Early this morning Sears Holding Corp. (White Plains, N.Y.) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection from its creditors amid mounting debt and sluggish sales during a digital shopping era in which it struggled to keep up.
Sears listed more than $10 billion in debt and more than $1 billion in assets in its filing, reports Fortune. It seeks to reorganize into a smaller base of profitable stores. With the help of $600 million in new loans, Sears and Kmart will remain open, but it will close 142 unprofitable stores (in addition to 46 already scheduled to close) by the end of the year. The company’s CEO Eddie Lambert is stepping down immediately, and the company will be run by an Office of the CEO, an independent board of directors that will oversee its restructuring.
The 125-year-old retailer was regarded as the first “everything store,” at its peak in the decades following World War II, then struggling with competition from Walmart Inc. (Bentonville, Ark.) and Amazon.com Inc. (Seattle) from the ’90s through today.