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Sears Canada is Closing Even More Stores This Year!

By Brooke Wilson, 8 years ago

It appears that Sears Canada has been struggling for quite some time now - years to be exact. So sadly, Sears has decided to downsize again. In 2012 Sears had sold 3 stores for $170 million and in 2013 they told everyone that they also sold a few more leases for $191 million. Later in 2013 Sears had announced they were closing five more stores. And now? They are closing more stores again.

I will be incredibly sad if Sears leaves us entirely, but while trying to cut down their costs they have decided to focus more on their department stores (like the ones you see within malls). They say they want to focus on home products. Their executive chairman is quite determined to turn their business around and help them strive again.

It sounds like they will only be scaling back their under-performing locations at this time. Sears has approximately 10 outlet stores, 40 home stores and 95 traditional full department stores. I wonder what is going on? We lost Target entirely, Future Shop closed up and Staples is downsizing quickly.

All in all, Sears Canada has made no final decisions about which locations will be closed at this time. Once all the arrangements are finalized, we will hear about which locations will be leaving us.

Moosers, what do you think is going on?

Comments

Fen
It's a marketing issue. They need to make their store "younger" as its still viewed by many as a store where grandma gets her nighties. Their website isn't great either. They need a revamp much like what we saw with The Bay. I buy stuff online during sales days, but the fact is that you can buy the same products elsewhere for much cheaper a lot of the time. Either you are high end or you're not. If you're not, then the prices should reflect that.
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- sdab
  It's not just a marketing issue, it's a customer service issue to. My father used to do installations for Sears for over 20 years, and then a few years back they completely changed the their Installation services. Instead of Sears doing it direct, they had Sears Home Service do it. Installs that used to happen in a few days time where taking a month to do. My father, who did electrical installations, kept getting work orders for plumbing installations. Installers weren't getting paid. Customers weren't getting installs. The Sales Team at our Sears location ending up just telling customers to contact the installers directly, since doing it through SHS was losing them customers. In the end SHS went bankrupt. I know my father's company was out $600 in unpaid fees from SHS, though he knew people who were owed $20k+. I'm sure that a lot of customers lost faith in Sears during the whole SHS ordeal.
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PaulinCalgary
Definitely a question of identity. Trying to do too much but doing too little. It is viewed as an old person store for the most part; somewhere your Grandparents went to. Young people are the ones that spend the money. It needs to reinvent itself as something that makes people want to go to Sears. I find great deals on there, but the atmosphere in terms of displays and marketing is pretty poor. And I'm not "old" yet, even though I'm getting there..
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Oingo
They have become irrelevant. I was just sent a flyer and opened it immediately only to find out the one product that I was interested in was not available. I also documented them changing msrp prices by adding a word to the description of the product. Their own branded products purposely don't have model numbers or names on them so that this is easy to do. They were not smart enough though to change the location of the images so when I searched for the old product number it came up with the "new" one and the images were in the same location. It's illegal to falsify the regular selling price of a product and in turn use discount percentages to misrepresent the actual value.
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willy
All I know is that my family got the best winter coats for the best price this winter in Calgary. No one else came close, not the Bay, not SportCheck, not REI and so on. The quality of clothes has gotten a lot better. I stopped shopping at Sears years ago because their clothes became all mis- sized chinese junk. Now they are much better and we go shopping there. I hope Sears keeps up the good work and the great products. We also only buy Kenmore humidifiers because they last longer.
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