Twilight falls on the eastern facade of Sears at Coventry Mall in this 2009 file photo
POTTSTOWN PA – The full-line Sears department store that has been a decades-long anchor of Coventry Mall and its shopping center predecessors, at Routes 100 and 724 in North Coventry (PA) Township, is one of only two Pennsylvania retail locations on a starter list of 79 nationwide that owner Sears Holdings Corp. said Thursday (Dec. 29, 2011) it will close to save money.
News of the Coventry Mall store’s closing follows by only two days the company’s Tuesday statement that poor holiday sales at its Sears and K-Mart-brand units would force it to close up to 120 under-performing sites.
No date was given for the Coventry Mall closure, although February 2012 reportedly has been mentioned by staff members there. Company spokespersons Thursday estimated more than 40 employees would be laid off. Sears indicated savings from closed stores would begin to show in its financial results within several months. The other Pennsylvania store is located in Upper Darby, 9 miles west of Philadelphia.
- A list of initial closings is available for download from the Scribd documents archive website, here.
Sears said other closures would be announced in a later press release on its website, although none was available Friday (Dec. 30) as of 6 a.m. Until the list is pronounced complete, the fate of the K-Mart store in Sanatoga village remains unknown; however, it has survived several earlier closing decisions by its corporate parent.
Neither Coventry Mall’s website or that of its owner, Stoltz Management Corp., mentioned the impending closing, but a mall webpage ironically promoted an after-Christmas sale of up to 25-percent off Kenmore-brand appliances sold there through Jan. 5 (2012).
Sears is Coventry Mall’s second-largest anchor, as determined by the area it occupies: 121,455 square foot, or about 15 percent of the mall’s available space. The largest is Boscov’s, with 190,712 square feet, according to Stoltz literature. The mall was enclosed in the early 1990s; it previously was an open shopping center.
Other coverage:
- Pottstown And Upper Darby Sears Stores Closing (Roy’s Rants)
You can’t run a retail store where customers have to pay 21 – 25% interest on their credit. I’ve had a Sears card since 1969. Back then it was the only way to buy tires, etc that were needed by me to run my home and cars. When they tacked on all that interest eventually I started shopping eleswhere.
Sears was once big enough to finance it’s own operations. Now it’s beholden to CITICORP and they’re milking the cow dry and now they’re sending it to the slaughterhouse. Very very poor management.
Shame …