Kmart Stores in Franklin, Clarion Make it Through Latest Round of Closures

| August 25, 2017

SUGARCREEK TWP., Pa. (EYT) – Kmart stores in Venango and Clarion counties are not part of the next round of cuts that were announced on Thursday.

Sears Holdings posted the announcement on its website on Thursday, August 24, stating that 28 Kmart stores will close later this year. Kmart is a subsidiary of Sears Holdings Corp.

Two Kmart stores in Pennsylvania are on the closing list, Allentown and Willow Grove.

It was the third time Sears Holdings announced closings this year, with the closure of 177 Kmart and 50 Sears stores.

Kmart in Sugarcreek Borough and the Clarion Mall have both been open for several decades, and so far, they have withstood the relentless march of Walmart and online shopping options.

Kmart in Sugarcreek Township opened on Allegheny Boulevard in Sugarcreek in 1981 before eventually building a new store nearby in 1994 and moved there in 1995.

The Clarion Mall Kmart location opened in 1980 and in 2016 signed a new lease to continue its operation

Store managers in both locations – Jim Reed, in Sugarcreek and Bill Brown in Clarion – told exploreVenango.com that they couldn’t comment on their respective stores and referred questions to the company’s corporate media department in Chicago.

The corporate office did not reply to phone calls or emails.

Sears Holdings Corporation, incorporated November 23, 2004, is an integrated retailer. The company is the parent company of Kmart Holding Corporation (Kmart) and Sears, Roebuck, and Co. (Sears). The Company operates through two segments: Kmart and Sears Domestic.

Sears and Kmart were both retail pioneers.

Sears’ catalog and department stores were fixtures of American life stretching back to the 19th century before being hurt in recent years by competition from steep discounters and by missteps that included forays into financial services and the decision to sell off a lucrative credit card business.

Kmart helped create the discount-store format that Walmart Stores Inc. came to dominate.

Sears, which started with a lone Minnesota watch seller in 1886, helped define the mail-order catalog industry – selling shoes, clothes, guns, and even ready-to-assemble homes to farmers across the country.

Kmart, which started as a five-and-dime store in Detroit in 1899, once commanded a retail empire that included Waldenbooks, Borders, OfficeMax, and Sports Authority before spinning them off.

Hedge fund manager Eddie Lampert engineered the combination of Sears and Kmart in 2005, about two years after he helped bring Kmart out of bankruptcy.

A long sales decline and an ill-advised price war against Walmart led to its 2003 bankruptcy filing, which allowed Lampert to gain control of the company.

At the end of 2011, Sears Holdings announced the closings of 100 Sears and Kmart stores.

In Pennsylvania, more than a dozen Kmart stores have closed in the last few years, the closest being in Butler, DuBois, and Erie. Nationwide has seen more than 200 Kmart and about 60 Sears stores close (or set to close by this fall) in the last two years.

The most recent nationwide store closings were announced in early July with Sears Holdings announcing the closing of 43 stores, including 35 Kmart, seven of which were in Pennsylvania.

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