Sears plans to sell or redevelop its massive corporate-office park in the Chicago suburbs (2024)

FAQs

What happened to Sears headquarters in Hoffman Estates? ›

All 2.4 million square feet of office space and supportive structures Sears built there in the early '90s will be removed by Carol Stream-based American Demolition to make way for a data center campus designed by Compass Datacenters of Dallas.

Sears headquarters sold to Compass Datacenters for $194M

The 197-acre property, located at 3333 Beverly Road in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, has long been home to Sears' massive 2.4-million-foot campus of interconnected buildings.

Increased competition with other big-box retailers and the rise of Amazon and online shopping took a bite out of Sears' profits. Within the company, tensions were brewing between lower-level management, employees, and Eddie Lampert.

Sears Holdings Corp

Transformco

In 1988, Sears Roebuck and Company sold and moved out of the building, but the Sears Tower name remained until 2009 when the building was renamed after the Willis Group, a London- based global insurance broker. Skydeck Chicago is the observation deck on the 103rd floor of the building.

Sears, Roebuck and Co. Chicago, Illinois, U.S. U.S. Sears was based in the Sears Tower in Chicago from 1973 until 1995, and was later headquartered in Hoffman Estates, Illinois from 1993 until 2021, the year when it announced that it would be selling its Hoffman Estates headquarters complex.

The Sears website was still active on last look. And as of January 2024, the company still had a dozen stores in the United States, as well as one in Puerto Rico. Note that Sears stores in Mexico are not operated by the company but by a conglomerate owned by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim.

Sears' Longtime Headquarters Near Chicago Sold to Data Center Developer for $194 Million.

As of February, 2024, there are 13 Sears stores in the United States. These stores are located in 7 states and territories and 11 cities. The state with the most Sears locations is California, with 4 stores. This is about 31% of all Sears locations in the United States.

Sears' inability to execute on delivering these omnichannel experiences is just one of the many ways this former retail hero let down its once-booming customer base. Sears ultimately failed because of its reluctance to fully believe in the consequences of a rapidly changing retail landscape.

Does Sears have a bad reputation? ›

According to Consumer Affairs, an astonishing 86 percent of customers are unsatisfied with Sears' customer service. That puts them at the bottom of the rankings under their primary competitors Macy's, JC Penny, and Kohl's.

As Sears' stores fell further into disrepair they couldn't generate enough to finance their own upgrades leading to a negative investment cycle which generates lower and lower sales and less money to invest over time. Lampert is credited with much of this lack of investment.

Summary: – Sears Holdings emerged from bankruptcy after a 4-year stay and more than 10,000 court filings. – Its store network shrunk from almost 700 to fewer than two dozen. – The remaining 20+ Sears stores are not expected to survive by Syracuse University professor Ray Wimer.

Lampert took control of Sears Holdings in 2005, after merging it with the Kmart discount chain. The hedge fund manager struggled for years to stem the losses of the company that had pioneered mail-order catalog shopping but never found its footing in the internet era.

Hoffman Estates had one thing Schaumburg didn't: thousands of undeveloped acres of land. One site contained nearly 800 acres of rolling farmland between Beverly Road and Route 59, just off the Northwest Tollway. It was just what Sears wanted.

The Now Arena (originally known as the Sears Centre, Sears Centre Arena and stylized as NOW Arena) is a multi-purpose arena in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, a northwest suburb 25 miles (40 km) from Chicago, near land which formerly contained the Poplar Creek Music Theater.

Hedge fund manager Eddie Lampert bought control of the Sears chain in 2005 for $11 billion and merged it with Kmart, another retailer in his portfolio. At that time, the two brands collectively had about 3,500 stores with more than 300,000 employees. In 2018, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

BSD Capital has acquired the Former Sears at Paddock Mall located at 3100 SW College Road, with 145,857 Sq/ft on 12.03 acres over two parcels of land.