It's the latest and most prominent casualty in an old-line family of department stores instrumental in the rise of the shopping mall and, later, in their mutual decline. As its health failed, Sears' presence in its hometown of Chicago dwindled to a single store, which closed in April 2018.

Sears had been confined to intensive care for years, kept on life support with hundreds of millions of dollars in loan transfusions from Edward Lampert, its controlling owner and CEO, and his hedge fund, ESL Investments. He stepped down as CEO with today's filing. In early October, the company added a restructuring expert to its board, even as $134 million in borrowings was about to come due—news that was shortly followed, ominously, by word that the company had hired a boutique corporate advisory firm to craft a bankruptcy filing that seemed imminent. It was a far cry from the healthier days, when Sears resided in a namesake Loop skyscraper whose status as the world's tallest building reflected the company's retail hegemony.

Lampert was a Goldman Sachs alum lacking retail experience when he and ESL acquired Sears in 2005, using Kmart, seized in bankruptcy, to engineer a merger. He decided to pull the plug after promised synergies never materialized, and mounting debt and chronic underinvestment in stores led to losses this decade that topped $10 billion.

Surgeons had prolonged Sears' life by amputating thousands of locations and selling or sacrificing rights to familiar brands like Craftsman, Kenmore and DieHard. The post-merger number of locations dwindled from 2,350 full-line stores to 842, as of September. But the hemorrhaging could not be stanched. Shoppers turned to Walmart and other giant discounters, to big-box appliance and electronics stores like Best Buy, and to home-improvement chains like Home Depot and Lowe's.