Sears Hometown Store at Willowbrook Mall is having its last gasp this upcoming week. While store employees could not provide a final date, they said this week would likely be it for them, as the store slowly runs out of stock. What little remained in the store largely consisted of fixtures and merchandise that had been purchased but yet to be picked up. Many of the items in the store had been shipped in from other locations, including stock labeled for Kmart. The gate to the mall sits shut now, no longer providing the best parking spot to entrance ratio. While one employee hypothesized that the store could make it to September 18th, another said that their final day could be as early as September 12th. This closure, along with the shutdown of Sears Hometown in Humble, and Sears Home Appliance Showroom in Sugar Land, will represent a full exit of Sears from the Houston area.
That Sears logo on the yellow closing banner is very strange! In some ways, it looks like the secondary logo Sears was using in a lot of their early 1980s print ads and catalogs (especially around the year 1983 and so). It’s not exactly the same, and I don’t know why the sign makers would use a logo similar to one that has not been used since the early 1980s, but it is a strange coincidence if nothing else!