Uploaded April 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
More on Greensboro's Sears Closing Coming - Like & Subscribe! UPDATE: Word is this Sears will remain open until "Everything is sold." That may take a few weeks, I went out there today, 4/24, and there was plenty of merchandise, in fact it looked like there was merch there today that wasn't there last week!
SEE ALSO: The Tragic End to Greensboro's Beef (Biff) Burger!
youtu.be/dI6bCpUGwW8
TVparty! tvparty.com
Well, this is the scene of the last Sears in the Great State of North Carolina. The last Sears in North Carolina closing, here in Greensboro. That's something I haven't seen in a decade. Cars in the Sears parking lot. It's amazing. Usually you go in that place, not that anybody goes in the place. I just went in there kind of about a year ago just to look around and there there were more people working there than they were shopping there, and there were very few people working there, very few people. The video you're looking at right now was taken just four days after Sears announced they were closing their flagship store in Greensboro a few years ago. They carved off a huge section of the southern end of the Sears store to accommodate a Whole Foods market. So that'll give you some idea of just how big this Sears was.
(00:51)
Sears has been very important to the city of Greensboro. In fact, Sears first opened in Greensboro 94 years ago, so we're almost celebrating a hundred years of Sears and a distribution center, was here from 1947 to 1993, and that was a major employer in this city. And it was also an outlet store. I bought my first stereo there. It's where you bought your appliances, you know, with a little ding or a scratch. The, the Sears store couldn't sell it, but you could go down and and pick it up really cheap. Everybody I know bought their appliances at Sears. Of course, Sears had the best appliances. They had the Kenmore brand, which they sold off foolishly. Sears has made a lot of very, very bad business decisions over the last 25 years. The worst being shutting down their catalog center. Uh, just a couple of years before the internet came along.
(01:39)
If they had just kept it going for a few more years, if they'd had the vision to see that the internet was going to be the next big thing, there would be no Amazon today. Sears would've dominated retail online in the United States. No question about it. They were already set up to do it and they shut it down. Maybe the biggest blunder management at Sears made was in 2004 when they spent 11 billion to acquire Kmart. It was like one dinosaur buying another, and it turned out to be a big loss for them because Kmart closed. Not long after that. They had to close those stores. I don't even know if there's a K-Mart left. There were only a few Sears stores left in the United States, and we don't expect those to be around much longer because honestly, without the giant network of stores, the business model just doesn't work. And don't forget, if you wanted to Die Hard battery, which was considered the best car battery in the business, you had to go to Sears until they of course sold off that iconic brand. The automotive centers were a huge profit center for Sears. But here's a commercial from 1987, to give you some idea of just how much business Sears did through their automotive center.
(03:20):
The Sears Auto Centers were busted in the seventies, eighties, nineties for fraud, false advertising. But every once in a while for sweeps week, the TV stations would rig up a car, make sure that it's in perfect shape, make sure everything is absolutely perfect mechanically, and then take it to Sears and have the salesperson or come back and say, "oh, you need about $1,200 worth of work on this car." Oddly enough, the closing of Sears in Greensboro comes just a few weeks after Sears downtown location was bulldozed. Sears moved from downtown to Friendly Shopping Center in the mid 1970s. Then the old Sears store became a mental health center. And, and that was just bulldozed, like I said, a few weeks before Sears closed. At one time, you could even order a house from Sears. They would deliver everything you needed to build that house except for the labor.
(04:10)
And there are still a lot of Sears kit houses around the city of Greensboro. Owners of one on Fernwood Drive told the newspapers in 2016: "We wondered why the rafters in our home were numbered. Now we know and are happy to report. After double checking our rafters, they are still in sequential order."
So we say goodbye to Sears, one of the most venerable names in retailing. Like so many institutions in American life that are fading away. I'll let Mr. Happy Blow have the last word here. An apt metaphor I suppose for the mismanagement of this company that led to the last Sears in North Carolina closing. And chances are there's not a Sears store near you.
