Sears files Chapter 11 amid plunging sales

NEW YORK — Before there was Amazon, or, for that matter, Home Depot or Walmart or Kmart — there was Sears.

From its beginnings as a mail-order watch business in Minneapolis 132 years ago, the company grew to become America’s everything-underone-roof store and the biggest retailer in the world.

For generations of Americans, the brick-like Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog was a fixture in just about every house — a miscellany of toys and clothes and furnishings and hardware that induced longing for this or that dream purchase. The Sears brand loomed as large over the corporate landscape as its 108-story basalt-like headquarters did over the Chicago skyline.

“It was the Amazon of its day,” said Mark Cohen, a professor of retailing at Columbia University and a former Sears executive.

But on Monday, Sears, plagued by falling sales and heavy debt, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization and announced plans to close 142 of its 700-plus remaining stores and eliminate thousands of jobs in a bid to stay afloat, if only for a while. According to published reports, two Central Florida Sears stores — one in Melbourne and one in Lakeland — will close.

Its bankruptcy was years in the making. Sears diversified too much. It kept cutting costs and let its stores become fusty in the face of increasing competition from the likes of Walmart and Target. And though it expanded onto the web, it was no match for Amazon.

In its bankruptcy filing, Sears Holdings, which operates both Sears and Kmart stores, listed assets of $1 billion to $10 billion and liabilities of $10 billion to $50 billion. It said it has lined up $300 million in financing from banks to keep operating and is negotiating an additional $300 million loan.

The company, which once had about 350,000 employees, has seen its workforce shrink to fewer than 90,000 as of earlier this year.

Sears was born in 1886, when Richard W. Sears began selling watches to supplement his income as a railroad station agent in North Redwood, Minn. By the next year, he had opened his first store in Chicago and had hired Alvah C. Roebuck.