Sears and K Mart, locally, exit the stage.

The news hit yesterday that the Sears Holding Company, which owns Sears and K Mart, is closing the two local outlets.  Sears had declared bankruptcy.

To anyone paying attention, this is no surprise whatsoever.  Neither brand seemed to get over the financial flu that they picked up a couple of decades ago.  I haven't been in our local KMart for years, indeed since my son was small and I went there as they carried certain toys he liked.  I've been in Sears a couple of times in the last year but each time was really disappointing.

Indeed, it was pretty clear to me that Sears was in trouble when I bought a Craftsman lawn mower about ten or fifteen years ago and hated it.  The brand name had been legendary.  It was a complete disappointment and was rapidly replaced.

I don't know how Sears Holding allowed these stores to fall into this state.  I'm sure that competing with more aggressive Walmart had something to do with it, and adjusting to the Internet including Amazon, or failing to do so, even more.  But what a change.

I'm not going to get too romantic about it.  It wasn't as if I was a huge KMart fan.  I rarely went there in recent years.  And Sears had declined to the point where a trip through the Sears was universally disappointing.  The latter didn't carry nearly the number of things it seemed to have once carried.

But both stores were real institutions when I was young.  KMart was about the only department store of that type around locally.  And Sears had a downtown store that, while we didn't go into it frequently, was sort of a big deal.  It carried, I recall, everything, even firearms, and had its own automotive garage.

A person can debate what happened to these companies, but in the end they don't seem to have been able to get ahead of the new economy.  While they do go back a ways, the Sears company dates back to 1886, they weren't ancient institutions and reflected instead the American economy that came up during the 20th Century.  They started to decline, really, in the late 20th Century as Walmart, which was born in their image and that of similar brands, but much more aggressive, came up and then the Internet really started to polish them off.

But we don't really know where this is all headed really.  Sears and KMart were once giants.  Is this unique to them?  Well in some ways, certainly.  In others, not so much.  The new economy, whatever it will be, hasn't ceased developing to where we can know.