Sears Pasadena Dodges Another Round of Store Closings

Department store chain Sears, under new management, will be closing 96 Sears and K-Mart stores by February 2020, with closing-out sales expected to begin on December 2, the company announced.

Sears Pasadena — one again — dodged the bullet once again and will remain open. The store is located in Hastings Ranch at 3801 E Foothill Blvd. It has survived years of Sears cutbacks.

The K-Mart store closest to Pasadena, in Temple City, is also not included in the list of store closures that Transformco, or Transform Holdco LLC, which now owns Sears and K-Mart, just released.

Transformco said following the closures, they will be operating 182 stores throughout the United States and will continue to evaluate their Sears and Kmart footprint in keeping with their overall retail and service strategy.

“We will endeavor to create and deliver value through a strategic combination of our better performing retail stores and our service businesses, brands and other assets, and expect to realize a significant return on our extensive portfolio of owned and leased real estate,” Transformco said in a statement.

Other Transformco-owned brands and assets include Innovel, which provides logistics solutions to businesses and consumers, Sears Home Services and Shop Your Way and financial services, Kenmore and DieHard.

The company also announced a Transformco affiliate has acquired Sears Hometown, a network of more than 400 independently-owned and operated, dealer-managed smaller-format stores that are known for offering customers a range of home products, including appliances, lawn and garden supplies, tools and sporting goods.

Sears also announced it has received $250 million in new financing from the company’s owner, Eddie Lampert and his ESL Investments hedge fund, along with an unnamed third party.

The former owners, Sears Holding Corp., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October 2018 after reaching a deal with lenders that led to 46 immediate store closures that month, but kept hundreds of other stores open through Christmas.

In January, the retailer closed another 146 stores that it said were losing money.

The one-time powerhouse retailer opened its first Sears store in Chicago in 1925, although Richard Sears and watchmaker Alvah Roebuck had incorporated Sears, Roebuck and Co. in Chicago in 1893.

In 2000, Sears CEO Alan Lacy lead the chain’s merger with K-Mart and the company became Sears Holdings.

In 2015, Sears started closing stores, spinning off 250 stores into a real estate investment trust called Seritage Growth Properties. From then on, Sears has been closing hundreds of locations.

From around 1,300 stores in 2016, Sears and K-Mart it will be down to 182 locations by February 2020, according to the company.

Throughout California, up to 28 Sears and K-Mart stores are in the latest list of closures.