TRU declared Chapter 7 in early March 2018. The stores remaining at that time didn't finally shut down until late June 2018. Liquidation takes months.
Everybody needs to read this. Yes, some stores will close immediately. Those closings have been in the works for a while. But most will take months before they are done for good. People who think the end is coming tomorrow or next week for all the stores really need to realize this.
Inventory at Sears has actually been looking fuller than it did at this time last year. I don't think there will be such a massive shortage of stuff to sell that it would significantly affect the typical liquidation timeline. I think they have a lot more empty shelves at Kmart, though.
One big difference between Sears and Toys R Us is that Sears is already starved for inventory, and has been been for many moons. It won't take 2 months.
"The liquidation company will try to sell everything"
EVEN THE KITCHEN SINK !!!!
Noooooooooo..........
ALL stores will close "immediately" and re-open under the management of the liquidation company. Yes, it will take 2-3 months to close a store (some will close quicker and consolidate merch to other stores) but the moment liquidation starts (on a massive scale) Sears/KMart will be no more.
Yes, a handful of people will remain at corporate to wind down the business, close out the books, etc. but it will be a skeleton crew from Day 1, and shrink weekly until the last few Finance and HR folks shut the lights off for the last time. But groups like Marketing, R&D, etc. will be gone days from the announcement as the new "owners" of Sears will look to maximize the amount they can get out of each store.
Liquidators come in quickly in the final stages, make an offer (usually 60 cents on the dollar) for the remaining inventory, and then they look to try to make a profit on that investment. While that happens, the rest of Sears will be auctioned off, and some company will get the names, trademarks, etc (likely for pennies of what it was worth 10 years ago) and that will be the end. The liquidation company will try to sell everything, even bringing in items that they got at other auctions to sell, and when they reach a certain inventory level, they'll put the remains in a warehouse for the next liquidation that they do.
List of stores closing soon is on Kmart.com and Sears.com. Click the store locator link to find a list.
Pretty sure all the low level shills got laid off about a month back. Did they get someone new?
Is there a list of stores closing now.
So are we closing soon? We are a sears grand.
Good post. In our case we were a B Sears store. It took 2 1/2 months to close our store. After the store closed a group of employees had to stay to completely clean it. That added an extra week and a half to the closing. That made the complete closing process almost three months.
In TRU's case vendors needed Toys R Us to survive, and Mattel is already facing bankruptcy in 2019 without it. TRU, unlike Sears, had $3 billion in DIP financing lined up, so they thought they were fine on that front. Vendors are gunshy with Sears precisely because of what happened with TRU, because what happened with TRU was completely without precedent. The senior creditors abruptly pulled the plug despite being awash with liquidity, and in things like inventory turnover and such, Toys R Us looks like a retailing genius compared to Sears that can't even manage 2 inventory turns a year and that's including all the liquidation sales. Amazon on average does an inventory turn once a month.
I remember at my local Toys R Us, the employees hadn't even heard about the Chapter 7 filing, and it was gone 10 days later.
Not from my experience. People flood the store at "20% off" even if it's still more expensive than Target. People just like the word liquidation.
Sears isn't like TRU where vendors were caught off guard and kept supplying them until the end. Sears shelves are already empty. It'll only take a few stores to sell out remaining inventory.
Most of the stores were gone in the first month.