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Sears to close South Hills Village, Mall at Robinson locations

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Sears announced Thursday it is closing another 48 stores nationwide, including its locations at South Hills Village and the Mall at Robinson.

Those stores are the only two that will close in Pennsylvania. The location at Washington Crown Center Mall in North Franklin Township will remain open.

After this round of closures, the company will have about 800 stores, down from about 1,000 at the end of last year and far below the 2012 peak of 4,000 stores.

Sears also posted a quarterly loss of $424 million and said store closings already underway contributed to a drop of more than 30 percent in revenue. That marks the more than five years of straight quarterly sales drop, according to FactSet.

Sales at established stores, a key gauge of a retailer’s health, tumbled nearly 12 percent, down 9.5 percent at Kmart stores and 13.4 percent at Sears.

The South Hills store, which straddles Upper St. Clair and Bethel Park, is set to close in late June, while the Robinson location will be vacated by September. The company also said it will close Kmart stores, including one in Latrobe.

The company said eligible workers at the stores will receive a severance and an opportunity to work at other stores if there are open positions. The company said the closures are a result of it trying to identify some of the least profitable stores in its network.

In January, the company announced the closure of 39 Sears stores and 64 Kmart locations, including the store at 1025 Washington Pike in Collier Township, which was a longtime anchor tenant in Chartiers Valley Shopping Center.

Chairman and CEO Edward Lampert, who combined Sears and Kmart in 2005 after helping to bring the latter out of bankruptcy, has long pledged to save the famed retailer, which started in the 1880s as a mail-order catalog business.

But the stores have remained an albatross. And Kenmore, the retailer’s renowned appliance brand, became the latest potential sale after ESL Investments, the company’s largest shareholder, headed by Lampert, said it might be interested in buying it.

Shares of Sears Holdings Corp., based in Hoffman Estates, Ill., fell 11 percent, or 36 cents, to $2.86 Thursday.

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