At the turn of the century, the idea of Sears getting into financial difficulty would have been laughed at as being absurd. They were too integral to the high street, and simply too big to fail. Unfortunately for them, times have moved on, and Sears reacted too slowly. They spent years dancing around the sinkhole, trying everything to survive including closing stores, laying off significant numbers of staff, selling assets and cutting costs wherever possible None of it has worked.
In October 2018, Sears filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, closing a further142 stores in the process of doing so. Sears CEO Eddie Lampert took the extraordinary step of lending the company several hundred million dollars from his own hedge fund to keep the company afloat and avoid bankruptcy being finalized, but the overall prognosis is a grim one.