~24 minutes in, that large open space was the store mockup. They used that to actually replicate a real store so that they could test out different displays and layouts. 34 minutes in, that was the point of sale lab, where developers and QA had to test their code. I spent many, many hours there as a software developer, lead developer, and later architect. I worked in this building from January 1999 until I left at the end of November 2012.
You were responsible for the monochrome text-based point of sale system I had to learn in 2005? It felt absolutely ancient on the then modern IBM color terminals with LCD screens.
Too bad they did not do more with Prodigy online! Sears once owned a "portal" to online sales in the provider "Prodigy" online services, an America Online competitor. Both were obviously killed by broadband in 2000.
I was hoping to see some of the older POS technology still laying around - the CompuAdd registers, the NCRs, even the Singer Friden ones from the '70s.
@@Shader670 I think they actually tried to utilize the Internet and its very early infancy, but it just wasn’t working yet. They were so far ahead of the curve except technology wasn’t ready yet, so they abandoned the idea
Yes they did. Private equity only wanted a tax shelter by slowly destroying the company, before stealing and selling the land. It was a real estate grab above all else. Scorched earth dissolution of a viable company with loyal employees. This is late-stage capitalism.
I miss the Prodigy days. It was a really entertaining service in the 80s. It had so many things going for it. You could buy stuff, book travel, trade, correspond in a multitude of ways. I was at the top of the technological pyramid at the time and still found it entertaining. It's strange that they couldn't parlay all that knowledge into the internet.
Makes me so angry what Eddie Lampert did to Kmart and Sears! 🤬 I used to work for Kmart and let me tell you Eddie DESTROYED the company. Kmart had issues before he came along but he made it worse especially when we were merged with Sears. After the merger it went all downhill from there. I miss my store, associates I worked with and I miss shopping there. Nothing but a sad memory.
100%. Controlled demolition by Fast Eddie. My father was a cabinet maker and later owned a cabinet shop. We spent a lot of time in Sears. I'm glad I still have all of my American-made Craftsman tools. That mid-tier/low pro-grade tool line is a thing of the past. It's either Harbor Freight garbage or Gucci Bag tool trucks with a few exceptions. Sears was awesome.
How else do you expect him to get his golden parachute and buy the company for an insane discount? Executives are pretty much all useless af making a ton of money for doing basically nothing. You have the stock market followers who worship them, since they control their "investments". Both scum IMO.
This was supposed to be where I would have grown my career and eventually retired from. It will forever be in my opinion the greatest retailer in history and the shining example of what was once middle class America. Absolutely devastating how Eddie ruined two American icons.
@@Itsaboutthewaterlife Those Hayworth office chairs with the double backrest supports are about $250. new, marked down to 20. Good design, high quality, bought 2 at a thrift store for 45. each. Looks like the IT department left in a hurry on the last day, probably had 30 minutes to pack their stuff and go.
Yes; It shows how Americans are a very, very wasteful people. If this was any other country....maybe hundreds of countries...in Africa, S. America, Easter Europe, even Asia they would have had the wherewithal to find a way to recycle many of the items (furniture, etc. etc.)
I drive past this building every day on the way to work and have always wanted to go exploring in it but was too scared to try getting inside. Thank you for doing this for everyone and preserving it on youtube
I worked for Sears in the early 2000’s as a receiving manager at a large store. The guys who sold tools, appliances and electronics/TV’s worked on commission and made good money, much more than the hourly employees. It was a fun job and great place to work, our store was busy and profitable. I miss those days
I sold electronics on straight commission; first real job after high school while I was in college. I averaged 12.50 an hour which was nearly double what most other jobs were paying at that time. It didn’t last long as every quarter commission got lower and lower and all the experienced associates were leaving or retiring. It was once a coveted job to sell at Sears. It was sad to witness their very slow demise.
I worked for Sears in the 1990s and NEVER made good money. Instead of a base plus commission, they had draw which meant you owed money if you didn't make your goal(s). Plus they kept lowering commission rates. I got recruited by a big box retailer and off the commission circus. That being said Sears upper management never listened to anyone outside the Tower.
In 2,000 years, nobody will remember that Sears ever existed. "For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind" (Isaiah 65:17, KJV).
@@TheGAMESHARQ I went back and turned my equipment in (computers/docking station/etc...) as well as retrieve my personal belongings from my cube in October 2020. At that point it was a ghost town with only absolutely essential employees and normal security then. They (Transformco) finalized the sale Sept '23, so I would have to imagine that somewhere around that time, the final SHC employees turned off the lights and locked the doors (well except the one our explorer got in). The monitors you see are ones that were long replaced and the majority got put in storage. Majority of us all had Dell flat screen LCD's in our cubes. Obviously there were exceptions for certain groups. Sears was really good for holding on to old stuff. You could go in to storage areas and find tons of ancient stuff, even paperwork and SEC filings, etc, dating back to the move from the Sears Tower in the early 90's.
