Asheville Mall Sears store to close in July: Here's what we know

ASHEVILLE — Amid an ongoing $45 million redevelopment project at the Asheville Mall, the facility's Sears store plans to close this summer with liquidation sales beginning later this month.

In a statement this week, Howard Riefs, director of corporate communications for Sears Holdings, said the store at 1 S. Tunnel Road is scheduled to close in mid-July. Riefs said Seritage Growth Properties, which has owned the store space since 2015 and leased it back to Sears, will recapture the space as it pursues a redevelopment project to add a multiplex movie theater, stores, restaurants and high-density residential housing options to the mall.

"The store will remain open for customers in the meantime and will begin its liquidation sales by April 27," Riefs said in an email to the Citizen Times.

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The closure marks the end of an era for Sears, an original mall tenant from when the facility opened in the early 1970s. Even as shopping trends have shifted wildly in the past four decades, Sears has been a constant in the large, mostly windowless space it occupies in the mall.

Riefs did not share the number of associates affected by the closure. He said eligible associates will receive severance and opportunities to apply for open positions at nearby Sears or Kmart stores. Sears has Hometown store locations — a subsidiary that primarily focuses on home appliances and tools, among other items — in Hendersonville, Waynesville and Brevard. There are two Kmart locations in Asheville and another located in Waynesville.

Questions of Sears' future at the mall have been looming large for months after Seritage submitted redevelopment plans to the city of Asheville in December.

Plans include the addition of new stores and restaurants, a 10-screen movie theater and a six-story housing structure with 204 multifamily units — much of it in the area where the Sears store exists today. In its plans submitted to the city, Seritage said the project will shift "an aging automobile-oriented retail center" into a place where people can dine, shop and live all within a short proximity.

It noted those plans "may include a smaller format Sears store," but the automotive center would be repurposed for "small-scale commercial uses." Seritage did not respond to an emailed request for comment about the impending closure.

Riefs said the company understands customers may be "disappointed" when it shutters a store, but that they're hoping to continue relationships with customers at other stores or through its desktop and mobile platforms.

The mall redevelopment was continued Monday in the city's Technical Review Committee to allow Seritage to complete a traffic impact study. A city staff report recommends conditional approval of the project singling out issues such as traffic, the addition of sidewalks and naming an existing access street near Tunnel Road and the Brackettown Road intersection.

It is scheduled to go before the committee again during its May 7 meeting.