All Over the Map: Final hours for the last Sears in Washington

It wasn’t so long ago that the name “Sears” was synonymous with American retail and with holiday shopping in particular. But times have changed, and the last Sears in Washington is closing for good this weekend.

The Sears at Southcenter Mall in Tukwila opened in 1994 in what had been home, perhaps ironically, to the old Frederick & Nelson space. That still-beloved local department store went through its own death throes in the middle of the George H.W. Bush administration; the once-grand downtown location in Seattle is now the Nordstrom flagship.

As of this moment on Friday morning, the Southcenter Sears is one of just nine Sears locations open for business in the United States. When 6:00 p.m. rolls around on Sunday, that number will officially drop to eight. This is also the last Sears still standing in Washington, after the Valley Mall location in Yakima closed earlier this year.

Though they weren’t all giant mall anchor stores like the one at Southcenter – some were much smaller rural storefronts – it’s staggering to consider that as recently as 2012, Sears claimed 4,000 locations in the United States.

But, here we are, living through history in real-time as all those changes everyone keeps talking about – wrought by shifting consumer habits and the growing dominance of online commerce – are brought home to the retail landscape, and especially to the many employees who will lose their jobs after this weekend. Sears would not respond to KIRO Newsradio’s inquiries, but a good guess is that somewhere between 20 and 30 positions will be eliminated with the Southcenter store closure

One of those employees with 30 years of retail experience – and lifetime of also being a Sears customer – told KIRO Newsradio that the Southcenter closure is more than just a store shutting down.

“For me, Sears is the end of an icon . .  it’s just an era,” the employee said (we are not using the employee’s name because they were not authorized to speak with media). “You went to Sears when you were little, you were bored to death, but then there’s the popcorn stand,” the employee continued. “And, you know, you bought everything (there) – you could trust the American-made Craftsman and Kenmore product.”

The Sears at Southcenter is selling off its fixtures and the store, the last Sears in Washington, will close on Sunday, December 15. (Feliks Banel/KIRO Newsradio)

Craftsman was a Sears-owned brand of tools, while the Kenmore name was applied to things like stoves and vacuum cleaners.

KIRO Newsradio also spoke to customers who were poking around the hollowed-out main floor of the Southcenter location, where store fixtures were the main things left and thus the most popular items being sold on Thursday.

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A mother and her 50-something daughter said they had shopped at Sears for decades. The mother said that in her day, she shopped at Sears because it was affordable. Her daughter said that, for her, it was more about loyalty to the brand.

“I think I came to Sears more so because of the name ‘Sears,’” the daughter said, “buying household appliances, things like a washer and dryer.”

“And because we had the Sears catalog, too, growing up,” the mother added. “The Sears book was always there every Christmas.”

Every American of a certain age remembers the Sears book or catalog. In retrospect, the Sears Christmas Wish Book with its head-spinning variety and hundreds of pages seems now to be the closest that any print material ever came to simulating online shopping before that option existed.

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On a video tour of the doomed Sears created by KIRO Newsradio posted to Facebook, several commenters pointed out that Sears seemed to have all the ingredients – especially the catalog, “bricks and mortar” locations and brand loyalty among its millions of customers – to have become Amazon before Amazon became Amazon.

Not everyone is so sure about that. For instance, some of Sears’ products just were not cool enough to ever be viral hits – such as Free Spirit bicycles and, especially, Toughskins Jeans.

Sears’ entry into the denim wars must have been treated with some kind of powerful industrial chemical. They didn’t fade and simply never wore out, which was the opposite of what most kids wanted in a pair of jeans. And the fabric never softened up and thus never developed that comfortable, lived-in feel. One can only imagine that Sears never held a focus group with kids about what they wanted, and instead aimed these destructible pants squarely at the hearts and wallets of thrifty parents.

The Sears at Valley Mall in Yakima, Wash. closed earlier this year. (Courtesy of Ken Zick)

The Sears employee we talked to earlier reported a similar experience. As a teenager, they tried to tell their mom that Toughskins just weren’t very comfortable.

“’They’re crunchy, look mom, you can’t even bend your knees,’” the employee reported telling her mother many decades ago. “And so I loved-hated Sears, but I would never put my kid through the torture of Toughskins jeans.”

“For the value,” the employee admitted, “it was a great pair of jeans back then.”

It’s hard to predict how much longer the shrinking retail giant that once supplied Toughskins to every corner of the United States can hang on. Sears, it seems, has proven to be far less durable than their unpopular jeans.

You can hear Feliks every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien, read more from him here, and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks here.

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