@@TheGAMESHARQ The stuff that was left there was done so on purpose. It was easier to just junk it with the building instead of paying someone to come haul it out of a building that was going down itself. Anything worth any money would have been auctioned off by the pallet long before demolition started. Also with a building that large there is plenty of room to leave old junk that corporate won't let you get rid of.
I worked in this building during a summer internship in ‘09. Wild to watch you walk through the main entrance and see all those leaves on the ground. Nobody tending those indoor trees anymore. Incredible video 👏🏻
Sad to think that despite its modernist underpinnings, it's still a hell of a lot more interesting architecturally that whatever monolithic data centers will take its place.
The incumbency of the data centers or warehouses is in a holding pattern. Unless and until our technocratic overlords figure out how to reverse the demographic collapse of their consumers worldwide. We're in a stagflation until that "solution." Because, fundamentally, none of us had enough "hopium" to have 2.1+ kiddos "at scale" (Peter Zeihan's catchphrase).
My dad is an architect and used to help design these big corporate buildings in the burbs back in the 80s up to the early 2000s. I’ve sent him videos of other buildings like this that are abandoned and scheduled for demolition. It’s truly a sad waste. The trend of the suburban corporate campus barely lasted 30 years. If some people thought that working in these buildings was kind of a dystopia, seeing them being knocked down, with not too many middle class jobs, makes it feel like a real dystopia.
Does your dad know anything about the former Kmart headquarters in Troy, MI? It's being demolished. I wonder because it has a facade of a unique metal that won't rust. My metals teacher during my apprenticeship mentioned it but I forgot.
2 people in my life worked in this corp HQ building for HQ Sears when it was built. I would go there often to meet up with them for lunch. This place was amazing! It was like what Silicon Valley became. It had a bunch of restaurants / food court places to eat even a Taco Bell inside it. It was sooooo cool. It wasn’t like that for long though as I recall my last visit 2001-2002ish and already it was turning into a ghost town and soooo many empty spaces in the building. The cool restaurants were already gone by this time . When it first opened, there was such a wonderful energy from the employees, you just really wanted to go work at Sears! Then by my last visit you could literally feel the thickness of the stress in the air. More then 60% of the parking lot was empty where it was once full. It was as if it was here and gone overnight. So crazy to see this video. Thanks for sharing ❤.
It is truly heartbreaking to see another corporate building in Illinois that my father had done construction on getting demolished. I watch this with the knowing that he walked the same floors and possibly put up a lot of those walls, stairs, floors, light fixtures, windows, desks, cabinets and etc.. I heard that they finally tore down Stratford sq. My dad helped put that beautiful waterfall in. My dad passed away years ago but he left a legacy of beautiful buildings behind that are either wasting away or just being destroyed! They just don’t make buildings like that anymore! What a shame that we live in such a throw away society ! Thank you for making and sharing this video 🙏🏻
Sears was the backbone of many malls in the US, and when they began closing stores there, some malls couldn’t get a replacement for the Sears store and eventually shut down themselves A good portion of the MA locations were in malls, and every NH location was within a mall too.
Local mall here just tote down it's old sears anchor it couldn't sell to build a apartment high rise attached to the mall. Going to have a bit over 400 rooms in it.
I still have my Kenmore dryer that I bought from Sears 23 years ago as it's still going strong as it gets used multiple times a week as my only dryer. Sadly it's sister Kenmore washing machine died about 7 year ago, but I still can't complain as it was replaced with a Speed Queen top load.
I've had a Speed Queen for ten years now. It's been working very well. I sought out something like Speed Queen because I didn't want a newer style machine that relied on PCBs and flash memory to operate. My Speed Queen, and all the older machines, just have a simple timer and some switches.
Eh, I mean it's your choice as a consumer to support them or not lol, but either way the land here isn't really unusable or permanently salted, I'm willing to bet give or take a few years and after the whole AI gimmick has pretty much lost its appeal that area will probably become some sort of housing area or something else.
@ Oh yeah sure, at the moment AI is kind of a big thing, and people especially at its start kinda hyped it up to he this massive thing that’ll replace writers or artists, which it really hasnt or doesnt. At the moment its kinda in a similar place to cars in the 50s.
@ it has though, many people are using it for ads, students are using it to cheat whole assignments, it’s being used to develop games, it’s a big thing, all those ai bots on websites that offer help, the list goes on
IBM SurePos register @31:56. That was the last round of Point of Sale registers Sears used before falling to pieces. Sears used custom written software at one point; the software was originally written for the CompuADD registers in the '90s and the migrated to the IBM systems. I think there may have been a merging of software technologies when Kmart bought Sears, but they continued to use the same registers.
