The announcement comes just less than two week before Elder-Beerman closes its location at the major Miami Twp. shopping center at 2700 Miamisburg Centerville Road near Interstate 75.
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A Sears location at Cincinnati’s Northgate Mall is also scheduled to close. The Sear’s Auto Center at the Northgate Mall will close in late September, the company announced. The Dayton Mall Auto Center closed last year.
The Dayton Mall Sears is closing. When's the last time you went to a Sears store?
— Holly Shively (@hrshively) August 22, 2018
The stores were among 46 deemed “unprofitable,” according to a Sears Holdings statement. The other Sears stores in the Dayton area at the Mall at Fairfield Commons and in Springfield, as well as the appliance outlet stores in Kettering and Huber Heights were not on the list to be shuttered.
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Sears has been struggling in recent months with back-to-back announcements of store closures. In May, the company announced 72 closures, though the Dayton region escaped the chopping block during that round.
Sears, which owns Sears and Kmart, once had a dominant presence in the Miami Valley. In 2017, the last Kmart in the region closed its doors — the Kmart store at 601 Woodman Drive was the last location in the area. Kmart also closed a store located at 4480 Indian Ripple Road in Beavercreek in July 2017.
The company has closed or has plans to shutter more than 630 stores in the United States.
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Sears seems to be facing the same fate of Bon-Ton’s Elder-Beerman, which is scheduled to shutter all of its stores by Aug. 31.
Washington Prime, the owner of the Dayton Mall, has about 15 Bon-Ton leases in its portfolio and nine of those have both Sears and Bon-Ton locations, including both the Dayton Mall and the Mall at Fairfield Commons.
When Elder-Beerman announced it was closing, local retail leaders told the Dayton Daily News that retail was in a transition period.
Chris Kershner, executive vice president of the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce, said the local closures are reflective of retail changes happening across the country. Despite economic planning and a diverse retail landscape, a national retailer’s demise is beyond anything local malls can salvage, he said.
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The future of malls has changed dramatically in recent years, as mall owners like Washington Prime have gone off the traditional path to attract customers into the shopping centers with breweries, Amazon lockers and galleries.
The company acquired four Sears properties and adjacent Auto Centers for $28.5 million in other parts of the nation, but none in Dayton so far. Washington Prime’s ownership of those properties gave the company full control over their redevelopment, despite Sears continuing to lease the lots.
This news organization has reached out the Sears and the Dayton Mall for more information about the Dayton Mall’s future and Sears liquidation sales.
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