RE: Boscov’s
I’ve bought mattresses there twice over the last 10 years and a recliner two years ago. Its a great store chain.
Thanks!
@DaveLong It’s also one of the few store chains that still has a perfume section just as you walk in the main set of doors, the smells are so overwhelming it sorta makes you gasp for air. :D
Ha! Yes. Jewelry, watches, cosmetics… all right there at the front. The cosmetics reps even do makeovers at those counters sometimes on weekends. :)
Here’s the actual list of new store closings:
The Kmart right down the street from me is done. Makes sense, it’s a sad place.
Yeah!
We survive another day. The question is… how many hoses should i buy before it totally folds.
Wow the Kmart and the Sears by me are still not listed for closing. D:
Both locations are ghost towns, with half empty shelves.
The 2 Sears here are in mall that have serious problems. One of the stores is huge, the other is actually in the back of the mall, away from the main street the mall fronts.
The one thing I see that they have that seems to be always busy is the auto service departments. They open early.
That is something unique about Sears. They are usually in malls, so if I need something done on my car, I can take it there and then shop at the mall instead of sitting in a waiting room. But it’s also not a good sign if the nicest thing I can say about Sears is that going there allows me to shop somewhere else.
Thats interesting, you guys have car mechanics at the mall?
Eddie Lampert, with his huge ego, sunk this company. I’m too lazy to look up the timeline, but he took over in the early 00’s and could have done something with Sears but did not.
If I hadn’t already mentioned it in this thread, I live just minutes from Sears Holdings HQ in Chicago area and know many people who (of course) used to work there. None of them have good stories of the later years although Sears allegedly used to treat their people well.
Well that’s just sad…
I gather ego was less to do with it and more about extracting enough money from Sears to pay off his leveraged buyout; and that apparently meant running Sears on 0 budget into the ground and then selling off the carcass. Which is what has happened.
I had no idea there were still KMarts around. The one in our town closed when I was just a kid. I thought all the Sears were gone too. Maybe that’s just in Canada.
Then it was ego that caused him to pursue the highly leveraged buyout! :-)
I remember seeing he was on the cover of some money magazine a few years after the Sears-KMart merger, and it made him out to be some smart guy. Sears did have some good times (around 2005-06, IIRC) but they still failed to follow the internet shopping wave.
Good news for me.
But @DaveLong is right (see photo in linked article).
I have so many fond memories of shopping at our KMart, and one of the reasons I still love going there is because it hasn’t changed one bit since the last (minor) remodel roughly 20 years ago. The place still has the endless rows of old fluorescent lights in the ceiling, and they’ve somehow kept them all maintained so they still all function perfectly. The store has had the same manager since I was a kid, he can actually be seen there. He obviously still cares about the place, and keeps it neat and clean. The store may not look great from the outside, but that’s not from lack of effort. He just doesn’t have much of a budget to work with, I think.
And every time I go there, the place is much busier than I expect it would be, what with one of our two Super Walmarts just a mile up the road. It just does my heart good to see that an iconic store from my childhood is still functioning in much the same spirit it always had.
The parking lot isn’t even in bad shape. That’s one of the first things to get neglected when a store is starting to give up, since repairing those can be hugely expensive.
All that said, I think its days are probably numbered, given the state of Corporate. As valiantly as that manager has been fighting, there is simply too much that is beyond his control.
Another issue is the nasty anti-synergy I guess of the mall itself. A lot of these sorts of stores are in malls, though plenty I guess are still stand-alone (K-Marts in particular). Those malls have become ghost towns. It’s like going to some location in a post-apocalyptic game, except you don’t have a flamethrower.
I am starting to believe that the mall may not be the best place to be during a zombie apocalypse.
It is full of stuff and no one goes there. It will be the BEST place to go. In fact when we’re done with the 100 zombie games everyone is making, the 101st game needs to do malls right and not have them packed full of dead people who never shopped there.
The remake of Dawn of the Dead had the crew mostly in an empty mall. It was surprisingly good for being directed by Zack Snyder. Great cast, including Ty Burrell playing a very different character than he does in Modern Family.