250 million in new capital in recent years, Sears has said it needs to trim back its assets to streamline operations.
The parent company, owned by billionaire Edward Lampert’s hedge fund ESL Investments, purchased the last of Sears Holdings Corporation’s assets in February for $5.2 billion to prevent it from going into liquidation.
The billionaire took control of the chain back in 2005 before appointing himself as chief executive and chairman of the company in 2013, stepping down when Sears Holdings Corp. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October 2018.
Back then the company operated 687 stores, a number which is now being shrunk to just 182.
Other department stores, such as Macy’s, have also been affected by the market in recent years and have been forced to close stores.
