Last Sears department store in Illinois closes Sunday

So it has come to this.

The last Sears department store in Illinois, which closed on Woodfield Mall on Sunday nearly a century after the retailer opened its first store in Merchandise Mart, is looking very, very … beige right now in its final hours. Like beige on beige. Like the color of Toughskins back to school in 1974, the color of your uncle’s Corolla in 1982, and the color of linoleum at DMV every decade.

It opened on the same day Woodfield – named after Sears manager Robert Wood and department store magnate Marshall Field – opened in 1971. It was the largest Sears at the time, with a retail space of 416,000 square feet. As it looks at the end of 2021, it’s hard to imagine that anything will have changed in 50 years.

The exterior now resembles a vinyl-sided carport in a derelict neighborhood, surrounded by walls of flintstone-like cast stone. The interior is still organized by well-known groups of goods – wrenches, mattresses, baby shoes, pants that have never been folded – only that everything looks slightly soiled and deprived of its freshness. Even the smell of rubber that once sweetened the power tool department has been removed. The video monitors of expensive displays are now dark and crooked. The Samsung showroom is being pulled away from its berths and its devices are gone, leaving bouquets of frayed cables.

Large trash cans keep dumps from mannequins.

Part of a mannequin can be seen on a chair in the soon-to-be-closed Sears store in Woodfield Mall.(Stacey Wescott / TNS)

The interior design department is reduced to a single ironing board and, as if the retail universe is blinking, a single damaged doormat that simply says “Good Bye” on it.

If you visit the last Sears department store in Illinois – and if you do, bring some tissues because this is a tearful story – you will be reminded not of a once thriving consumer destination, but of one of those street stalls in a dystopian thriller, the Kind where drifters sell whatever they can salvage from the post-apocalyptic landscape.

Signs hang from rafters:

“EVERYTHING MUST GO!”

Above the sporting goods department, a banner in a zillion-inch font:

“CLOSE BUSINESS.”

As if we need to be reminded of it. There are a handful of tennis rackets, a couple of Little League gloves, two NordicTrack slaloms and way too many packets of ping-pong balls. This is the sports department. Around the corner, just in time for the holidays, the loneliest toy department of all time. All three shelves of it. A NASCAR helmet made of plastic. Two Star Wars action figures. Unicorn soap. A football. Something called Foodie Roos Chips (“I look, smell and feel like my favorite food”).

When you have a certain age you will flinch. When I was a kid, part of every fall was about spending way too much time reading every page of the monolithic Sears Christmas catalog and circling ideas for Santa.

No wonder a woman went by with a scowl, shaking her head, awe at the desolation and saddened at the loss. She leaned against an older man she did not know, who was sitting on his walker and surveying the wasteland in front of him. “What a shame,” she whispered.

He nodded.

“End of an era,” she said.

He nodded.

She was Angie Sanchez from Bolingbrook, and she came to catch a look before it was gone. “I grew up with Sears,” she said. “Everyone I knew grew up with Sears. They would come for Christmas, partly for the decoration alone. You know their Christmas tree. There was once real joy here. “

Beside her stood cardboard containers with loose ornaments that were inelegantly bundled under plastic wrap. The only Christmas trees were tabletops and broken and cost a couple of dollars. Sanchez was the fourth in a family with 13 children. Her father worked for Inland Steel and supported her with a welder’s salary.

“I wonder what’s going on in this country,” she said. “Only the rich are preferred. We forgot what we had – even if it was just Sears. We forgot to rate things and now we have … Amazon. “

Patti Naleck pushes a cart filled with a mannequin through the Sears store in Woodfield Mall on Thursday.(Stacey Wescott / TNS)

In fact, the first floor of your Sears department store once smelled like popcorn.

The showcase of its off-brand Atari consoles was a convention of neighborhood kids.

I remember buying a new washing machine with my grandfather and coming home with AC / DC’s “For They About to Rock, We Salute You” on vinyl. I remember waiting for a ping pong table at the oversized shop window. I remember buying school clothes and finding a sea of ​​sweaters that looked like the design team stopped 25 years ago. I remember Sears jeans that looked like pants. I remember a Howard Johnson across from Sears and baskets of clam strips.

I remember the very specific American theater of a Sears department store that had some sort of shared civic identity cut away partly by the convenience and price of Walmart and Amazon, partly by the wages that were not keeping up with productivity , partly due to the decline of the unions, common facts and so much more. A large American middle class made Sears, and in return Sears supplied Kenmore and Craftsman, Toughskins and Discover. Whenever I see a parody of a family picture on Instagram, I think of almost blissful Sears portraits with mottled backgrounds hanging in houses. I think of tens of thousands of Sears kit houses still standing across the country.

All relics now – like the metal filing cabinets and office copiers in the Woodfield store that were dragged from the back offices, plopped on the floor, and tagged with price tags.

Plus, Sears isn’t even really Sears anymore – after a long decline and bankruptcy in 2018, it was swallowed up into the larger Transformco based in Hoffman Estates, which also owns all of Kmart’s remains. A Transformco spokesperson sent a statement that the Schaumburg store is actually not the last Sears in Illinois, that there are 11 left in Illinois, particularly the Sears Hometown stores.

That said, it’s the last Sears department store in Illinois, and for a shopper of a certain age, it’s the same as the last. In its prime, Sears, once the country’s largest retailer, had 3,000 stores, so of course, this Woodfield store is nowhere near alone. Also dead after Sunday are Sears department stores in Pasadena, California; Maui, Hawaii; and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Long Island recently lost its last Sears department store, and Brooklyn is losing its last Sears on Thanksgiving.

There are still two Sears department stores in Texas, in El Paso and Pharr.

Indeed, seeing that a Sears department store still serves as the anchor for a large mall today is like a window into the stormy and floating location of the American mall in the 21st century. Sears is on the south end of Woodfield while JC Penney is on the north end; Macy’s and Nordstrom occupy port and starboard sides.

On the day of my visit, about a week before closing, the ship was mostly under water.

A serving bowl of four paper mache apples was $ 5. There were many lampshades and not a single lamp in sight. I remembered I needed a phone charger, but all they had was the cables for Apple devices that were several generations old. But they had stacks of “ultrasonic” humidifiers and a couple of candlesticks. Diamonds were 80% cheaper.

Marilyn DeAngelis stood behind the jewelry counter.

She is 77 and has been working here for 22 years. At times she was one of the “cosmetics girls”, she said. She worked all over the shop, in all different positions. As she spoke, she tried to tie a thin necklace around a small display. As if the presentation was still important. As if 60% or 80% off were not its own temptation.

Finally she grabbed the clasp, draped the chain on the stand, pushed it back into the cabinet, and looked up. She smiled sadly. She must find a new job, she said. She liked this. She has no choice. What a shame, everything. She will miss the Christmas decorations and even the Black Friday wackos. But most of all, she will miss the Sears department store. “But once it was just bigger.”

Christopher Borrelli,

Chicago Grandstand (TNS)

The exterior of the Sears store will be shown four days before its final closure in Schaumburg, Illinois.(Stacey Wescott / TNS)

[ad_1]