By Sally Bell – Staff Writer
Sears at the Cranberry Mall is closing.
The store, which has been an anchor tenant at the mall since the shopping center opened in 1981, will be shuttered in early October. The Sears Auto Center will close in late July.
The announcement came Friday in the form of a blog post from Eddie Lampert, the Sears chairman and chief executive officer, on the Sears Holdings website.
“That’s going to be a big impact,” said Cranberry Mall manager Jeff Clark, adding that he was surprised Friday by the news.
Sears had signed a five-year contract at the mall just last year, Clark said.
“I figured they were pretty confident about staying,” he said.
Clark said that he heard the news earlier in the day from a Sears manager.
A Sears manager at the mall store said he couldn’t answer any questions and gave the phone number for a Sears media representative. The media representative did not return a phone call for comment.
In the blog post, Lampert said the company was closing the 43 “unprofitable” Sears or Kmart stores. The Franklin Kmart store on Allegheny Boulevard is not on the list of stores that are closing.
Kmart is a wholly owned subsidiary of Sears Holdings Corporation.
Only one other Pennsylvania store a Kmart in Erie is on the list of store closings.
Inventory liquidation sales will begin as early as July 13 at all closing stores, the company said.
Lampert went on to say in the blog post that the store closures were intended to “address losses from unprofitable stores and to reduce the square footage of other stores because many of them are simply too big for our current needs.”
Clark said the square footage of Sears’ Cranberry store is in the neighborhood of 80,000 square feet.
In a statement accompanying the list of store closures, Sears said eligible employees will receive severance pay and will have the opportunity to apply for jobs at other Sears or Kmart stores.
Clark didn’t know how many employees work at Sears in the mall.
Grand opening at mall
The Sears store opened at the Cranberry Mall to much fanfare on Aug. 3, 1981, a full two months before the rest of the mall officially opened on Oct. 5, 1981.
Many dignitaries were on hand that day, including area State Rep. Joseph Levi of Oil City, who shook 7,000 hands in 11 hours in an effort to break a Guinness record for handshaking.
Sears had moved out to the new mall after operating a popular store on Seneca Street in downtown Oil City for 52 years beginning in 1929. The Oil City store carried appliances, furniture, tools and an automotive center, but didn’t stock clothing.
The relocation to the mall enabled Sears to add clothing and several other items to the merchandise selection while also modernizing its customer service departments.
Sears, Bon-Ton and Hills were the three original mall anchor stores, and they were joined in April 1986 by a fourth anchor, JC Penney.
But Bon-Ton is the lone anchor tenant remaining as Hills and its replacement, Ames, both closed a number of years ago. Then JC Penney shut down last spring.
As of February 2016, the Cranberry Mall topped out at a 25 percent vacancy rate, according to data provided in the Cranberry Township draft comprehensive plan. The vacancy rate will obviously be higher now with the closure of Sears.
Indoor malls nationwide have been struggling as consumers vacate the brick-and-mortar stores for shopping online.
What’s next for mall
The fate of the mall has been a topic of discussion among Cranberry Township officials.
The mall is mentioned prominently in the draft comprehensive plan and has been discussed at meetings of the township’s burgeoning economic development committee.
“It is to the township’s advantage to have the mall survive and thrive, both in terms of revenue and avoiding large scale blight,” the draft comprehensive plan said.
Lampert seemed to indicate in the blog post that Sears is now focusing more on developing smaller, specific-inventory stores. One such Sears store has already opened in Colorado and another in Texas.
“Having the right formats and right-sized stores will help us put Sears Holdings in a better position to meet the realities of the changing retail world,” Lampert said in the post.
On Friday, Clark said the mall has no idea what it is going to do with the space vacated by Sears, having just heard the news that the store was closing several hours earlier.
He added that management will continue to solicit businesses to occupy the vacant space, as it is still doing with the Penney storefront.