Sears never known for high tech. I worked there and there back up plan for one segment of the business was using spreadsheets if the very old system went down. Which it did at times
It was very controversial when Sears left the Loop-based tower. Thousands of Chicago employees didn't make the move because the only way to get to the campus was by a 90-minute car commute. CEO Brennan lived in the Barrington area -- ritzy suburbs a half-hour away. Brennan's "Edifice Complex" cost $100 million plus... in 1990 dollars. Not much of an ROI. Ironically, most Chicagoans still refer to the original HQ as the "Sears Tower."
The Hoffman Estates sht was state subsidized too with incentives. The state never made it's money back. Ironically the KMart distribution center in Manteno is sold to Chinese Communist Party owned Gotion which is also getting subsidies. Illinois sucks.
Curious how much less taxes would have been. Downtown corrupt chicago vs not quite as corrupt where ever the campus was. What they did at the tower vs what they did at the campus, and then getting supplies, etc.
I was in that building and it was extremely impressive. The economics of allowing it to be demolished boggles the mind. It’s right up there with the decision of Sears leadership, when starting to drown, asking for a Kmart anchor instead of a life preserver.
It was a Kmart acquisition by real estate mogul Eddie Lampert who wanted to drain both companies dry and sell off their real estate. Unlike most big box stores who lease their building from someone like CBRE, Sears and Kmart still owned the majority of their buildings and the land it stood on. He had every intention of bankrupting both to enrich himself.
@@LockelyFoxboth were 100% doomed and would have been liquidated very quickly if not for ESL. He obviously has zero talent in running retail stores, but it is undeniable that those failed companies would have logically been liquidated immediately. As you said they owned vast real estate but their stores were losing money like crazy because nobody wanted to shop at outdated, dirty stores that hadn’t been maintained since Reagan was president. ESL sold the land off gradually and used some of the proceeds to fund the project of continuing to cosplay as a retail company for some reason. A more heartless buyer would have simply skipped the pretending and sold everything asap.
@@dgpsf His entire intention was to liquidate immediately but the real estate market crashed, so he swapped to vampire mode instead. He could have reinvested into both the stores and the people, but he's a parasite. Don't defend these people, they don't care about you and would sell you up the river without a paddle at the first chance they get.
@@dgpsf Yup! Eddie did not appear out of thin air. He saved Autozone when it was failing and seemed intent on trying to do so with Sears - else he wouldn't have held onto it for so long - but by that point he had made some very powerful enemies. If you look back through his history years before Sears, when he spoke out against shortselling he made a long list of people who were doing it, which included prominent businessmen and politicians. During the Sears troubles the board of directors seemed totally hostile to him and kept pushing out anonymous statements to the press about his supposed behavior behind closed doors and just generally trying to damage the brand's image with rumors. If he were really in it to skin it, he would not have kept as many contracts going as possible with quality producers for sears-branded items, he would have gotten his bag ASAP and left like the other vultures that exist.
It really shows the amount of research you did, I really liked the old pictures and backstory before the video! And the visuals of the layout around the building, trying to avoid security was awesome.. Keep going man!
I am 51. We even had Sears stores in Costa Rica in the 80s , I used to go with my mom as a kid and they were highly regarded as a piece of the US in my country geared towards upper middle and higher income customers. Such a great piece of Americana. My mom always said “ if it’s from Sears, it’s high quality”.
@@Ponchoed Carlos Slim I think owns the brand name and logo but that's about it, it's otherwise its own company that's been unrelated to the American Sears since the late 2000s - which is why it survived the dismantling of the original Sears.
30:00 YES! I love you, you know. Thank you for pointing out the apostrophe my brain was screaming about, too! You just earned a subscriber for life. We have got to be related, LOL.
I worked at the Sears HQ in Hoffman Estates back in the late 90s\early 2000s as a contractor. They had a very nice lunch room and a section for fast food like Taco Bell. We use to go outside and feed the fishes during lunch. I remember walking in to the building on Sept 11, 2001 and the TV's by security in the E building had all the news playing the planes hitting the buildings in NY and people were just standing there watching. I remember Christina Aguillera showing up and did a small concert because she was doing a commercial for Sears a long with a few WNBA players, Colin Power and I think George Foreman was there too. Some of the people working in the Sears HQ were big A$$holes especially in the F building. They felt they can treat the contractors like crap and get away with it.
