Abandoned - Sears

[Music] what's up guys my name is Jake and welcome to the very special 50th episode of abandoned holy smokes this of course is the show where we talk about some of the most interesting abandoned places in the world this is likely going to be a very long video so please stick around to the end of this video for a very special note from me today I wanted to look into a subject that has been requested for years it's a retail chain famously known around the world with a beam at one time one of the world's largest companies certainly America's largest retailer with over 3,500 stores between its two mega brands but incredibly over the past decade or so the world has also watched its slow progression into obscurity and eventual bankruptcy its brands now struggling to stay afloat by overwhelming debt leaving hundreds of abandoned stores in its wake so today let's talk about the once retail Goliath Sears it all began in the late 1800s when a man named Richard Warren Sears had moved to Chicago just before he started the r:w Sears watch company a mail-order business specializing in jewelry diamonds and of course watches after some moving around him and his business partner Elvis E Roebuck had joined forces for a new watch company in 1893 named Sears Roebuck and Co the idea of people getting the catalog to which they can purchase items from seemed revolutionary and the new company joined the trend spearheading it with a wide range of items people could buy anything from dolls to stoves to bicycles and even a car by the end of the century Sears Roebuck and Co had over $400,000 in sales equivalent to around eleven point two million dollars today as the 1900s came in the company opened its stock up to the public quickly earning itself over 40 million dollars or a little over 1 billion dollars today it was the first major IPO and American history Sears Roebuck and Co were quickly expanding gaining national popularity as a mail-order business and in 1908 RW Sears himself had retired as president and his business partner Julius Rosenwald had taken over the company had been growing massively now opening a large distribution plant in Chicago however by the 20s the Great Depression had severely crippled the company only able to stay alive by Julius's own fortune funding operations despite the setback the company pressed on now taking a big leap from catalog to brick-and-mortar Sears Roebuck and Co had opened its first retail store within their own complex in 1925 and five years later they introduced what they called the Sears wish book a Christmas catalog mainly for toys and gifts by now the company had its hand in just about everything a modern family could ask for you could even order a house from the catalog where everything you would need to build one came shipped in a container Sears was most popular with rural America but they knew they had to diversify their reach to consumers and with their one and only retail store doing well they set out to revolutionize the idea of retail stores through the 20s all the way to the 1950s Sears opened several locations of what is now known as the big-box store they designed these spaces to be a place for both men and women to shop which is something that didn't really exist in the time these were spaces with large square footage and no windows yet air conditioned and designed with the contemporary motorists in mind located in urban and up-and-coming areas close to Main Roads with plenty of parking space all designed to meet your household needs with a large variety of products at a huge convenience it's really hard to describe how massive of a success this was Sears had really pioneered and changed how normal Americans shopped their retail locations quickly overshadowed their mail-order business and Sears was arguably the major catalyst for this retail boom by 1959 Sears foresaw the upcoming shopping mall craze in North America and formed their very own development company to build shopping malls the company also created Allstate during this time their very own insurance agency and had grown many of their own products and brands like Kenmore and Craftsman as the retailer leaned more into branding themselves as simply just Sears their market share and sales reflected their immense growth and success by the 1970s the retailer had over 300 thousand employees across America Canada and Mexico and then made an even greater mark in building things in 1974 our sears completed their 110 story office tower in Chicago called the Sears Tower it became the world's largest building and now also served as the company's iconic headquarters through the 70s and into the 1980s the brand continued with their dominance able to exclusively sell hot items like the video game pong and keeping up with new technology like outfitting their older stores with computerized checkout stations Sears have been posting sales of over a billion dollars every month by far America's largest retailer and one of the most recognizable brands in North America however all of this was about to be challenged by the mid-1980s Sears entered an era of harsh competition their retail dominance wasn't so assured once brands like Kmart JCPenney Home Depot Ames and mainly Walmart began to gain traction they were offering similar products at a cheaper price but management within Sears had sort of swept the company's shortcomings under the rug and instead focused on expansion however in the now quickly changing retail landscape this began to be a problem for them Sears then purchased a real estate company and launched the discover credit card in 1985 and by the end of the decade the retailer had over five hundred and twenty thousand employees in the 90s some more serious issues began serious stock price wasn't doing all that well and after several quarters of slumping sales the company began to restructure now selling off key assets and laying off a portion of that huge workforce the retailer continued with these efforts through the 1990s sort of distracting management as to the other threats the quickly changing retail markets sales were now at 30 billion dollars and with the Sears Tower up for sale and Allstate spun off the retailer could now focus on the core business at this time they had 500 Sears hardware stores 250 HomeLife stores and over 800 Maine Sears stores however despite their massive imprint on retail in North America by the early 2000s things were only going to get worse the company had already sold over 80 percent of their Mexican stores and Citibank had taken over their existing Discover credit card operations the various other business endeavors