This is not about Sears, sorry, but it is truth for those seeking it. This article neatly explains how our government pulls the wool over our eyes with its massaged, purposefully deceptive economic statistics and what the TRUE state of the American economy is.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-05-12/going-broke-faster-economic-numbers-are-less-meets-eye#comment-11661213
The unemployment rate is an indicator of how easy or hard it is for someone to get a job if they're looking for one. That's a legitimate thing to measure. You don't include people who aren't looking for work as unemployed. They may be stay-at-home parents, they may have gone back to school, they may be disabled or in poor health, etc. But even if they're just lazy and living with parents, they're not included in the unemployment rate because their lack of a job isn't due to a failure of the job market to provide jobs for those who are looking.
Also, Zero Hedge is a Russian disinfo operation. "Russia=good. Obama=idiot. Bashar al-Assad=benevolent leader. John Kerry= dunce. Vladimir Putin=greatest leader in the history of statecraft," is how one of the authors who posed as Tyler Durden described the narrative the bosses wanted in a now-paywalled Bloomberg exposé.