The fancy stone flooring goes nicely with Sears' typical stone facade (even if the overall look isn't particularly standard for Sears). Also not so standard is the present-day Sears logo this store has, and unlike on the outside, there are no obvious scars from the old logo here.
Huh, my first impression about this mall entrance is how un-Sears it looks! The typical Sears mall entrance, at least from the mid-1990s until the end (I know this Sears is still open, but...lol) had those white and grey tiles. Here's a rather humorous example of what I consider to be the common Sears mall entrance at my former local Sears during the brief time it was a Hometown store: https://houstonhistoricretail.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Sears-Willowbrook-2022_9943-scaled.avif
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if those tiles in the typical mall entrance were stone. I just kind of assumed they were porcelain or glazed ceramic tile, but I'm not really sure! Whatever the case is, I think the materials at this Sears are nicer than the typical entrance and the offset entrance is also atypical in the 1990s+ era. That said, before that era, Sears used offset entrances quite regularly. In fact, that same mall entrance at my local mall in the above photo used to be an offset entrance (with a dark brown brick finish) until Sears redid it sometime in the 1990s.
The only problem of sorts with this Sears mall entrance is that the stone looks pretty similar to the corridor floor tile!
Yeah, the actual design is pretty weird, probably because this was a retrofit added in the 00s, years after most mall-based Sears stores were built. That probably explains the different materials too, though I'm sure I've seen some other Sears with similar stone tile (and yes, I'm sure it's not real stone... stonegrain? 😉).
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