Bro how come you barley have 5k subs, this editing and quality of this video is outstanding and just flat out amazing props to your dedication to this video,
@@suspiciouswatermelon7639You would ironically like a certain type of architecture because you know it's kitsch, impractical, whatever, but you still enjoy it. The person you answered genuinely likes early '90s architecture; thus, unironically.
oh my gosh, thank you so much for this video. i worked at this building from 2007-2009 and while it was certainly not the best of times, it was so interesting to see it abandoned. i worked on C3, one floor up from the cubicles you showed. very sad to see what happened.
largest commissary second only to the pentagon..... that's what they told me. Consulted for them for like 5 yrs. We saved them $1B per year but is wasn't enough. WOW chills. Like haunted houses for companies. Great content man! Would NOT have added the last part about the videos!
Yes, and in that video of the cafeteria, you saw the outside of the main cafeteria where the Sbarro and Panda Express (and one time Taco Bell), used to set up shop.
Nice video. A few years ago before they closed everything down, they were selling off various items from the workshops, office areas, etc. It almost felt like a real world version of American Pickers as you were scavenging through the relics that they left for people to look. I ended up scoring a 1992 Sears catalog which was pretty cool.
Awesome!! I worked for SHC a total of 10 years and 2 of those were at Hoffman there. That campus was something to behold in its day. I was in building A. I remember the Kmart model store in the basement there as well. There supposedly was a vault on site with the jewelry but not sure of the validity of that. There also used to be a MyGofer store where you could shop a decent amount of the pantry and drugstore essentials. Will always live in my memories and this video definitely reminded me of some. Great job!
And that MyGofer store would do deskside delivery (if you ordered by like 10:30am). So many employees did their grocery shopping and had it delivered to them. It would come from the Bloomingdale Kmart.
Okay, so, this concept is awesome. Such a well executed video. Love the objective screen. Good amount of background without being boring. Loved the camera quality/sounds and commentary while exploring. And the ending screen was the cherry on top. Love how you "stuffed" one of those in your backpack. =P
I worked in a Sears Auto center Way back in the 80a the pay was good, benefits good, they didn't play around with the Highering they had their own Dr to check possible employees for Lung issues before they could work in the auto center. This was also when the Auto center was fairly Honest , unlike the last decade they were trying to make $$$ any way possible. They ripped customers off a lot at a store I knew of guess they didn't care knowing their days of employment were numbered.
I worked there from July of 1998 to November 2005. What a magnificent building. A site to behold. A little city. I started in the repro graphics dept in the basement of the C building, went to the mailroom and then in July of 1999 went to E building 3rd floor. Worked in the utilities dept. Memories that I will not ever forget. It was the best job I ever had. The best team I ever had. So much laughter and so much food. I will cherish my time there. Thank you for the video.
Even though this building was built 32 years ago (in 1992, and is has that definitely 1990s fashion sense to it), it always struck me as strange when I see perfectly good, attractive, clean, well-maintained buildings intentionally being destroyed. It's worse when good, attractive buildings are destroyed to create a unremarkable huge tin sheds.
The issue with these grand complexes again and again is the only ones that can seem to really "afford" them are well-functioning multi-million or billion dollar industries. So if their underpinning company fails, who really needs this grandiose building now? Data center buildings might be "boring", but at least they'll be doing something and providing jobs, unlike this gigantic carcass.
These buildings were not maintained, going back 10+ years. Sears was slowly headed toward bankruptcy and money for the buildings was skipped. The cool main building lobby with a super high ceiling and lots of glass was leaking pretty bad 4-5 years ago (I have friends who worked there).
You have to maintain the gaskets on the glass roof installation every 20 years otherwise it leaks and becomes worthless. Would imagine you need 5% of the cost of the buildings to maintain em every year? That's a Lotta money.
Sears decline began back in the 60's with its aging, apathetic workforce who were unmotivated and just hanging around waiting for retirement. Closing their catalog operation, just at the beginning of the internet, sealed their fate. They attempted to rebound with online sales. I tried ordering a couple hoodies online but their systems were so screwed up it turned into a nightmare. But nobody cared by then. Sears used to be the go-to store for a lot of stuff. I still have Sears and Kenmore appliances, still working after decades and boxes stuffed with Craftsman tools, fortunately purchased in the 60's and 70's when they were still made in the USA and lasted.
One funny part is watching other retailers repeat Sears’s early online mistakes! Walmart is actively trying to destroy its online shopping experience with third-party seller garbage and irrelevant search results as we speak!
I hear you. When they dropped their Weatherbeater paint line, I knew something was very wrong. You're right about their apathetic sales force, too. They could be found jabbering with one another at our now-defunct and torn-down Sears store.
All old farts do is complain how people don't work hard enough as the cause of any downfall, and boastfully talk up your hundred dollar washing machine that miraculously keeps working.
