Sears, Roebuck & Co. sold America almost everything for more than a century, and on October 15, 2018 its parent, Sears Holdings, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Founded in 1893 as a mail-order house, Sears built the most influential retail catalog the country ever produced — a fat annual book from which a farm family could order a sewing machine, a suit, a tombstone, or, between 1908 and roughly 1940, an entire house shipped in numbered pieces by rail. It was, in every meaningful sense, the Amazon of its age, and it parlayed that into the largest retailer in the United States, a position it held through the 1980s with something on the order of 350,000 employees. At its physical high-water mark in the late 1990s it ran on the order of 3,500 stores under the Sears name (figures vary by what one counts, and later Sears Holdings counts ranged from roughly 2,700 to 4,000 across both banners).
What killed it came in two waves, and the second makes this a parable rather than a tragedy. The first was ordinary competitive failure: Walmart passed Sears in sales around 1990, Target took the style-conscious middle, and Amazon — running, with some irony, the exact mail-order-at-scale model Sears had invented — took the catalog’s whole reason for being. Sears, slow and over-stored, did not adapt. The second wave was financial. In 2005 the hedge-fund manager Eddie Lampert merged the ailing Sears with the ailing Kmart into Sears Holdings, and over the following decade the combined company was steadily hollowed out: its best brands sold off, its real estate spun out from under it and rented back, and its losses funded by loans from Lampert’s own ESL Investments, which became both the company’s controlling owner and its largest creditor.
By the time it filed, Sears Holdings listed some $11 billion in liabilities. Lampert’s ESL then bought a remnant of roughly 425 stores — about 223 Sears and 202 Kmart — out of bankruptcy for around $5.2 billion, mostly by crediting the debt it was already owed, preserving perhaps 45,000 jobs. That remnant, operated as Transformco, has since dwindled to almost nothing: as of late 2025 there were five Sears stores left in the country.
What was lost is not abstract. Sears shed hundreds of thousands of jobs over its long decline; at the 2018 filing it employed around 68,000, down from its mid-century peak. Its pension plans, covering roughly 90,000 workers and retirees and underfunded by about $1.5 billion, were handed to the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. The catalog colossus that taught America how to shop at a distance was, in the end, dismantled at a distance — by spreadsheet.
Service Merchandise was the largest catalog-showroom retailer in the United States — a chain built on the strange, beloved ritual of ordering from an in-store catalog and watching your purchase ride out of the stockroom on a conveyor belt — and on January 4, 2002 it announced it would liquidate every store. The format traced back to a five-and-dime that Harry and Mary Zimmerman opened in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1934, but the company as shoppers remember it was born in 1960, when the Zimmermans turned a Nashville warehouse into their first catalog showroom. Customers browsed a thick printed catalog and the sample displays, filled out a paper order form with the catalog numbers they wanted, handed it over, and collected the goods minutes later at a pickup counter where the items arrived on a motorized belt from the warehouse out back. By the late 1990s the company ran more than 400 stores across some 37 states and topped $4 billion in annual sales, the clear industry leader.
The model was a genuinely clever answer to a 1960s problem — how to offer the deep selection and low prices of a catalog with the immediacy of a store, while keeping most inventory locked safely in the back to cut shrinkage and staffing. It was, in a sense, an early hybrid of catalog and showroom, the kind of multi-channel idea retailers would rediscover decades later. But it was also a format whose advantages evaporated as the world changed around it. The big-box discounters — Walmart, Target, the warehouse clubs, and the category-killers like Best Buy and Circuit City — offered the same brands at comparable prices with the goods on open shelves you could carry to the register yourself, no order form, no waiting at the belt. And then the internet did the catalog’s job better than any printed book could.
Caught between the discounters and the early web, Service Merchandise tried to reinvent itself as a specialty seller of jewelry, gifts, and home décor, but the pivot never took. The company filed for Chapter 11 on March 15, 1999 — at the time among the largest bankruptcies in Tennessee history — and spent three years trying to reorganize before the September 11 economic shock helped close the door. On January 4, 2002 it gave up, announcing the liquidation of its remaining 200-plus stores in 32 states; going-out-of-business sales began January 19, and roughly 8,300 store employees lost their jobs. The conveyor belt stopped.
