Sears files for bankruptcy

Once America’s retail giant, Sears filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Monday after 132 years in business. The company plans to close 142 of its 700-plus remaining stores and lay off thousands of workers. Founded as a watch store, Sears blossomed into the Amazon of the early 1900s as a mail-order business. “What Sears did was make big-city merchandise available to people in small towns,” economist and author Marc Levinson said. The retailer at one time sold everything from build-your-own-house kits to grave markers. But after the advent of Amazon—and Target and Walmart—Sears couldn’t keep up. In its bankruptcy filing, it listed assets of $1 billion to $10 billion and liabilities of $10 billion to $50 billion. Though it has a plan to restructure and stay afloat, most analysts didn’t have much hope for the future of the retailer. “In our view, too much rot has set in at Sears to make it [a] viable business,” Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail, said in a note to investors.