So you observed ALL the workers at these stores huh? Sounds like you are real accurate in your counting. Just like the 2024 election scam where we were all sold to Musk and Putin for a couple million
Good on you for uploading the commercials! I salvaged a bunch of VHS tapes from a giant paper mill I explored, it was footage after a couple of explosions at the plant and they were pretty fascinating. There were also several late '90s safety videos which are priceless! Phenomenal explore!
Just sad. A once mighty, vibrant company, part of all our lives from Toughskin jeans to Craftsman tools and Die Hard batteries-brand names sold off and just plain gone. And thousands of white and blue collar jobs too. Farewell once mighty Sears. So much a part of many lives in America.
i used to work for Sears back in the 1980's and 1990's. They began floundering even back then when the launched the Discover and AllState insurance Companies to get more intwined in their customer lives. Stores, service centers all gone.
@robertwhite7071 sears basically didn't exist long before covid. Covid killed millions of people. It almost killed me, an active healthy 20 something.
I LOVE THIS VIDEO! The story telling in the beginning was great, the animations were super cool and it was a wild ride going through there. Earned my subscription can’t wait for more!
Our society what an unbelievable waste, think of the millions and millions of dollars I went into building that complex and then just basically torn down like it’s nothing. Our just disposable society.
Craftsmanship means nothing to business people. But they'll be the first to withhold payment if anything goes wrong, because it's an excuse to justify their greed and flex their power.
My mother worked there for a few years in the late 90s until major layoffs started in the early 2000s. I saw a lot of the facility in operation many times. Here's what I remember. Immediately inside the main entrance to the right was a light up model of the building, push a button and the location would have a light. At the foot of the escalators to the left was a Chinese gift shop selling greeting cards and Hello Kitty junk. There was an elaborate series of waterfall fountains in the atrium running along the escalators that I think were turned off for cost in the middle of the time my mother worked there. On the mezzanine was a museum with changing displays like antique appliances and there were some very old open cars with squeeze horns and a motorcycle. I always wanted lunch from the Taco Bell. In retrospect I wish I had tried some of the fancy looking entrees they always did in the main chow. They always put sample plates under lights. There was a production studio including a green screen. Somewhere was the product testing department with a copper Faraday cage and an old tank like soundproof room on springs that was moved from the demolished ORIGINAL pre tower headquarters and warehouse on the west side of Chicago. I never did see the model stores. Outside were two ponds with pairs of breeding swans, one couple was named Beverly and Higgins after the nearest main roads and the other was Bonnie and Clyde or something dumb like that. The names were from employee voting contests. The swans were brought to Florida for the winters. Along the access road to the west was a helipad one of the previous CEOs used a lot. A van was used to get to the building. I believe my mother was always in cell block B with the bulk of HR. The executives were on the sixth floor. G may have never been fully used or finished.
I do believe it was saved per one of the demolition people I talked to. Cell block B, or Building B is where I was, on 5, just under the execs. Eddies personal toilet (up on 6) actually sprung a leak on my desk once.
you're so cool. your care for the details is so satisfying. I love how organized the description is. the wobbling intro is incredibly aesthetic. your music taste is sophisticated. your voice during the exploration is soothing and the ambience is ASMR to me. 34:00 is my favorite part. From the bottom of my heart I wish you all the best.
That’s my best guess too. The fire extinguisher at the entrance to the room had its hose pulled out and looked like it was briefly discharged into the room.
I can concur with that… I had to discharge a dry chemical fire extinguisher at a small kitchen fire. The powder comes out at an amazing velocity, and it gets everywhere right away, and it is so fine that we were finding a layer of yellow dust all over the house.
For those down about Sears being nearly gone, don’t worry in Mexico they’re everywhere, as much as Walmarts. Last year I traveled to a few and they felt like the Sears I used to go as a kid in the early 2000s. Their logo color is read and white instead of blue and white
I like reading those old papers strewn about, even if it's some miscellaneous stuff it gives a nice snapshot of the work life they had. also love the quiet dark empty spaces, i was going to compare it to caves but maybe that doesn't really fit in with man-made stuff.
Its sad to see these places where not so long ago, people like me, working in their careers, visiting these places every day and then it all shuts down leaving behind all this waste and brokenness.
I was hoping you'd pick up one of those dvds and upload it, glad you did. You went above and beyond giving people a glimpse of the past and it's awesome I'm going to check those out
Hoffman Estates, what a massive majestic complex. Many people that worked there detested that place. But it really did represent Sears’ last gasp of prosperity before everything went to shit with the new Millennium.
I'll play old man for a second...I remember when everything west of Barrington Road was corn. The announcement that Sears was moving to Hoffman Estates happened right before I left the Chicago area so I haven't seen HE with the sports arena and the rest of the added development that began with Sears.
