BUSINESS

Southwest Florida Sears stores up for redevelopment

Maggie Menderski
maggie.menderski@heraldtribune.com
The Whole Foods in the former Sears space at Westfield Countryside Mall. HERALD-TRIBUNE STAFF PHOTO / MAGGIE MENDERSKI

The Sears building at Westfield Countryside has one corner that’s booming.

It’s the part that the department store abandoned.

Sears stores are scaling back or shuttering throughout the country, and that’s a trend that may be trickling down to the Sarasota-Bradenton region before we know it.

Just look what’s happening to the north of us.

About three years ago Sears gave up 38,000-square-feet of retail space at Westfield Countryside in Clearwater to make room for a Whole Foods Market. Now, instead of combing through moderately priced clothing and household equipment, customers are piling carts with organic groceries, drinking beer from a long string of taps and choosing from an array of ethnic cuisine and salads at the self-service food bar.

That space has gone from barely moving racks of Sears merchandise to refilling three types of tofu on the hot foods bar daily.

The full checkout lines, fresh-made coffee bar, organic soaps and the 14 locally sourced hot sauces at that grocer are a huge shift from the outdated department store on the other side of its wall.

On our own turf, we have 101,000-square-feet in Bradenton and 224,713-square-feet in Sarasota of outdated Sears space, too.

And it’s all up for redevelopment.

Seritage Growth Properties, which acquired a bundle of Sears and Kmart real estate in July 2015, was advertising its space at Westfield Sarasota Square and Desoto Square Mall for redevelopment late this summer at the International Council of Shopping Centers conference in Orlando.

This isn’t a surprise. Sears' parent company announced plans earlier this year to close 10 stores and 68 of its Kmart properties. Sales are dropping, and the chain is struggling. The slow death of some brick-and-mortar retail has been well publicized. This is just another piece of it.

Representatives with Seritage haven’t returned my calls or provided, really, any idea of what kind of retail project they’re aiming for.  

But given what’s happening around us, it’s not hard to guess.

The Whole Foods at Westfield Countryside was just the beginning of Sears makeovers in Southwest Florida.

Seritage is gearing up to take a bulldozer to the Sears location at Tyrone Square Mall in St. Petersburg.

Lucky’s Market, Petsmart, Dick’s Sporting Goods and a fourth unnamed anchor are all planning to move onto the property, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

Seritage has submitted plans to the city of St. Petersburg to knock down the 188,515-square-feet, roughly half-century old department store and replace it with retailers that shoppers will patronize.

Likewise, with the right tenants, our Southwest Florida Sears properties have plenty of potential.

Seritage is unlikely to follow in Countryside and Tyrone Square’s grocery footsteps at Westfield Sarasota Square because of the mall’s neighbors, said Barry Seidel, president of American Property Group of Sarasota Inc. That mall already brought on Costco Wholesale in 2012 to take over a vacant Dillard’s anchor. Between that and the Sprouts Farmers Market that’s expected to open across the street in Pelican Plaza, adding more grocery aisles to the intersection of U.S. 41 and South Beneva Road just isn’t the best move.

But a Dick’s Sporting Goods could be a gold mine, Seidel said. Now that Sports Authority has shut its stores nationwide — and specifically just across U.S. 41 in Pelican Plaza  it’s left the Sarasota sporting goods market under served.

It’s a different story for the Sears space at Desoto Square Mall where the closest Publix or Winn Dixie is about three miles away. A grocer in that part of town could fill a huge need for the neighborhoods surrounding the shopping center.

Or at the very least a bigger need than that building is filling now.

I stopped at the Bradenton Sears on Tuesday afternoon on my way back from Westfield Countryside. There were only two cars in the lot, and mine was one of them. The other shopper was a few paces ahead of me, and she muttered “I can’t even remember the last time I came in here” as she held the door open for me.

She’s probably not the only shopper feeling that way. The inside was dead.

The department store staff had planted sale racks at the indoor mall entrance just willing shoppers to come in, and only a few did. 

It was a different scene two hours earlier in Clearwater. Cars packed in around the Whole Foods Market on the back side of the Sears building. Customers dined outside at the market’s patio area.

Whole Foods likely brought in more customers to its corner of the building during the lunch hour than its department store neighbor did during that whole day.

There was a time when Sears was at the forefront of the middle-class shopper’s mind, but that mentality started unraveling years ago. The Desoto Square Mall store is rumored to be one of the worst performing Sears in the chain, but there are ghost towns bearing the company’s logo splattered across the country.  

Whatever Seritage proposes in Southwest Florida, it’s bound to be a new or at least more vibrant life for those properties.

Even if that means starting with a wrecking ball. 

 — Maggie Menderski, the Herald-Tribune’s retail and tourism reporter, can be reached at 361-4951 or at maggie.menderski@heraldtribune.com. Follow her on Twitter @MaggieMenderski and her daily blog at whatsinstore.blogs.heraldtribune.com.