Sears store to close in Cape, ending an era of retail

The Sears Grand store in Cape Girardeau will close this fall, according to a statement posted Tuesday on the Sears Holdings website.

The 150,000-square-foot store at 330 Siemers Drive is one of 26 “large format” Sears and Kmart outlets being closed by the financially-troubled retailer. According to the website, store liquidation sales in Cape Girardeau and the other stores will begin “around Aug. 15” and the stores will close by late October. Two other Sears stores in Missouri, located in St. Peters and Independence, will also close.

Transform Holdco LLC, a privately-held company formed in February to acquire the assets of Sears Holdings, said “over the past several months we have worked hard to strengthen our vendor relationships, return our inventory levels to normal and improve customer satisfaction and operations; however, we have faced a number of challenges returning our stores to sustainable levels of productivity, including differences with Sears Holdings over our purchase agreement and a generally weak retail environment. These challenges have unfortunately affected our performance and limited our strategic choices.”

The statement added “after careful review ... we believe the right course for the company is to accelerate the expansion of our smaller store formats which includes opening additional Home & Life stores and adding several hundred Sears Hometown stores.” The decision to close the stores in Cape Girardeau and elsewhere was “difficult but necessary,” the statement read.

As of late Tuesday afternoon, employees and management at the Cape Girardeau store had not been informed of the closure, according to an unnamed employee who identified himself as a manager.

“All eligible associates will be offered the same number of weeks of severance as offered to employees of Sears Holdings Corp. prior to that company’s Chapter 11 filing in Oct. 2018,” according to the statement, which added “we will continue to evaluate our network of Sears and Kmart stores and cannot rule out additional store closures in the near term.”

Once one of the nation’s largest retailers, Sears has closed hundreds of stores in recent years. Five years ago, there were roughly 2,000 Sears and Kmart stores in the United States, but by the end of 2018 that number was down to about 700. Sears Holdings closed the Kmart in Cape Girardeau in November of last year.

Originally known as Sears, Roebuck & Co., the iconic retailer has had a presence in Cape Girardeau since June 1941 when the company opened a catalog sales office on Main Street. Sears operated a retail store in Cape Girardeau’s Town Plaza Shopping Center from 1963 until moving to its current location on Siemers Drive in 2005.

The latest list of Sears and Kmart store closures can be found at www.searsholdings.com/docs/080619_store_closing_list.pdf.

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