More on Greensboro's Sears Closing Coming - Like & Subscribe! UPDATE: Word is this Sears will remain open until "Everything is sold." That may take a few weeks, I went out there today, 4/24, and there was plenty of merchandise, in fact it looked like there was merch there today that wasn't there last week!
SEE ALSO: The Tragic End to Greensboro's Beef (Biff) Burger!
youtu.be/dI6bCpUGwW8
TVparty! tvparty.com
Well, this is the scene of the last Sears in the Great State of North Carolina. The last Sears in North Carolina closing, here in Greensboro. That's something I haven't seen in a decade. Cars in the Sears parking lot. It's amazing. Usually you go in that place, not that anybody goes in the place. I just went in there kind of about a year ago just to look around and there there were more people working there than they were shopping there, and there were very few people working there, very few people. The video you're looking at right now was taken just four days after Sears announced they were closing their flagship store in Greensboro a few years ago. They carved off a huge section of the southern end of the Sears store to accommodate a Whole Foods market. So that'll give you some idea of just how big this Sears was.
(00:51)
Sears has been very important to the city of Greensboro. In fact, Sears first opened in Greensboro 94 years ago, so we're almost celebrating a hundred years of Sears and a distribution center, was here from 1947 to 1993, and that was a major employer in this city. And it was also an outlet store. I bought my first stereo there. It's where you bought your appliances, you know, with a little ding or a scratch. The, the Sears store couldn't sell it, but you could go down and and pick it up really cheap. Everybody I know bought their appliances at Sears. Of course, Sears had the best appliances. They had the Kenmore brand, which they sold off foolishly. Sears has made a lot of very, very bad business decisions over the last 25 years. The worst being shutting down their catalog center. Uh, just a couple of years before the internet came along.
(01:39)
If they had just kept it going for a few more years, if they'd had the vision to see that the internet was going to be the next big thing, there would be no Amazon today. Sears would've dominated retail online in the United States. No question about it. They were already set up to do it and they shut it down. Maybe the biggest blunder management at Sears made was in 2004 when they spent 11 billion to acquire Kmart. It was like one dinosaur buying another, and it turned out to be a big loss for them because Kmart closed. Not long after that. They had to close those stores. I don't even know if there's a K-Mart left. There were only a few Sears stores left in the United States, and we don't expect those to be around much longer because honestly, without the giant network of stores, the business model just doesn't work. And don't forget, if you wanted to Die Hard battery, which was considered the best car battery in the business, you had to go to Sears until they of course sold off that iconic brand. The automotive centers were a huge profit center for Sears. But here's a commercial from 1987, to give you some idea of just how much business Sears did through their automotive center.
(03:20):
The Sears Auto Centers were busted in the seventies, eighties, nineties for fraud, false advertising. But every once in a while for sweeps week, the TV stations would rig up a car, make sure that it's in perfect shape, make sure everything is absolutely perfect mechanically, and then take it to Sears and have the salesperson or come back and say, "oh, you need about $1,200 worth of work on this car." Oddly enough, the closing of Sears in Greensboro comes just a few weeks after Sears downtown location was bulldozed. Sears moved from downtown to Friendly Shopping Center in the mid 1970s. Then the old Sears store became a mental health center. And, and that was just bulldozed, like I said, a few weeks before Sears closed. At one time, you could even order a house from Sears. They would deliver everything you needed to build that house except for the labor.
(04:10)
And there are still a lot of Sears kit houses around the city of Greensboro. Owners of one on Fernwood Drive told the newspapers in 2016: "We wondered why the rafters in our home were numbered. Now we know and are happy to report. After double checking our rafters, they are still in sequential order."
So we say goodbye to Sears, one of the most venerable names in retailing. Like so many institutions in American life that are fading away. I'll let Mr. Happy Blow have the last word here. An apt metaphor I suppose for the mismanagement of this company that led to the last Sears in North Carolina closing. And chances are there's not a Sears store near you.
