When Dana Elling’s mother was a young girl growing up on a Carver County farm, the Sears catalog arrived in the mail each fall and loomed large as a stand-in for the actual department store, if not a gateway to the glitz of city living.

“They would dog-ear all the pages they wanted their mother to look at. They didn’t really go anywhere, they didn’t drive,” said Elling, who stopped by the Sears store at 425 Rice Street Thursday during a break from her job as a senior researcher at the Minnesota State Capitol building in St. Paul. “It was their window to the rest of the world.”

St. Paul’s Sears department store on Rice Street shut down on Sunday, victim to a changing retail landscape, competition from suburban and online shopping trends, and what some describe as a stubborn reluctance to change with the times.

Its closure marks more than the end of an era for Sears, which also is shuttering locations at the Mall of America in Bloomington and roughly 200 other sites across the country.

The St. Paul store off Rice and University avenues, which opened in 1963, was the last major retailer in the city’s downtown area. A Macy’s department store — formerly Dayton’s — closed downtown in 2013.

At Sears, “Everything Must Go” and “At Least 40 to 80 Percent Off Lowest Ticketed Price” signs still hung this week over skeletal store fixtures that mostly had been plucked clean. And yes, even the fixtures were for sale.

A busy motor vehicle licensing bureau that had been located on the second floor had earlier moved to the nearby Sunrise Banks building at 200 University Ave. W.

“I used to come here all the time with my dad,” said 53-year-old Scott Robins of North Branch, Minn., while disassembling a weight rack on Thursday. To celebrate his graduation from Dunwoody College’s automotive school back in 1987, his mother took him to that same Sears store and bought him a toolbox. It’s a memory he’s kept for 30 years.

“Hopefully all the workers keep good spirits,” said Robins, a hay farmer. “I asked them (about job prospects), and a couple didn’t know yet.”

A 20-year-old sales clerk who said she was a biology student at Hamline University seemed more blasé than concerned. After less than six months with the retailer, her last day will be in mid-January, she said, and she said she had no special connection to the work.

Ted Rose, 30, of St. Paul, stopped by Sears with his wife and young daughter in hopes of finding deals under $20 — and there were still some options in the clothing section.

The end of Sears marks the end of a youth employment opportunity Rose remembers well. Rose recalled being a 16-year-old high school freshman again, working the registers with his brother and cousin.

RELATED: St. Paul’s Sears is closing, but its ’63 debut was a sensation

“I used to get all my Craftsman tools here,” he said. “Pretty sad, man.”

Cardell Adams, a father of seven children ages 1 to 10, scoured the clothing racks for deals for his kids. As a temporary building cleaner at the store, Sears’ closure keeps him employed for the time-being, but that’s cold comfort.

“It impacts me,” he said. “I like shopping at Sears. I don’t understand it.”

Sears declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October, announcing at the time that it would close 142 Sears and Kmart locations nationally. That number has since grown by 80 locations closing by March.

In 2013, Sears floated concept plans calling for a four-story office building, an apartment and townhouse complex, a parking garage and more than 100,000 square feet of retail space in separate buildings surrounding its St. Paul store.

Nothing came of it, and the 187,000-square-foot store and the 17 acres of land around it were transferred last year to Seritage Growth Properties, which is handling real estate sales and development around the country for the storied department store chain. Related Articles St. Paul council approves mayor’s basic-income project for poor families

St. Paul City Council agrees on no levy increase

St. Paul police chief says budget cuts would cut officer ranks; some on council not convinced

Business owners and community groups refine state aid requests for properties damaged in riots

‘Moral courage’ training, already planned for St. Paul officers before George Floyd death, takes on more urgency

Not everyone had heard the death knell.

“What is all this? Why is everything like this?” said Damilawa Oyemomi of St. Paul, who walked wide-eyed into Sears on Thursday afternoon with his mother Esther Oyemomi.

The news came as an unwelcome surprise: “Oh, they’re closing?”