Lord & Taylor was the oldest department store in the United States, and in 2021 it closed every one of its stores after 195 years. Founded in 1826 by Samuel Lord and the English immigrant George Washington Taylor as a dry-goods shop on Catherine Street in Lower Manhattan, it predated Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and very nearly every other name that came to define American retail. For most of two centuries it traded on heritage and a particular kind of restrained, upscale taste — the Fifth Avenue flagship that opened in 1914, the rosewater-and-old-money associations, the place a certain New Yorker bought a good winter coat. By the 2000s it ran about 86 stores; by its final years it was down to 38.
The decline was the familiar department-store story — squeezed between the discounters below and the luxury houses above, and then hollowed out by e-commerce — but the ending was strange enough to be a parable about a particular moment in retail. In 2019, the Canadian conglomerate Hudson’s Bay, which had owned Lord & Taylor since 2008, sold the flagging chain to Le Tote, a San Francisco clothing-rental startup, for roughly $100 million. A retailer founded under James Monroe, in other words, was handed to an eight-year-old subscription app whose plan was to fuse a 200-year-old store with a Rent-the-Runway-style closet.
The plan never had time to fail on its merits. In March 2020 the pandemic closed the stores, and a chain whose specialty was dresses and dressy clothes watched demand for exactly that evaporate as the country switched to sweatpants. On August 2, 2020, Le Tote and Lord & Taylor filed for Chapter 11 together. Unable to find a buyer willing to keep the stores open, Lord & Taylor liquidated all 38 of them through 2020 and into 2021. The name did not die so much as detach from its body: the intellectual property was sold to the Saadia Group, which relaunched Lord & Taylor as an e-commerce-only brand, and it has since changed hands again. The stores, the 195 years, and the jobs were gone.
Barneys New York was the arbiter of American luxury taste for the better part of a century, and on August 6, 2019 it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy — a prelude to liquidation. It had begun, improbably, as the opposite of what it became: a 500-square-foot men’s discount shop opened in 1923 by Barney Pressman, who raised the lease money by pawning his wife’s engagement ring and sold off-price suits to working men. Over three generations the Pressmans inverted that origin entirely, turning Barneys into the store that introduced America to Giorgio Armani, Comme des Garçons, and a downtown-Manhattan sensibility that the uptown department stores spent decades trying to copy. At its height it ran roughly two dozen stores, anchored by a 230,000-square-foot, $267 million flagship on Madison Avenue that opened in 1993.
What killed it was not, in the end, a failure of taste. It was real estate and the internet, arriving together. The lease on the Madison Avenue flagship contained a fair-market-value reset, and in 2018 an arbitrator handed the landlord — Ben Ashkenazy’s Ashkenazy Acquisition — the right to raise the annual rent from roughly $16 million to about $30 million, beginning in January 2019, nearly erasing operating earnings on a store that was the company’s identity. At the same moment, luxury was migrating online and, worse for a multi-brand retailer, the designers Barneys had championed were increasingly selling directly to customers, cutting out the middleman that had made them famous in America.
Squeezed between a doubled rent and a disintermediated business model — and carrying the strain of years of ownership turmoil and debt — Barneys filed in August 2019 with $218 million in financing to hunt for a buyer. It closed most of its stores immediately, looked for a savior, and found instead a liquidator’s logic. In October 2019, a partnership of Authentic Brands Group and the financial firm B. Riley won the assets for about $271.4 million, announced it would close the remaining full-price stores, and licensed the name to Saks Fifth Avenue. The institution became a trademark.
What was lost was a point of view. Barneys was not merely a place to buy clothes; it was a curator, a launchpad for designers, the author of the wry holiday windows and the satirical catalog voice, the store that told a certain kind of New Yorker what was next. A licensed nameplate inside a rival’s department store can sell the logo. It cannot replace the eye.