the company had embarked on in the 80s and 90s proved to severely hurt the company's bottom line an unfocused view of what was actually bringing in cash by now Sears had opened a new store concept called Sears grand and by 2004 it was announced that in a landmark deal Kmart Holdings and Sears Roebuck and Co would merged together in an 11 billion dollar agreement so a year later a new corporation was created called Sears Holdings which would fully operate both mega retailers however this also meant Sears would now take on each other's problems Kmart had just emerged from bankruptcy and literally had thousands of stores across North America despite this though Sears is profit reached an incredible 1.6 billion dollars keeping their stock price soaring over a hundred and forty-four dollars a share in 2007 Sears had hit its all-time peak but this also turned out to be where things started to fall Sears Holdings now had over three thousand five hundred and nineteen stores globally many of them being K Mart's full-line Sears stores and other specialty locations like Sears hometown stores by 2010 the company was still making money however consistently losing sales revenue every year then in 2011 Sears Holdings was starting to see an alarming figure and their annual report that year the company posted a net loss of over 3 billion dollars they attributed the immense loss from intense competition general market share los seres began to fall behind in the space they pioneered with retailers like Walmart JCPenney Kohl's Home Depot Lowe's and now Amazon two appliances made up a pretty large percentage of sales for the company now with other retailers suddenly changing that like Home Depot really after the 2008 financial crisis consumers just wanted to buy products at a cheaper price and what the popularity of online shopping now Sears his website just wasn't anywhere near as popular as Amazon almost rather suddenly Sears Holdings found themselves with thousands of stores across the country that people just weren't visiting and buying from as much as they did in years prior this put the company in a very bad position with tons of locations and companies dragging down whatever was profitable by 2014 the brand started selling assets and oh boy did they ever between 2010 and 2014 Sears had closed over 1,700 stores across the country and ended up selling the remaining stake in Sears Canada effectively killing off that company for good the retailer then began to take drastic actions on formatting their stores for more modern patrons first with a new loyalty program then focusing on more tech this didn't slow how the market saw them though with their stock price now down to just 23 dollars a share by 2016 their cost-cutting efforts had led to their own bread and butter products like craftsman outsourced to China which many claims significantly lowered the quality sales had now also dropped to 16 billion dollars a year and the writing was on the wall while the company continued to close stores other retailers had begun to dominate the market share Sears once helped management within the company was also reportedly a complete mess with divisions acting as their own separate entities their CEO a teal amber was a Wall Street guy best known for a successful hedge fund and many criticized him for seemingly steering the company downwards he was also accused of deliberately selling assets of Sears to entities that he owned himself many thought that he was just acting in his ownself greed rather than trying to save the dying company just an overall bad corporate situation consumers now saw the brand is more of a joke than anything their merchandise and marketing gave people very little reason to shop there and it makes sense I mean look at the interiors of these stores it's a mess of beige and gray it's a completely uninteresting and unexcited space to spend your time in you take a look at a modern Sears and then you take a look at a modern target there's a huge difference there the retailer had just failed to keep up with the times and adapt to what make shoppers actually want to spend money and now Sears was feeling the full effects of that but what was it like from the inside well I sat down with Alan Dekker a former department manager at a Sears hardware outside of Houston Texas my official job title started as just a hardware associate so I basically was over tools and the plumbing and electrical stuff those changed when I became a department manager at the very start of 2015 to where I had to do inventory control and loss prevention and it's sort of the interesting thing I sort of had in the back of my mind when I first got hired that Sears wasn't doing amazingly great but as I got to work there and especially like talking with other co-workers and some of the managers that it wasn't doing very good but the main thing was there was like a blissful unawareness with managers they did they didn't act like Sears was going out of business they were just going with it day to day like as if it was still like the 80s or the 90s because some of the man you know my first manager was actually with the company for quite a while so he was with them when they were still doing decently attendance throughout the week would sort of fluctuate it was kind of miniscule - all right decent some Saturdays it would be busy it said it would depend but like some of the slowest days like in February of like 2015 on a Tuesday there was a time when I think less than ten customers entered the building like throughout an eight-hour shift I saw a handful of customers at a time some like some days it would it would be that dead finally in 2018 whirlpool appliances ended their 100 year long partnership with the company and after dreadful holiday sales the inevitable happened in October Sears Holdings filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection with over eleven billion dollars in liabilities soon their CEO had stepped down and their stock price had now sunk to just under $2 a share by early the next year a bankruptcy judge had approved a five point two billion dollar plan by the company's largest shareholder and chairman to sort of reinvent the brand and now that brings us to today with Sears implementing this new plan with the company slowly closing what remains of their main brands Sears and Kmart stores the company is now focusing on more specific retail even opening some new small Sears and HomeLife stores and several former Sears hometown stores however to do this the company still needs to continue its immense downsizing announcing store closures seemingly every month and