Will Middletown Sears Survive the Cut?

The fate of in Middletown hangs in the balance as the national retailer's parent company announced today it would mothball 100 to 120 underperforming stores according to the Associated Press.

A  located a few miles north on  could also see its doors close for good if its shared corporate parent, Sears Holdings Corporation of Hoffman Estates, Ill. targets it for shutdown.

For now, employees and customers of both stores will have to wait until Sears Holdings releases its list at a later date according to the company website. Company officials have not yet decided which stores will have seen their last holiday season.

Once a final determination of stores to be closed is made, the list will be posted at searsmedia.com, according to the Sears Holdings web site.

Two days after the all-important holiday season, company officials pointed to disappointing sales, competition from discounters, and the still troubled economy as reasoning for the anticipated closures.

Quarterly-to-date and year-to-date figures for the fourth quarter ending Dec. 25, as released on Sears Holdings' website today, indicate that Kmart's sales are down 4.4 percent quarterly and nearly two percent year-to-date when compared to the same calendar period last year.

For the company's Sears Domestic division, which includes appliances, consumer electronics, apparel, and its trendy Lands' End line, fourth quarter sales were down six percent and year-to-date sales had dropped 3.3 percent when examined next to sales figures for the same time in 2010.

Sears Holdings officials would not disclose how many jobs might be lost as a result of the closures according to the company website and other news reports.

"Given the performance and difficult economic environment, especially for big ticket items, we intend to implement a series of actions to reduce our expenses, adjust our asset base, and accelerate the transformation of our business model," Sears Holdings CEO Lou D'Ambrosio said in a company press release.

"These actions will better enable us to focus on our investments in serving our customers and members through integrated retail--at the store, online and in the home," he added.

More than half the decline in sales of Sears Domestics home appliance categories happened with dropping sales in its consumer electronics area according to Sears Holdings web site. Apparel sales in boths Sears stores and its Lands End outlets were also flat throughout the fall

To generate cash flow for surviving Sears and Kmart stores, the parent company expects to sell off existing inventory in the closing stores and to sell or sublease any remaining real estate, D'Ambrosio said.

The stand-alone Middletown Sears store, at , has stood at the busy intersection for nearly 50 years. A separate shares its property.

Other nearby Sears stores are in the Freehold Raceway Mall and at the Seaview shopping area in Ocean Township. Like the Middletown store, the latter also stands alone from other retailers in that shopping center.

The Kmart in Hazlet is geographically the closest store in that chain to Middletown. In business for about 40 years, it shares a shopping center with several smaller stores and restaurants.