@ haha so cool, I have no clue there was virtually nothing out there prior to Sears building their HQ. Really must’ve been exciting back then. I’m surprised they didn’t keep any of it just because of how somewhat modern the complex was.
@@garbagebanditdayz819 I lied (or forgot)...Poplar Creek theatre was out there. Maybe three or four miles west of Barrington Road but that's the only thing I remember being there before Sears. I guess it doesn't seem that exciting now, but it was what I knew. Far worse places I could have grown up.
All those reports, wall charts, etc that were shown abandoned in the office cubes. Some low level flunky made those, with his boss looking over his shoulder, probably had to go through 4 or 5 revisions. Got told it was super-important to get it right and was pressured to get it done now!, because we needed that info now! and the bigger boss was waiting for it now! And what did it all mean in the end? Nothing. Now they lie there abandoned, left behind and covered with dust. Not even worth the effort to throw away when the last person turned out the lights for the last time. something to think about. I'm sure there's some philosophical lesson in there somewhere .
Looks like they left in a hurry, probably called into the conference or break room and given 15 minutes. Or locked out the next morning when they came to work, judging by that newspaper.
@@bernieschiff5919 I noticed that as well. Everything is still strewn about, as if the HQ shuttered operations in the middle of a regular office day. It almost reminds me of what happened at airports and airline personnel the day Pan Am went out of business.
@@James01520most people haven't seen the aftermath of a fire extinguisher discharge, much less a powder based extinguisher as they typically aren't used for training.
i knew what that "dust" was upon seeing it.. i was one of those punks that had fired multiple of those dry cam ones multiple times and places. they make a real mess 😂
Was going to comment the same thing, but figured I’d scroll the comments first. Was obvious as I noticed the fire extinguisher sitting on the floor when he walked in the room. Good fun except when some asshole fired one off at a party in my house at college one year.
Fun fact: Sears used to have a corporate aviation department at the DuPage Airport (DPA) in West Chicago, IL until Sears made the decision to close it down in 2010. I know this because back then, I worked for a 3rd party janitorial service company they hired out to clean their offices and part of the shop. They had two Bombardier Learjet 60s.
Each Territory also had a Jet (or two) assigned to the Territorial Vice President. I was privileged to fly in one a couple of times. Of course that was in the 80's.
My dad used to sell animal furs to Sears back in the day. And I bought most of my cloths from Sears. It was the store to buy anything anyone could possibly want.
Nice explore. I was part of a construction crew that remodeled the Sears buildings in the Twin Cities around the year 2000. In the 2010s My daughter and I walked through the Sears at Mall of America twice a month because we parked in the Sears lot. Was sad seeing it slowly die. They didn't seem to try very hard to stop it though. They kept doing what wasn't working even though the rest of the mall was still fully busy until the pandemic came along.
Crazy thing is MOA signed a 100 years lease with Sears. Still 70 years left and MOA can't touch the Sears corridor. MOA are now suing the company that owns Sears to break the lease.
At 16:37 those are the largest indoor Ficus Trees I've ever seen all of those leaves are because they are no longer watered and are going into drought/ cold shock. A waste for large specimens like that to die.
"Our business is doing bad. Should we innovate? Use more technology? Learn from Amazon and Walmart?" "No. Let's sell our prime piece of real estate, and spend a lot of money on a brand new complex in the middle of bum#uck nowhere."
At the time Amazon only sold books. It was a convenient bookstore, but just a bookstore. Walmart was the growing competitor and that was before they converted their stores to Supercenters and added groceries. It's true that Sears really missed the boat on innovating and leveraging its existing logistics chains and store prevalence to become a king in the eCommerce sector. Mismanagement set up the company for a plunderer like Lampert to pillage the rest.
Wow, what am amazing exploration! I really thought it might be just a relatively unexciting office space, but it has some really interesting surprises. There's that Chatillon force gauge, which looks a bit out of place in the relatively modern office setting, in its fancy wooden box and all. And being a vintage computer and tech nerd generally I almost screaming at the screen for you to turn around and check out some of the cool equipment I saw. If it were me I'd contact the people responsible and ask if there's any remaining things I could take off their hands before demolishing the other buildings. I saw a bunch of stuff that vintage computer nerds like me would love to get their hands on.
That gauge was in a room used for a liquidation sale, you can find some videos about the sales. You missed your chance. Demo guys sometimes know good antique store fodder though.
Awesome video. Love seeing these types of abandoned corpo HQs. Wish you made it to the Executive Suites or the B Building; I heard a lot of under the table stuff happened in B.
I find it crazy to think there were people working in this building up until 2019. Even as a kid back in like ~2010 or so I could tell Sears was a dying brand, and by 2015 or so I imagine the writing on the wall had long since dried. Just shows how dedicated the few that were left were.
