Sears To Close Its Final Pennsylvania Store in the Willow Grove Mall, Early Spring 2022

Sears will close yet another store in our area, and this is kind of a monumental piece of news.

The Sears store in the Willow Grove Park Mall (Montgomery County, PA) will close "in the coming months," according to multiple published reports from both The Inquirer and Philly Voice.

This store closure hurts a little more than usual because it actually marks the closing of the chain's last-full service retailer in the ENTIRE state of Pennsylvania.

Mall officials have confirmed the news to both publications.  However, an exact date for the closure was not immediately announced. It's expected to happen in the "early Spring," it looks like.

As for the Willow Grove Mall, it remains anchored by Bloomingdale's, Primark, Macy's, and a Nordstrom Rack. The Bloomingdale's store is the largest anchor store on the property. 

Sears Has Been Struggling for Years

Of course, our area has been no stranger to Sears stores closing. In recent years, we've covered the closings of Sears stores in Freehold, NJ, King of Prussia, PA, and the Quaker Bridge Mall, among many others.

Sears was once one of the nation's largest retail chains. Experts told the Inquirer last month that the retailer just couldn't compete with Walmart in the late '90s and early '00s. Afterward, the company was riddled with debt and poor investment choices leading to its demise.

We heard that the Sears store in the Willow Grove Mall was a bit of a ghost town over the recent holiday season. Shoppers and employees alike noted that it felt like a bit of a liquidation sale had already begun with prices and inventory slashed throughout the store over the 2021 holiday season.