What Killed Sears?

You have probably heard that Sears, an American retailing icon for more than a century, is filing for bankruptcy. While Sears certainly has problems of its own, this is part of a larger trend for department stores. U.S. retail sales for September grew 0.1 percent from the prior month, sales specifically at department stores fell by 0.8 percent.

Those numbers have been diverging for a long time. Since 2000, overall U.S. retail sales have grown by more than 300 percent. But sales at department stores have declined by about 35 percent.

Sears is much diminished from the retailing giant it once was, but even today, it still was a significant force among department stores. In the first half of its current fiscal year, its merchandise sales were equal to about 6.5 percent of all U.S. department-store sales.