Lampert has spun off Lands’ End, Sears Hometown & Outlet Stores, Sears Canada, and Orchard Supply, each into its own public company. “We’re fighting to survive—that’s pretty clear,” Lampert says.

His critics see things differently. Robert Chapman, a California-based hedge-fund manager, calls Sears Holdings “a total shit show” that is in “secret liquidation” mode. He says he recently came out of a Kmart in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, that offered so many bargains he couldn’t believe his eyes. “He’s not calling it a liquidation sale,” he says of Lampert, “but if you’ve gone into one of the stores, it’s a liquidation deal.”

Cohen says, “[Lampert] is a guy who may have harbored some notion of running this business, but if he did he’s pivoted to just simply manipulating it, if you will, for his own benefit. . . . This is the creative destruction of a very weak brand [Kmart] and a perfectly viable brand [Sears], both of which together were doing something like $50 billion when he took over, and he’s getting away with it because he’s been able to treat this like a private company. No public company would ever allow a chief executive officer to remain in their seat who was so intimately tied to these manipulations and presiding over the failure of a business like this. This is not normal, if anything is normal these days. This is certainly not normal.”

Cohen believes that a bankruptcy filing is inevitable, and that Lampert will end up benefiting from it because he will be able to “walk away” from onerous store leases and other liabilities, such as the underfunded pension plan, and get rid of those assets that he hasn’t been able to sell. Since he’s the largest Sears Holdings creditor, Cohen says, “he’ll then bring this thing right back out as a new company, and he’ll become the new shareholder, and he’ll start this process all over again because Sears still has a substantial inventory of at least theoretically valuable real estate, and as long as there’s any plus value to any consequential outcome it’s all to his benefit.”

For his part, Lampert says he is going to keep fighting for as long as it makes sense: “I believe in what’s possible, and we’re doing things that are necessary to keep the company going. . . . It’s definitely not just humbled me, but it’s expanded my awareness of real issues that exist in our society. . . . I feel like I can make a contribution by being involved, O.K.?”

Cohen takes a more cynical view. “This is all just a perversion of our free-market system,” he says. “This is the actions of a controlling shareholder treating a company as if it is truly private, with no oversights, no constructive oversight whatsoever, with no intent to protect any of the requisite constituencies other than essentially himself.”

Lampert’s spokesperson says, “There is no merit to the speculation that Mr. Lampert is working to benefit from the ‘liquidation’, ‘failure’ or ‘bankruptcy’ of Sears Holdings . . . All shareholders—and the Board of Directors that represents them—ensure there is oversight of their interest in the Sears Holdings, as do several other stakeholders (lending partners, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, vendors, employees, members, etc.) who have their own different interests in the Company. So, it is untrue and unfair to allege that the company is being manipulated to only serve the interests of Mr. Lampert.”

Despite Lampert’s optimism, Sears continues to decline. Many other big-box retailers had a surprisingly robust 2017 holiday sales season, but sales at Sears suffered mightily, down around 17 percent. Lampert once again tried to reassure the company’s suppliers and equity holders that it had enough cash to pay its bills as they became due. On January 10, he announced that he had arranged an additional $300 million of new loans to ease the terms on other loans that Sears already has, in order to buy more time. He also announced that Sears would find another $200 million in cost savings not related to already announced store closings. Nevertheless, the fourth-quarter 2017 loss could be as much as $320 million, and Lampert announced he is going to close another 103 Sears and Kmart stores by this month.

Despite everything, the Sears Holdings stock price has slumped to $2 a share, down considerably from the high of $134 per share some 11 years ago. Sears Holdings now has a market value of around $250 million, making Lampert’s nearly 60 percent stake worth $150 million.

At the end of our interview, Lampert made it clear he’s not done yet. “Put it this way, if I consider all the other alternatives, they’re not great for a lot of people and I just want to be responsible. If I didn’t believe that this company could be transformed still—the window is definitely shrinking—but if I didn’t believe that, I would try to take a different path. But I don’t know what that path exactly would be. It’s not a question of giving up or not giving up.”