I also was in the A building. The ability to have your groceries ordered and either delivered to your desk or your car was awesome. Truly miss working there
@@RobertHAbney A was the finance side of Sears and Kmart BU's IIRC and I think HR may have been in there for awhile. Or maybe straddled the connection between A & B.
As someone born in 1979 I never thought Sears would be going anywhere, even as companies like Wards went out in the early 2000s Sears was still huge and raking in business. When my parents used to take me to the mall as a kid we'd always park in front of Sears and enter the entire mall by going thru Sears to see what they had on offer. Their Craftsman tools used to be among the best you could get, my dad if he found a broken wrench knew that as long as it was Craftsman you could take it to any Sears and they'd replace it no questions asked with a new one. That's because they used to be made with American steel and made completely in America from start to finish. We'd have never guessed back then that Sears would be outlasted (altho just barely) by JC Penney's, but now both of those are nearly gone. Eddie the hedge fund Wall street crook certainly managed to kill off Sears and Kmart. Buying both dying brands and trying to combine them, which really all he wanted to do was get his hands on their assets and sell them off. Now you can find Craftsman at Lowe's and it's not American Steel nor made in America and there's no replacing tools that were at one point a lifetime guarantee. The catalogs used to be a highlight, Sears had one, Penney's had one, Ward's and even stores like Service Merchandise and those would come at least a few times a year and as a kid it's how you marked or could see all the stuff you wanted and dreamed about. Also any Sears would get your catalog order in in a few days and you'd go out and pick it up, we even had in my small town a Sears store that sold a few things like tires and appliances/tools, then we had a Penney's catalog center where you could pick up a catalog and your order would come to. The catalogs were essentially the internet shopping of their day, it was no different from online shopping. Then you had catalog showroom stores like Service Merchandise and that's a concept that I've read Amazon is looking into bringing back. So a showroom store for certain products so you can go in, look at them touch them and if you like order it and it'll come out ready for pickup on items most people want to see, feel, experience before buying.
I worked here for almost 6 years. I stayed until the ship sunk. As a young 20 something I watched grown men get fired day after day before I realized what was happening. One of the craziest things I’ve ever been apart of
It is a shame that corporations never use these old buildings already built. They always want a new, fresh building that cost 10 times more then just doing some minor remodeling.
these buildings are so old that most of the time it's just cheaper or more worth it to make a new fresh building. plus they're gonna make a data center, you can't really have a big data center in an office building
I worked in a fairly large complex like this once. Defense industry in my case, so the complex was a mix of offices (where I worked, as I was just an IT nerd), hardware build/test areas, and an on-site kitchen / cafeteria. Probably the largest and most "lavish" place I ever worked, and that wouldn't even compare to all the amenities it appears this HQ once offered. The contract I was hired under was cancelled, and it caused a 300 person layoff. And that was about a decade and some change before COVID even was heard of. Always kinda wondered what happened to it after that. The overall company still exists, but that really damaged that local satellite office complex. I'm not sure if they survived, but then, I don't live anywhere near there and it was a long time ago now, so I don't really care either way.
If the drive isn't too long and time's been indifferent enough it could be a fun, lawful trip. This is not legal advice and I have no idea what you're talking about. Safe travels.
This building is by woodfield mall . It was great to live in the area . What a great mall and the memories of playing videos games buying stuff in Sears will never be forgotten
I was there back in 2003 for 2 weeks of training. Very impressive building. If you want to blame somebody for the failure Sears/Kmart his name is Eddie Lampert.
I worked in one of the business park buildings across the street from the K-Mart HQ about 10 years before it closed. This would have been around '94-ish. In those days, everybody in IT wanted to work for K-Mart, until they did. Then they wanted to just leave. One of my co-workers was former K-Mart, and he seemed to be happy being away from there. You couldn't get him to say anything bad about "the Mart", but neither did he ever say anything good about it. I had heard stories of how the traffic right there would be absolutely nuts at 4:30 when all the K-Mart HQ people would go home for the day. 90% of them would be on the freeway within 5 minutes. It wasn't that bad when I worked across the street, but we rarely left work before 6 or 7 pm. I have relatives in Troy and Royal Oak, so once in awhile I'd be back in the area. But it has been at least 10 years now, and I don't know if the K-Mart structure is still there. It was massively huge too, and it quickly became run-down once nobody worked in it anymore. I just couldn't stay at the job I had across the street for more than a year; that company was just as mismanaged as K-Mart was, so I left Michigan for a 6-month IT contract gig in Indiana. Best decision of my career at the time; it was ultimately my path to real career development and success. I would never go back to Michigan for work. And Illinois was never on my list to begin with, although I did get a great steak dinner from a recruiter in Illinois once, lol.
