- Sears and Kohl's are both having issues.
- Sears narrowly avoided liquidation in February when it was bought by the company's chairman, Eddie Lampert. It also recently laid off 250 employees at its corporate headquarters and announced multiple store closures.
- Kohl's reported a 2.9% drop in sales of in stores open for more than a year in its second-quarter earnings, though the company's partnership with Amazon has increased foot traffic in stores, Kohl's CEO Michelle Gass said.
- We visited both stores and saw issues in each. But Kohl's clearly had the advantage for a few key reasons.
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Among struggling retailers, it doesn't get much worse than Sears.
For years, the company has been fighting to stay alive. Its sales fell from $53 billion in 2006 to less than $17 billion in 2017. It filed for bankruptcy in mid-October 2018, but was then bought by Sears' chairman, Eddie Lampert in February.
But the struggles continued. In August, the company announced that it would close 26 stores. This month, Sears laid off 250 employees at its corporate headquarters and announced more store closures.
Kohl's has issues of its own, most recently reporting a drop in sales of 2.9% in stores open for more than a year in its second-quarter earnings. However, the retailer has a few secret weapons that have helped it survive, namely the fact that nine out of 10 Kohl's stores are in suburban strip malls and not standard shopping malls, which means declining foot traffic in malls isn't as much of a threat.
More recently, Kohl's partnered with Amazon to accept returns for the e-commerce giant in its stores, a move which helped boost traffic nearly 24% in the three weeks after the partnership began, data from InMarket revealed.
We went to both stores and saw for ourselves why Kohl's is outperforming Sears in more ways than one. Even though they carry similar merchandise and both stores were somewhat messy, Kohl's did a better job of adapting to the modern customer with its in-store and digital perks.
Here's what we saw: