Now for a quick post until I can cobble together something larger.
Here are some views of the final days of the Sears Auto Center in Pasadena Texas. The store closed in November 2020 just a few days after my photos were taken.
The main store closed in January 2021.
The remaining unsold inventory minus the tires was moved into the main store.
April 2021 image.
In 2025 the store is still sitting just like this. Vacant and unused much like the majority of the mall property. As for the mall itself, nothing has happened since the new owners took over a few years back. The mall still is open, but who knows how much longer.
More to come. Sears Willowbrook is up next, finally!
Oddly enough, this was the only outparcel Sears Auto Center I went to in semi-modern times, since the 1980s at least. While I had tires mounted, tire rotations, oil changes, and so forth at the Willowbrook Mall and Mall of the Mainland Sears a number of times, those stores both had attached Auto Centers.
ReplyDeleteSears seemed to change their mind about attached auto centers in the 1990s. Sears started to switch from outparcel Auto Centers to attached ones in the very late 1970s, but then went back to building outparcel locations in the early-to-mid 1990s, sometime after the Mall of the Mainland location opened and when The Woodlands Mall and Pasadena Town Square locations opened. I preferred attached auto centers (Willowbrook had attached Sears and Wards auto centers) since it was easier to drop the car off and then bounce between checking out the store/mall and checking in on the state of the service at the auto center. These days, the whole attached/freestanding auto center debate is mostly academic except in odd cases like the Greenspoint area Wal-Mart which has that strange detached auto center.
Oh, wow, the Sears Willowbrook post is going to be epic! I think I sent you some notes about the history of the store back around the time the store closed, which would have been around the start of the lockdown era. It must have been around February-March 2020. Anyway, whatever I wrote back then was really long so maybe there are bits and pieces from that which would be helpful. Of course, I wrote that not knowing the store would re-open in Sears Hometown form.
One of Mike's loyal readers shared some photos of the Round 1 conversion at Willowbrook and the paint job looked absolutely terrible, something very amateur. Hopefully they've fixed that or else that's going to look like an eyesore for the rest of the mall, kind of like when that decrepit ex-Sage store in the 1990s across the Beltway from Town & Country Mall really hurt the upscale image T&C was trying to push at the time. Maybe it won't be that bad since the Sage had turned into a flea market, which Round 1 most certainly is not, but the photos I saw of the Round 1 did remind me, unfortunately, of the terrible paint job in the flea market era of that Sage building.
Sears was kind of shoehorned into the mall, so I guess an attached auto center was not feasible here. Like you said, it seems like the majority of the Sears stores from this era had separate auto centers. Then again, a lot of the old-school vintage stores also had detached auto centers. 90's era stores such as Mall of Louisiana, West Oaks, and Pasadena all had separate auto centers. The 1980's era stores do seem to be the ones with attached auto centers. The Sears Grand stores did go back to having attached auto centers, they make more sense for a business like Sears.
DeleteI added your write-up to the blog post, and I really appreciate the effort that went into that post. I made sure to note that the history was written back in 2020. For some reason, blogger will not let me upload photos directly from my computer anymore so I will add the updates after the store closed at a later time. I need to put the photos on my phone to upload everything from there since that still works.
I have another round of malls from 2025 including 2 revisits and 2 new malls to the blog from the Dallas-Fort Worth area. One of the revisits is a mall that I didn't fully cover the first time, Northeast Mall in Hurst Texas. There are a couple of short videos on my Youtube from two of the malls. I also posted my short video from the Sears Willowbrook Hometown visit back in August of 2022.
It is a funny coincidence, but the Score Entertainment being developed in the old Sears at Deerbrook Mall has something similar going on. Part of one of the exterior walls was painted weirdly several weeks ago. Work is ongoing in that building, but it is mostly interior demolition from what I can see. There were workers in there a couple of days ago when I visited the mall. Hopefully the Round 1 paint is just a primer or first coating that will be cleaned up. The one at Deerbrook looks really clean and new as it should.