Sears at Woodfield Mall, Illinois’ Last Remaining Sears Store, Closes Sunday; Sears, Roebuck and Co. was founded in Chicago in the 1890s http://nbcchi.com/LwADVZm

SEARS

Sears at Woodfield Mall, Illinois' Last Remaining Store, Closes Sunday After 50 Years

Sears blossomed through much of the 20th century, as it sold everything from homes to apparel.

Published November 12, 2021 • Updated on November 13, 2021 at 12:33 am

After serving shoppers from around Chicagoland for decades, Illinois' last remaining Sears store is closing its doors for good this weekend.

The department store at Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg will close Sunday after 50 years at the popular suburban shopping center.

Transformco, the chain's parent company, announced the closure in mid-September. The company said it would look for ways to revive the space with another tenant because it also manages the real estate.

Sears Holdings, which also owned Kmart, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in October 2018. Transformco later acquired Sears out of bankruptcy and has since closed dozens of the remaining Sears and Kmart locations across the United States.



Gordon Beu takes photos inside Sears at Woodfield Mall, Thursday, Nov. 11, 2021, before it permanently closes this weekend in Schaumburg, Illinois. Beu, who worked in this store for 25 years as a customer convenience manager, needed to get one last look at the store where he spent a quarter century. (Stacey Wescott/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

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ENTERTAINMENT

‘End of an era’: Once a staple of the holidays — and middle class life — the last Sears department store in Illinois closes Sunday at Woodfield Mall

By CHRISTOPHER BORRELLI
CHICAGO TRIBUNE | NOV 12, 2021 AT 8:12 AM

So it has come to this.

The last Sears department store in Illinois, which closes Sunday in the Woodfield Mall nearly a century after the retailer opened its first stores , looks very, very... beige right now, in its final hours. Like beige on beige. Like the color of back-to-school Toughskins in 1974, the color of your uncle’s Corolla in 1982 and the color of linoleum at the DMV in any decade.

It opened the same day that Woodfield — named for Sears executive Robert Wood and department store magnate Marshall Field — opened in 1971. It was the largest Sears then, boasting 416,000 square feet of sales floor. From the looks of it in late 2021, it’s hard to imagine anything changed in 50 years.

The exterior now resembles a vinyl-sided carport in a crumbling neighborhood, surrounded by walls of Flintstone-esque faux stone. The interior is still organized by old familiar clusters of merchandise — wrenches, mattresses, baby shoes, never-pleated slacks — except everything looks slightly soiled, stripped of its freshness. Even the smell of rubber that once sweetened the power tools section has been stripped. The video monitors of pricey displays are now dark and askew. The Samsung showroom is pulled away from its moorings and its appliances are gone, leaving bouquets of frayed wiring.

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84 years of Sears Christmas catalogs: See what's inside »

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Indeed, once, the first floor of your Sears department store smelled like popcorn.

The display of its off-brand Atari consoles was a convention of neighborhood kids.

I remember going with my grandfather to buy a new washing machine and coming home with AC/DC’s “For Those About to Rock, We Salute You” on vinyl. I remember waiting at the oversized merchandise window for a ping-pong table. I remember shopping for school clothes and finding a sea of sweaters that looked like the design team had quit 25 years earlier. I remember Sears jeans that looked like slacks. I remember a Howard Johnson across the street from Sears and baskets of clam strips.

I recall the very specific American theater of a Sears department store, which had a kind of shared middle class identity, one that was whittled away, partly by the convenience and price of Walmart and Amazon, partly by wages not keeping pace with productivity, partly by the decline of unions, shared facts and so, so much more. A large American middle class made Sears and, in exchange, Sears provided Kenmore and Craftsman, Toughskins and Discover. Whenever I see a parody of a family picture on Instagram, I think of quasi-beatific Sears portraits with mottled backdrops hanging in homes. I think of tens of thousands of Sears kit houses still standing around the country.

All relics now — like the metal filing cabinets and office copy machines in the Woodfield store, hauled out of the back offices, plopped onto the floor and slapped with price tags.

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Behind the jewelry counter stood Marilyn DeAngelis.

She’s 77 and has worked here for 22 years. She was one of the “cosmetics girls” for a time, she said. She’s worked all over the store, all different positions. As she talked she tried clasping a thin necklace around a small display. As if presentation still mattered. As if 60% or 80% off wasn’t its own enticement.

At last, she caught the clasp, draped the chain on the stand, slid it back into the glass case and looked up. She smiled sadly. She’ll have to find a new job, she said. She liked this one. She didn’t have a choice. It’s too bad, all of it. She’ll miss the Christmas decorations and even Black Friday wackos. But mostly, she’ll miss the Sears department store. “Then again, once, it was just bigger.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com