Sears call center shedding 67 jobs
Nearly 70 employees at a Sears call center on the West Side are losing their jobs this month.
An affiliate of Sears’ parent company Transformco notified the Texas Workforce Commission on Jan. 6 that it would be shuttering the facility at 1560 Cable Ranch Road and beginning the cuts March 7.
Affected employees — 67 in all — include technical specialists, sales and training managers and repair sales advisers, senior human resources director Milena Thompson told the agency.
They are not represented by a union. Some were placed on paid leave and continued receiving their usual pay and benefits until they were laid off this month.
“The employment separations are expected to be permanent,” Thompson wrote in a letter to the agency. “However, not all positions are being eliminated.”
Transformco, which closed its
last Sears store in San Antonio in August, did not immediately respond to an inquiry.
Sears, Roebuck and Co., formed in 1893, was once a trailblazer in the retail industry.
The company sold everything from appliances to tools to clothing to toys, created Allstate Insurance Co. and introduced the Discover credit card. It opened department stores and shipped its thick catalog to homes across the country, and it employed hundreds of thousands of people.
Sears opened its first store in San Antonio at 806 Broadway in 1928 and moved the next year to what’s now known as the Tower Life Building. The store relocated again to 600 Soledad St. in 1938 and is now the site of the Central Library.
But Sears has struggled with changing strategies, its own mistakes, debt, competition from lower-priced rivals and customers’ changing shopping habits. The company has closed stores, laid off thousands of employees and spun off some of its businesses.
Sears shuttered stores at Park North Shopping Center and Ingram Park Mall in 2018 and locations at South Park Mall and Rolling Oaks Mall in 2020, leaving it without any stores in the area.