Sears Holdings announced in January that it would shut down 150 stores this year, with most locations closing by April.
Now the company is closing even more stores.
Sears, which owns both Sears and Kmart stores, has been notifying local media of the additional closures over the last several weeks.
Most of the stores on the new list will start liquidation sales in April and close in July, though some will shut down in August.
Over the last month, the list of additional closures has grown from about five stores to more than two dozen.
Seritage Growth Properties, a company that owns more than 235 Sears and Kmart stores, is behind several of the closures, as Business Insider reported Sunday. Sears CEO Eddie Lampert is chairman of Seritage Growth Properties.
We compiled a list of the additional closures that the company has revealed so far, and will update this list as we learn of more locations that will shut down.
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Sears now has fewer than 1,500 stores, down from 2,073 five years ago.
The company is under pressure from years of plunging sales and last month lost its second chief financial officer in six months, just as it began talks with lenders over a looming debt payment from a $500 million loan facility that’s maturing in July.
In a rare interview last week, Lampert spoke about the retailer’s troubles and said “the reality is better than the perception.”
He told the Chicago Tribune that Sears is “fighting like hell” to stay afloat but that unfair media coverage was making it difficult for the company to turn business around.
Regarding the potential for a Sears bankruptcy, he said, “We have as much time as our vendors and our lenders and our shareholders are willing to give us. We’re trying to be proactive with our vendors, we’re trying to be proactive with our members, with our employees, associates, etc., to explain that the reality is a lot better than the perception. The reality needs to be better than it is for us to really demonstrate to people that the transition is starting to take hold.”
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