CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The last Sears department store in Ohio is closing.
The Sears at Great Northern Mall started a liquidation sale this week, though a final closing date hasn’t been determined.
A spokesperson for Transformco, Sears’ parent company, declined comment.
All sales at the North Olmsted store are now final, according to its Facebook page. The location is open daily from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. except for Sundays, when it opens at noon.
Though the store is the last full-size Sears store in Ohio, the company still has 13 Sears Hometown and Sears Appliance Outlet locations in the state. Those stores are smaller, selling primarily appliances, tools, lawn and garden equipment and closeout merchandise.
The Great Northern Sears welcomed its first customers on July 28, 1976. In an advertisement in The Plain Dealer about the grand opening of the new 172,000-sq. ft. store, as seen below, the retailer boasted about its men’s collection “for the active and arm-chair sportsman,” Custom Shop where shoppers could order custom-made bedspreads and draperies, robust furniture offerings, Fisher stereo store, 17-stall auto service center and computerized sales system. The store also had a deli, driving school, insurance center, Ticketron booth and tobacco shop.
Founded in the late 19th century as a catalog business, Sears was once the largest retailer in the United States and had more than a dozen stores in Northeast Ohio in the 1990s. But the demise of the legacy retail chain has been rapid since the company filed for bankruptcy in 2018. Sears had about 700 stores at the time. That number, according to a recent audit by Forbes, is now down to 118.
The.Great Northern Sears opened on July 28, 1976.
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