Where Sears is Still Thriving – and Why

“Sears isn’t dead. It’s alive and well in Mexico.” So reads the opening sentence of a recent story in The Washington Post on how a once seemingly ubiquitous retail chain is down to its final members in the U.S., but still growing in Mexico.

In the United States, the 140-year-old business has been devastated by e-commerce, squeezed by rivals Target and Walmart, undercut by a disastrous merger with Kmart and unable to recover from chronic mismanagement, the Post notes. Once America’s largest retailer, Sears declared bankruptcy in 2018 and was sold the next year to a holding company.

Here’s the heart of the diverging fates befalling the brand in its home country, where it’s been owned since 2019 by Transformco, a private company controlled by billionaire hedge fund manager Eddie Lampert, and south of the border, where in 1997 the Mexican locations of the brand were bought by billionaire Carlos Slim’s Grupo Carso, which folded them into his existing retail empire:

“America fell out of love with budget malls — once Sears’s wheelhouse. The number of malls has shrunk from a peak of 1100 in 2008 to roughly 900 today. Consumers embraced the ease of online shopping. Sears, slow to adapt, became increasingly anachronistic.

‘Mexico, which welcomed its first Sears in 1947, has gone in the opposite direction. The number of commercial centers here over the past decade has surged nearly 50 percent, from 584 to 887. And in contrast to U.S. consumers, Mexicans came out of the coronavirus pandemic with a renewed zeal for shopping in physical stores.”

Bottom line: Sears, which once operated 2700-plus stores in America, now has just five locations left there, while since Slims took ownership, the Mexican version has grown from about 40 stores to 90-plus locales today.

Click here for more from the Post’s story.