Memories of Sears

This is what market forces look like. Tuesday, Sears Canada announced what’s probably been the writing on the wall for years: It plans to shut all of its operating stores, liquidate its inventory and lay off about 12,000 employees.

During the next few weeks, you can expect to hear plenty about the Sears-that-was.

There will be stories about the arrival of the Sears catalogue in lonely outposts on the Prairies, some perhaps enlivened by descriptions of the uses that catalogue pages were put to once the ordering was done. There will be stories of the arrival of Sears orders at small outlets like the one in Broad Cove, Conception Bay North, and invariably, discussions of the dreams launched by the Christmas Wish Book, a catalogue that let children get their holiday demands in place as early as September.

Nostalgia will no doubt reign supreme, a rich and sad vein open for media strip-mining.

None of that is likely to change anything (even a lastminute salvation offer before Friday’s court deadline — a long shot, indeed — failed).

The problem is that Sears is a retail model from the past. It is a piece of the retail fabric of the nation, a large employer and a once-profitable business empire. But the factors that made it such a success have been overtaken by time, by technology, and by new and different entrants in the marketplace. The market has spoken.

St. John’s (N.L.) Telegram