The Sunday best at Sears: The retail nightmare before Christmas

MORE Sears and KMart stores closing before Christmas..

Not even nipple slips could save them now.. the latest numbers show one troubling sign, financial analysts will tell us. If SEARS will close many of these stores and lay off thousands of workers prior to Christmas, the typical best time of year, then doesn't that portend a self-inflicted fate of financial suicide?

Perhaps it’s a sign that SEARS’ success will be confined to the Brady Bunch era and that, in the end, we may not see them around much longer .. the retail landscape is certainly changing.  The long running bit on the show, and then repeated in the 1990s theatrical version, was the line 'put on your Sunday best kids, we're going to Sears.' 

That is when shopping malls were in style.. Back in a time and age when a family could spend an entire day perusing items of all kinds within the confined walls of their shopping palace. Eateries.. kiosks.. gifts and bargains. Blue light specials at Kmart and the smell of fresh retail in the morning..

But that era is bygone.. And as it goes, we are seeing more and more vacant and decrepit buildings popping up from sea to salty sea.

My local mall is going to have some major issues, too.. SEARS and KMART are two anchor stores.. it has already been announced that SEARS is gone. No word on KMART.. The Sears location that inhabits my local shopping center is amazingly large, it takes up a vast amount of retail space. As does the Sears Auto that goes with it.. Those services now will end immediately after Christmas, and the store will shut its doors to the area. Saying goodbye will not be difficult for the people who basically avoided Sears like the plague since the end of the 20th century, but it will come in handy to practice your goodbye skills as more stores suffer the same fate that is paralyzing Sears and Kmart's lifespan..

A skilled photographer Seth Lawless captured the essence of the failure that is the retail scene in America in a book called BLACK FRIDAY..  It showcases the evidence of what happens when retail dies, when malls close, and when the fountains stop running. And it's haunting..

That haunting scene presented in photo display by Lawless is being repeated throughout the entire nation. America's malls are drying up.. A website called DEADMALLS.com brought this issue to the forefront in the early part of the 20th century. Since then, when a mall would end up on the site, a regional PR disaster would ensue. But the PR disaster now occurs not from being listed on a website, but when a new store shudders inside a once thriving mall of ceramic hallways..

Sears is going .. Fast.
You may not see its facade at some point soon.

Which is ironic in this sense: Sears was once cutting edge, ahead of its time, and very modern. Just think: The SEARS catalog was an amazing venture in the 19th century.. the prospect that you can order someone through the mail and get it was a novel concept.

In that sense, SEARS was amazingly creative, and in a very true sense, the AMAZON of its day with snail mail backing up their success.

They have gone from being ahead of the game to being behind the curve. Now, as we see in this latest set of troubling stories, they are about ready to get a retail plug pulled on them..

And the rest will be history.