Sears, The Limited Closing Local Stores

Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Last week, we said Macy’s wasn’t alone in its retail slump, and it wasn’t long before other retailers came forward to announce store closings of their own. Sears and K-Mart announced major closures at the end of the week, and on Sunday, women’s apparel chain The Limited began closing all 250 of its stores nationwide.

Across the state, six K-Mart locations will be shut down by April, including one in Lancaster. Atlantic City’s Pleasantville location is also on the list, in addition to three other New Jersey stores. Four Sears locations from Camp Hill to Uniontown will be shuttered, including one at Shenango Valley Mall outside of Pittsburgh, where a Macy’s store is also set to close. Sears Holdings, which owns K-Mart, announced its first wave of store closures back in the spring of 2016. The latest announcement brings the total number of closures scheduled for early 2017 to 150. View the full list here.

The Limited’s 250 stores are all officially closed, but the chain will continue to operate online. According to the Inquirer, there were only two locations in the Greater Philadelphia region that were left to close last Saturday—the stores at the Oxford Valley Mall in Langhorne and Freehold Raceway Mall in Monmouth County, central Jersey. The stores at the King of Prussia Mall and the Montgomery Mall in North Wales had already been closed.

A statement on the “find stores” page of The Limited’s website is titled “this isn’t goodbye” and reads, “We’re sad to say that all The Limited stores nationwide have officially close their doors. But this isn’t goodbye. The styles you love are still available online—we’re just a quick click away 24 hours a day.”

The statement sounds slightly ominous—in 1990 the chain had a total of 770 locations and now there are none. But the brand says its legacy will live on through e-commerce, a decision it seems ownership had very little power in making. “We have worked very hard and made significant investments over nine years to improve operations and create sustainable business at The Limited,” Sun Capital, which owns The Limited, told Reuters, adding, “In an increasingly challenging environment for mall-based retail and women’s apparel, we are very disappointed that the company has had to make the difficult decision to close its retail locations.” The Limited slashed 4,000 jobs in the process.

And as for Sears, the retailer is closing stores for similar reasons. In the most recent quarter, Sears’ revenue fell 13 percent to $5 billion, and its losses widened to $748 million from $454 million in the period last year, according to Business Insider.

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