Sears And Kmart Pretend To Run A Retail Business For Another Quarter

Sears Holdings, the company that owns Sears and Kmart, is focused on “restoring profitability,” but so far the only method that the massive department store chain has found to do that since 2012 is by selling its stores to an affiliated real estate investment trust. Sears has a lot more real estate to sell, and could keep this charade up for a while yet. Will it?

In the third quarter of 2016, Sears Holdings had $3.7 billion in long-term debt, with $618 million in short-term debt and $1 billion of its revolving credit line in use.

Comparable store sales across the whole company are down 7.4%, but the good news is that comparable store sales at Kmart are only down 4.4%. That leaves comparable Sears store sales down 10%. Dozens of the chain’s stores across the country are closing this month, which is why the “comparable stores” figure is important: that tells you useful things about a company’s health when its store total is expanding or contracting.

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