Sears Holdings Corporation History
Earlier company descriptions, brand line-ups, store counts and photographs from the history of Sears Holdings Corporation, kept for historical reference.
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The Company Description of Its Time
Sears Holdings Corporation was formed by one of the largest retail mergers in American history: the combination of Kmart and Sears, Roebuck and Co., which closed on March 24, 2005. The filing describes the resulting company plainly - the nation's third largest retailer, with approximately $55 billion in annual revenues and a vast retail network - and notes the structure beneath the headline: Sears Holdings was the parent of Kmart Holding Corporation and Sears, Roebuck and Co., headquartered in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, with Kmart's own headquarters in Troy, Michigan. Two of the most famous names in American retailing, the discounter that had defined suburban shopping since 1962 and the catalog house that had defined it since the nineteenth century, now answered to one holding company.
From Merger to Chapter 11: 2005-2019
The merger's logic - two struggling giants sharing costs and real estate - never produced the recovery it promised, and the filing's confident 2009 snapshot is followed in the record by a long contraction: store closures by the hundreds, the sale of prized brands, and years of losses funded by the company's chairman, Edward S. Lampert, and his hedge fund ESL Investments. On October 15, 2018, Sears Holdings Corporation filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the Southern District of New York, listing billions in debt against a business that had shrunk to a few hundred stores.
The surviving business was bought out of the bankruptcy by Transformco - Transform SR Brands LLC, an ESL Investments affiliate formed on February 11, 2019 - which acquired the remaining Sears and Kmart stores and the brands for approximately $5.2 billion. Sears Holdings Corporation itself ceased to exist as an operating company; what trades under the Sears and Kmart names today belongs to Transformco, and only a handful of Sears stores remain open. The full 2009-era record - the store network, the formats, the brands - is kept with this profile as a document of American retail at a scale that no longer exists.
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