Dartmouth store stays open as Sears closes several in New England

DARTMOUTH — Sears filed for bankruptcy on Monday and revealed 142 new closures of Sears and Kmart stores, including Sears in the Natick Mall and four others in New England. The Dartmouth store will remain open.

The quintessentially American value-priced department store has struggled to remain profitable as online shopping and big-box stores transformed the retail landscape.

"It is really sad, because it's been (there) for many years," shopper Damaris Morales of New Bedford said, on her way into the Dartmouth store on Monday.

"Like me — I have two jobs," the nursing assistant said. "It's easier for me to sit in front of the computer."

But online shopping has not been the only problem for Sears. The company has also failed to keep some of its stores updated, a problem business commentators have been talking about for a long time. The exterior of the Dartmouth store does not bear the current Sears logo used on the website and on some other stores.

"It's sad to see them go," said Kent Darsch of Yarmouth regarding the Cape Cod Mall location, which was previously set to close Dec. 9. He and his wife, both in their 70s, stopped at the Dartmouth Mall while they were in the area to visit a friend. They wanted to see if the Sears in Dartmouth had the same liquidation pricing as on Cape Cod. So far, it does not.

The new closures in New England are Sears stores in Natick, Massachusetts; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; and Milford and Waterford, Connecticut; and Kmart in Madawaska, Maine.

The Sears Hometown Store in Wareham is independently owned and not affected. Owner Bruce Wynot said the store is licensed to sell Kenmore appliances, but even if Sears ceased operations, his store would stay in business.

"I hate to have anybody lose their business," he said of Sears' woes.

A woman working in the Dartmouth Sears management office declined to comment. Sears corporate spokesman Howard Riefs provided only a list of closing stores.

At its peak in 2012, Sears Holdings, which operates Sears and Kmart, had 4,000 stores. It will now be left with a little more than 500. Sears once had 350,000 workers; that number had shrunk to 68,000 workers as of Monday's court filing.

Last year, the company sold its famous Craftsman brand to Stanley Black & Decker Inc.

Sears revolutionized American shopping in the 1890s with a wide-ranging catalog before opening its first brick-and-mortar store in Chicago in 1925. The catalog famously offered homes that could be built from kits.

Sears maintains an extensive historical archive online.

Material from The Associated Press was used in this report.