Sears At Mall To Close Within Weeks

The Sears in the Oxford Valley Mall will close within weeks.

The 173,000-square-foot store in Middletown, according to employees, will most likely close in the final days of 2018. The company’s press team did not respond to a request for more information on the store’s closure and how many employees will be impacted.

The store in the Neshaminy Mall in Bensalem is also slated to close.

A large Sears and Kmart distribution facility in Falls Township has not been listed as closing and the facility continued hiring employees as of last week.

At the Oxford Valley Mall store, many items were between 60 percent to 75 percent off and bargain hunters were out in force. Formerly packed aisles were reduced to condensed racks of clothes – many name brands – on discount and dotted by unclothed mannequins.

The closure of the Lower Bucks County stores is part of a batch of 142 locations that will close after the company filed Chapter 11 with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. In the weeks since, the company announced an additional 40 Sears and Kmart stores will close in February.

Sears said in an October statement that they are planning to keep open a core group of profitable stores and focus their efforts on those locations.

The 125-year-old Sears has not made a profit in years and is weighed down by mounting debt. Over the years, the iconic American brand has closed hundreds of Sears and Kmart locations, including shutting down its entire Sears Canada subsidiary and its Kmart store in Middletown.

Financial publication Bloomberg reported this week that several major retailers have expressed interest in Sears locations.

Earlier this year, LevittownNow.com published information that the proposed MaST-Neshaminy Charter School had signed a $9.6 million letter of intent to take over and convert the Sears store at the Oxford Valley Mall into a kindergarten through 12th grade learning center. However, the plans for the charter school at the location fell through after roadblocks.

Sears’ closure will leave Simon Property Group’s Oxford Valley Mall with two out of its four large anchor spots open. The two remaining anchor stores are filled by Macy’s and J.C. Penney.