If a restaurant is located in an area that has no customers interested in better ingredients or food, then it will lose business to competitors. And Sears' customer experience has been terrible for a couple decades, but from all accounts I've heard it was great in its heyday. What changed, and this is my conjecture of course, is the introduction lower cost options such as Walmart, Home Depot, Amazon, etc, that revealed that Sears' clientele were not willing to pay a premium for their products in exchange for whatever extra Sears was offering (in this case I'm assuming better staff at the stores via Sears offering better pay and benefits).