This store is one of the 80 stores announced in early January to close. Central Mall in Port Arthur Texas is now the closest Sears to Lake Charles Louisiana. This Sears store is not very large, roughly about the size of the Mall of the Mainland Sears store. These photos were taken just before the announcement of the Lake Charles Sears and Kmart closings, in June 2018. The store was mostly well stocked at this time, but who knows how it is now. There are a few spots of emptiness though. This store had a decent amount of traffic around lunchtime on a Saturday.
We start our store tour in a strange spot, but this sign is so awesome. The sign has survived many years even with all of the slaps that have left fingerprints all over the bottom of the sign.
Tool department.
Sporting goods was a little empty, but Summer stuff was being put together next to this department.
Appliances
Clothing departments.
Mattresses right next to the clothing department. I think this was the former electronics department.
As you can see, the clothing selection was somewhat light.
One of the few parts of the store that were empty.
Now to the mall entrance area of the store.
Jewelry
A view of the mall entrance off in the distance.
Now we head off to the package pickup area, and coolest part of the store.
This section of the store had odds and ends. The product selection was very random as you will see.
Strange that this entrance was closed off to customers.
Closet exit, lol.
So we have boxed appliances.
Luggage, home goods.
Kitchen items next to chemicals to clean up floors, and Lysol.
The other side of that aisle is just as strange, but at least kitchen cleaners are available.
Such a strange sight, a rack of dollar soaps next to a lonely register in the corner, next to boxed appliances. Like I said earlier, random products.
More clothing, just on the other side of the random corner of the store.
Another look at the randomness.
In the baby department, there were a few strange sights also.
Very little effort to fill in this gap.
What happened here? This was facing the main aisle right in front of the computer in the photo below.
The curtain is covering up the former portrait studio.
To the left is the mall entrance.
There were several appliances and other products set up outside of the store in the mall corridor. Not many malls will let their department stores setup a bunch of items outside of the store like this.
The outside of the store. This store was one of the first to re-open after the mall suffered damage during Hurricane Ike in 2008.
Update final Christmas display 2018.
Next up Greenspoint Mall 2017 and 2018 update!
It is great to see a Sears store which is not (yet) in the process of closing. Thanks for the photos. Hopefully this Sears, and the rest of the remaining ones, will stick around for a while. We'll see.
ReplyDeleteI was actually thinking about buying some sockets from Sears. Your pictures are actually helping me see what Sears has in stock! For better or for worse, that part of the tool department is probably better stocked than other parts of it. One of the pictures shows an old and falling apart Craftsman Power Center sign from the 1980s probably being covered up by some more modern banners over where the tool chests are. That old sign, even if it's being covered up, is a real blast from the past.
The old restrooms sign is a blast from the past as well, but I must confess we have at least a few signs like that at work. Oh well, they're still functional and I think they look pretty good.
It seems like almost every Sears now has a department mostly full of new appliances in cartons, but this store has more cartons than what I usually see. It looks quite tacky, but I guess it drives home the point that Sears has appliances ready for immediate pick-up (something which JCPenney for sure and maybe others cannot match). Perhaps this is part of the directive to keep the backrooms free like what happened at Kmart a year or two ago. I had to laugh seeing one of those cartons saying that the washing machine inside it is made in Vietnam with another washing machine carton next to it saying it was made in Korea. The thoughts of Korean and Vietnamese washing machines at Sears probably seemed laughable in Sears' golden era of physical stores, but Sears did sell Korean electronics in at least the late 1960s/early 1970s.
This store seems optimistic about their cleaning supplies department. They even have Clorox name brand bleach and generic brand bleach as well! I remember seeing a cleaning department at the N. Shepherd Sears during my last visit there earlier this year. As far as odd products at Sears stores go, I was truly scratching my head when I saw a large amount of Centrum vitamins being sold at the Mall of the Mainland Sears sporting goods department during my visit there a couple weeks back. I don't even think they had prices on the hooks they were hanging from, but they had many bottles of them. I could be wrong, but I don't think many people head to Sears to buy multivitamins, but I could be wrong. For Sears' sake, I hope I am wrong!
Anyway, this Sears seems like many others. Some departments look fairly well stocked and in good condition, but others look pretty sad. Hopefully Sears can figure out how to stock these stores better if they survive, but we're all waiting to see whether Sears will have another holiday season beyond this one.
I think I mentioned this to you earlier, but YouTube user uxwbill has recently taken up retail videos. He recently filmed a Sears store near him (in central Illinois) that was in it's last days. He got a lot of interesting views of the nearly empty store. It's worth a look.
I'm looking forward to the Greenspoint Mall updates. It's easy to forget that GPM still exists even though I drive by it on I-45 fairly regularly. I am curious to know how it is doing these days.
This is not the first Sears I've seen with malfunctioning price scanners and order computers which aren't on/don't work. Oh well, the price scanners in particular are helpful especially when products get scattered around as they often do at Sears.
