Back in 2018, the signage and the products on offer still mostly aligned with one another. However, it appears that the mattress section ended up absorbing the bath department at some point, and (unsurprisingly) Sears never bothered removing the old sign. On a side note, it looks like Sears chose about the clunkiest possible way to translate "bath" into Spanish, going with "things for the bath" -- that sort of excessively verbose translation always bothers me a little bit.
For a company that was circling the drain, my local Sears did a lot of store resets in the 2010s and the mattress department seemed to make the biggest moves. For a while, they were upstairs by the escalators, then they moved to the back of the second floor, and then they moved into the old electronics department downstairs when Sears mostly eliminated electronics. Granted, towards the end, I think mattresses was one of Sears better departments so I can understand why they gave it a more favorable and larger space. That said, at least the department signage didn't say electronics when they moved down there like this one does with the bath sign! You could tell it was the old electronics department because the walls were full of outlets for the TV display.
ReplyDeleteWhile I'm generally not a fan of grey paint like this, it probably does make sense for mattresses to be surrounded by something dull.
I don't know if you remember Sears Homelife stores or if they even existed in the Northwest. In the 1980s, Sears had the idea to more or less remove furniture from their full-line stores and move them to standalone furniture stores which looked like any other ordinary mid-tier furniture store. We bought a lot of furniture from them, they sold some good stuff. Sears eventually sold those stores off and moved furniture, at least mattresses, back to the full-line stores. Here's a 1995 Sears Homelife commercial. The one in North Houston which we shopped at looked just like this. Link: https://youtu.be/0WCi65k-31A
What you see here is just the start of the weirdness that happened in this corner of the store! While Sears must have expanded the mattress section at some point, it has shrunk significantly since my 2018 visit, but Sears never bothered removing the mattress signage. But we'll see that eventually!
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