cutting thousands of jobs with the reinvention of the company the entirety of Sears Holdings was actually taken over by an equity firm called transform hold Co LLC which is owned by Eddie Lampert by the way they now own both Sears and Kmart plus all of their subsidiaries and because it's a private LLC they don't disclose financial information which means publicly no one really knows how Sears is doing now the company went from over 2,400 stores in 2005 within the United States and Canada to now under just a hundred and fifty source and those staggering figures don't even include Kmart with store closures of that magnitude across North America there are literally hundreds of closed and abandoned Sears stores many of them I've actually visited within malls which aren't able to fill the massive square footage some malls even back in the 60s and 70s were named after their main anchor store and then when Sears left years later they had to depressingly change their name like the Sears town mall in Titusville Florida which is now called the Titusville mall some shopping centers weren't even able to stay open with their largest anchor gone and some were abandoned altogether it's a grim and staggering reminder of how impactful the company was it accounted for a lot of other people's rental income and the closures really affected a lot of things down the chain when you take a step back from all of this it is truly staggering what happened it really is hard to comprehend how we Norma's Sears was and how influential it was in retail shopping malls catalog sales and the average North American shopper Sears had scaled themselves to pioneer a new retail format to helped popularize what is now known as the big-box store there was a time from the 1920s to about 2007 where the average shopper would head to Sears for whatever they may need around the home but as the company failed to adapt they didn't change and passed off their competitors as not a large risk they didn't see the potential in internet sales and were slow to follow suit rather than the other traditional retailers their clunky corporate structure had only made things worse and trying to manage two mega retailers with literally thousands of stores and employees proved to be a liability rather than an asset online was always much cheaper than in the store and also the mall locations had different prices than our store and that wasn't just because it was a franchise that was just like home town stores outlet stores in the malls had different prices based on the catalogues and the magazines that would send us so there was customers that we would again have to price match online prices or we would tell them hey buy it at this kiosk over here and then just do it as a pickup which is just a really crappy way to do business along with like outdated systems from like the 80s which would be really slow at times and and there was a time when they ran an update on them and they became slower like that was just bad business right there we would have liens pile up if we had a lot of customers and that looked bad one thing I noticed with like mall like the mall location it was near us is they would have lots of missing product everywhere that was empty they they were behind all the times and especially with the internet craze they were extremely behind and I think that was just that that just set them up for failure after I left it was the management more or less stayed the same until about mid 2016 which some people left and then the the franchise owner sold that Sears back to corporate and it became a corporate series the fall of 2016 I heard rumors that they were gonna close it from co-workers that I still knew there and the very started 2017 they BAM closing sale and yeah that was it I think the fall of Sears can best be visualized by their stock price at their height in 2007 Trading over a hundred and forty dollars a share and in just a little over a decade the company ended trading at 20 cents a share since 2010 the company had continuously lost money Sears was once the largest retailer in the world only to make a spectacular fall into what it is today all while bringing down another make a brand closing thousands of stores and laying off literally hundreds of thousands of employees today even the towering monument Sears had built as their head office is now renamed as the Willis Tower no longer the tallest building in America I think most people can remember back to some connection or memory they had with the retailer I grew up in Canada and sometimes went to their Canadian counterpart but I sort of have a weird deeper connection to the company the condo building which I have lived in for almost three years was literally themed after the now historic Sears merchandising tower in Chicago sort of interesting isn't it I've literally been living in something that was themed after Sears while the brand itself today is still very valuable and it likely won't ever fully fade away the disintegration of Sears will likely go down as the largest retail collapse in history an almost 130 year-old company which most people can now only visits by the abandoned stores that were left behind I want to say that I'm so unbelievably proud of this show and the entire channel as a whole solely because of abandoned I decided not to quit YouTube for good and that has genuinely changed the course of my life probably forever actually all because of this show it's enabled me to travel meet wonderful new people and allowed me to create my own feature documentary which will come out in 2020 it's been over five years of making the show and over 50 episodes and obviously I want to say thank you all so much for watching and supporting these videos and because of that my entire career my name is Jake and thank you all so much for watching and here's to another thing [Music] today [Music]

Channel: Bright Sun Films

Views: 1,860,028

Rating: 4.8729568 out of 5

Keywords: ABANDONED 50, Sears Roebuck and Co, Sears, Sears Hardwear, documentary, sears canada, interview, company, decline, bankruptcy, abandoned mall, abandoned store, sears still open, beginning, history, company history, story of, 2020, 2019, 2021, sears news, Kmart, sears tower, new documentary, shopping mall, HD, family friendly, sears commercial, florida, 50th episode, bright sun films, PG, store closing, Sears Holdings, new, dead mall, Sears Department Store

Id: sG4z89WH0vs

Length: 21min 17sec (1277 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 27 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/dogmankid2007]

I was waiting for this video for a very long time..