How quickly things change in the world of Sears. As you may know, this store is on the most recently 80 stores to close.
DeleteThere are so many strange things I saw at this store. I did not even notice the appliances from 2 different countries.
The vitamins at Mall of the Mainland are very strange, I wonder why they wound up there.
News reports from today sadly seem to indicate that this Sears is now slated to close even though it was initially listed as a go-forward store. There will also be Sears and Kmart closures in Metairie and it also looks like a few Sears in central Texas will close as well. Some high profile stores in California and New York look to be closing as well. Aside from that, the Houston Sears stores will continue to operate normally for now.
ReplyDeleteThe Beaumont Sears will also remain open. I suppose shoppers of the Port Arthur Sears will have to go to Beaumont now. At least they'll still have a store in their general region, some regions will be totally without Sears stores. Perhaps SHOS franchise stores can open up and fill the gaps in some of these areas, like central Texas, but I'm sure Sears Holdings' problems will hurt SHOS as well even though they are separate companies.
There was some fear that Lampert might miss the deadline for filing a bid to save Sears here on the 18th anniversary of the announcement of the end of Montgomery Ward, but it looks like Lampert did put in a bid to keep Sears alive before the deadline passed. We'll see if the court accepts his offer. I'm sure the court would rather save jobs, but the banks claiming that liquidation is a better option than keeping Sears alive might well have a valid point. Still, I hope Sears can survive even if there's little hope of a recovery as long as Lampert is still in charge. We'll see, hopefully this past Christmas was not the last Christmas for Sears and Kmart. I certainly did a lot of Christmas shopping at Sears this year. I was very pleased with the deals I got and people were happy with the gifts I got them. Sears still has some value as far as I'm concerned, but we'll see.
I saw that Sears and Kmart both had same store sales growth for the first time last quarter since around 2010. That's quite remarkable, but it is speculated that liquidation sales helped fuel the increase. The overall bottom line was not as positive as the sales numbers due to the decreased store count. I'm sure the heavy promotions that Sears was offering before the bankruptcy hurt the bottom line and may continue to hurt the bottom line as people redeem their SYWR points that they earned from purchases during Q3 2018. OTOH, getting people to return to the stores might be a good thing.
Of course, we'll have to see what inventory is like after the Christmas stuff is packed away. The store inventory at the Sears I went to during the Christmas season seemed better than expected, but the impact of the bankruptcy on inventory might not be visible until 2019 when the seasonal inventory changes happen. We'll see.
As you probably know, Sears has a tentative bid to keep the stores open. Hopefully it is more than any of the liquidators bid.
DeleteNow is the time to use points and gift cards if you have them. The last points deal I earned, took 2 weeks to see the points and I have only 7 days to use the points. The point deals are still good, but they are putting a lot more restrictions on them.
Inventory is probably going to be very light once the Christmas stuff goes. The toy departments will stay, so things will not be as empty as in the past.
I hope that Lampert will prevail in his attempts at keeping Sears together, but I don't know if his revised bid will be enough. It really does seem that there is a push to liquidate the assets, but we'll see what happens.
DeleteYou're right that this is the time to use up SYWR points and gift cards. While these are dire times for Sears, many other department stores are struggling as well and people probably shouldn't sit on gift cards from those stores either. Even if they don't close entirely here in 2019, chains like JCPenney and Macy's may end up closing more stores.
It seems that Sears isn't nearly as aggressive in offering massive points offers as they were prior to bankruptcy. Instead, they discounted merchandise quite significantly during the Christmas season. Many departments were 15-25% off of everything and the prices weren't really inflated to make up for the discounts. It was almost as if Sears was liquidating even before the liquidation.
Even with that, the inventory was surprisingly decent at the Sears I went to during the Christmas season. I don't know what things will be like going forward though. Is Sears even prepared to be ready for the Spring-Summer season should they survive? It's going to be very tough for them I think unless there is a lot of unsold inventory sitting around from last year.
Anyway, I may need to make some shopping trips to Sears to buy whatever I may want from there. I don't want to risk things selling out during a liquidation. I'll certainly take in the Sears experience (while thinking of other similar demised chains like Montgomery Ward) if I do visit their stores. I don't know if they'll close or not here soon, but things look to be 50/50 at best.
Looks like JCPenney and Macy's will close more stores. JCPenney has announced 3 and Macy's will close 8. I wonder if JCPenney will be around long enough to see the planned new store opened at San Jacinto Mall.
DeleteI used up all of my most recent point totals at Sears. I really don't see why people did not take advantage of those deals. They had a lot of deals with buy $40 and get $40 in points to use later. Usually they broke the points distribution up to $20 and $20 a couple weeks later. Either way, it is easy to save money from those deals. Their toy department this year had some good items that made good gifts.
We will find out Monday or Tuesday what will happen with Sears. I doubt the liquidation bids will come close to what Lampert offered, but we will see. The judge accepting the offer is hopefully a good sign. Even if the company shrinks more if it is saved, at least it will still be alive.