Is Sears still in business in 2026?
Yes. Sears still exists in 2026 as a brand, a website and a short list of stores, all owned by Transform Holdco LLC, which does business as Transformco. Transformco is the private company that ESL Investments, the hedge fund run by Edward Lampert, set up to buy Sears out of bankruptcy in February 2019.
It is not in bankruptcy now. The Chapter 11 case that Sears Holdings filed in October 2018 was a reorganization, and the salvageable business was sold rather than liquidated.
What survives is small. The last published count found five full-line Sears department stores still trading in the United States, and Forbes reported on January 2, 2026 that even those five were facing closure. Sears.com still takes orders, Sears Home Services still books appliance repairs, and Kenmore and DieHard are still sold.
Because Transformco is private, it files no annual report and publishes no store count. Every figure for how many Sears stores are left comes from reporters counting doors rather than from the company, which is why each number here carries the date it was taken.
Where are the last five Sears stores?
USA Today counted the survivors in December 2025 and found full-line Sears stores open in Braintree, Massachusetts; Concord, California; El Paso, Texas; Orlando, Florida; and Coral Gables, Florida. The Braintree store anchors South Shore Plaza, a Simon Property Group mall, and the Concord store sits inside Sunvalley Shopping Center as the last Sears in California.
The decline reads as a list. Sears Holdings ran 1,002 stores in the United States at February 3, 2018, made up of 547 Sears full-line stores, 23 Sears specialty stores and 432 Kmart stores, according to its final annual report on Form 10-K. The February 2019 sale carried 425 of those forward. Set that against more than 3,400 Sears and Kmart locations at the time of the 2005 merger and the shape of the thing is clear.
Counts published by data trackers sometimes run higher than five, because they fold in service centers and licensed outlets. Transformco confirms nothing and gives no notice before a closing, so the honest answer for 2026 is five full-line stores or fewer.
The same two decades emptied out RadioShack and Circuit City. Neither of those had spent most of a century as the default American store.
What happened in the October 2018 bankruptcy
Sears Holdings filed for Chapter 11 protection in October 2018. The retreat was already visible in the filings: revenue of $16.7 billion for fiscal 2017, down from $22.1 billion the year before, and a net loss attributable to shareholders of $383 million.
The auction that followed produced one bid that would keep the chain running instead of liquidating it, and it came from the sitting chairman. On February 7, 2019, Judge Robert Drain of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in White Plains, New York, approved the $5.2 billion offer from ESL Investments, a decision the Associated Press reported would keep about 425 stores open and roughly 45,000 people employed.
Lampert had become the story by then. One of his own lawyers told the court that the billionaire had been painted as a cross between the railroad tycoon Jay Gould and Barney Fife of "The Andy Griffith Show." Drain acknowledged the treatment and moved on. "He is a wealthy individual and a big boy," the judge said, as the Associated Press reported in 2019, while pressing Lampert to keep talking to the company and its employees.
Worth saying plainly, because the search results rarely do: Sears did not go out of business in 2018. The company that walked out of Chapter 11 in February 2019 was smaller by design, at 425 stores against the 1,002 of a year earlier.
Which Sears brands did Transformco keep?
The names were always worth more than the buildings. Transformco still owns Kenmore and DieHard, still runs Sears Home Services, which its own site describes as "the nation's largest product repair provider," and still holds the Shop Your Way loyalty program and a large portfolio of former store real estate.
Craftsman is the exception. Sears Holdings sold the tool brand to Stanley Black & Decker before the bankruptcy, in a deal Stanley Black & Decker announced in January 2017 and closed that March, while keeping a license that let Sears carry on selling Craftsman in its own channels. That is why Craftsman now sits on shelves at retailers Sears never supplied.
The practical result is that most of what is left of Sears has no storefront. Appliances and parts move through Sears.com, and repair technicians are dispatched to homes in states where the nearest full-line store closed years ago.
Kmart went through the same sorting. It arrived with the 2005 merger, followed Sears down the same curve, and is now a handful of stores under the same owner.
The catalog that ran for 105 years
Richard Sears mailed his first catalog in 1888, a thin book of watches and jewelry, with ad copy he wrote himself promising "THE LOWEST PRICES ON EARTH," as Smithsonian magazine recounted in 2023.
The book grew into the Big Book, and for a stretch of the early twentieth century it sold houses. Between 1908 and 1940 Sears shipped mail-order homes as numbered kits of lumber, ordered out of a catalog and delivered by rail. Historians still argue about how many went out, and Sears itself claimed more than any of the outside estimates.
Sears opened its first retail store in 1925, and over the following decades the stores quietly became the whole company. The Big Book was retired on January 25, 1993, a 105-year run that ended just as the web arrived.
So the line about Sears being Amazon before Amazon is not a flourish. Sears had the catalog, the warehouses, the credit operation and the national reach, and traded them for anchor space in malls. The company that rebuilt the model online only had to survive the dot-com crash to inherit it.
Why the $175 million settlement mattered
The Chapter 11 case outlived the 2019 sale by three years. Unsecured creditors, mostly suppliers left holding unpaid invoices, sued Lampert, ESL Investments and other former executives over roughly $2 billion of pre-bankruptcy transactions: the 2014 spin-off of Lands' End, the 2015 rights offering and property sales involving Seritage Growth Properties, and the financing ESL provided to Sears before the filing.
It settled for $175 million. Bloomberg Law reported that insurers covered $125.6 million of it, the defendants $41.9 million and shareholding funds $7.5 million, and that Judge Drain approved the deal in 2022, clearing the way to close the case. The defendants admitted no liability.
Whether the merger that created Sears Holdings ever had a chance is still argued. Mark Cohen, the former chief executive of Sears Canada, told CNBC in 2018 that Sears "was toast about a day after it closed" its 2005 merger with Kmart, and called the turnaround plans that followed "just plain bogus."
On the stores that are left, Dan Hamilton Rice, a marketing professor at Louisiana State University, told USA Today what most of the retail industry assumes: "With so few stores, there's serious doubt from industry experts and former insiders that they could be profitable anymore."
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Sears still in business in 2026?
Yes. Sears is still in business in 2026 as a retail brand owned by Transformco, with a small number of full-line department stores, an online store at Sears.com and a home services arm. It is not in bankruptcy: the Chapter 11 case Sears Holdings filed in October 2018 was a reorganization, and the surviving business was sold in February 2019.
Where are the last Sears stores?
The last published count, from USA Today in December 2025, put Sears at five full-line stores: Braintree, Massachusetts; Concord, California; El Paso, Texas; Orlando, Florida; and Coral Gables, Florida. Transformco publishes no store directory and gives no notice before a closing, so call ahead before driving to one.
Is Kmart owned by the same company as Sears?
Yes. Kmart bought Sears in 2005 and the two have shared an owner ever since, first as Sears Holdings and now as Transformco. Kmart shrank on the same curve: it ran 432 stores in the United States at February 3, 2018, and only a handful were still open in 2026 under Transformco.