I actually went to this location just before it shut down in 2022. They were selling a bunch of equipment and my family got their hands on a bunch of the state of the art speakers they had in the studios.
~24 minutes in, that large open space was the store mockup. They used that to actually replicate a real store so that they could test out different displays and layouts. 34 minutes in, that was the point of sale lab, where developers and QA had to test their code. I spent many, many hours there as a software developer, lead developer, and later architect. I worked in this building from January 1999 until I left at the end of November 2012.
You were responsible for the monochrome text-based point of sale system I had to learn in 2005? It felt absolutely ancient on the then modern IBM color terminals with LCD screens.
Too bad they did not do more with Prodigy online! Sears once owned a "portal" to online sales in the provider "Prodigy" online services, an America Online competitor. Both were obviously killed by broadband in 2000.
I was hoping to see some of the older POS technology still laying around - the CompuAdd registers, the NCRs, even the Singer Friden ones from the '70s.
@33:39 cool diagram
thank you for your service ! ❤
The irony that Sears, the original catalog company, didn't have the wherewithal to utilize the Internet when they had the chance.
A consultant had recommended exactly that
Seriously. The brand recognition with older adults would've seen them as busy as Amazon.
@@Shader670 I think they actually tried to utilize the Internet and its very early infancy, but it just wasn’t working yet. They were so far ahead of the curve except technology wasn’t ready yet, so they abandoned the idea
Yes they did. Private equity only wanted a tax shelter by slowly destroying the company, before stealing and selling the land. It was a real estate grab above all else. Scorched earth dissolution of a viable company with loyal employees. This is late-stage capitalism.
I miss the Prodigy days. It was a really entertaining service in the 80s. It had so many things going for it. You could buy stuff, book travel, trade, correspond in a multitude of ways. I was at the top of the technological pyramid at the time and still found it entertaining. It's strange that they couldn't parlay all that knowledge into the internet.
Makes me so angry what Eddie Lampert did to Kmart and Sears! 🤬 I used to work for Kmart and let me tell you Eddie DESTROYED the company. Kmart had issues before he came along but he made it worse especially when we were merged with Sears. After the merger it went all downhill from there. I miss my store, associates I worked with and I miss shopping there. Nothing but a sad memory.
@ yup the guy is a real sleaze bag. I’ll never get over what he did to our company. He deliberately ran it into the ground.
I pray for karma but realize the rich get away with everything.
100%. Controlled demolition by Fast Eddie. My father was a cabinet maker and later owned a cabinet shop. We spent a lot of time in Sears. I'm glad I still have all of my American-made Craftsman tools. That mid-tier/low pro-grade tool line is a thing of the past. It's either Harbor Freight garbage or Gucci Bag tool trucks with a few exceptions. Sears was awesome.
I remember KMart, it already sucked compared to Target which now also sucks.
How else do you expect him to get his golden parachute and buy the company for an insane discount? Executives are pretty much all useless af making a ton of money for doing basically nothing. You have the stock market followers who worship them, since they control their "investments". Both scum IMO.
This was supposed to be where I would have grown my career and eventually retired from. It will forever be in my opinion the greatest retailer in history and the shining example of what was once middle class America. Absolutely devastating how Eddie ruined two American icons.
They were kinda already going under, it was inevitable, now there are other companies, that's just how it goes in a competitive market.
Plus, also challenges posed by covid 19. Which made things even worse as well
Now Kohl’s and Target are struggling too.
@@hermancmlol only reason I go to kohl's is for Amazon returns! 😆
@@MikeTython369 I used to get tennis shoes there when on sale but lately I’ve been ordering them directly from NB when they have specials.
What a waste. There has to be hundreds of thousands of dollars of stuff in those buildings that can still be totally utilized.
Was thinking the same thing.
@@Itsaboutthewaterlife Those Hayworth office chairs with the double backrest supports are about $250. new, marked down to 20. Good design, high quality, bought 2 at a thrift store for 45. each. Looks like the IT department left in a hurry on the last day, probably had 30 minutes to pack their stuff and go.
American society in a nutshell it’s not about utilizing resources that can benefit society it’s about not utilizing resources to keep society poor
Yes; It shows how Americans are a very, very wasteful people. If this was any other country....maybe hundreds of countries...in Africa, S. America, Easter Europe, even Asia they would have had the wherewithal to find a way to recycle many of the items (furniture, etc. etc.)
That's a lot of empty buildings. Especially the abandoned schools/hospitals with thousand dollar equipment just left to rot to the elements
I drive past this building every day on the way to work and have always wanted to go exploring in it but was too scared to try getting inside. Thank you for doing this for everyone and preserving it on youtube
I'm honestly scared of getting caught
@@Snowhater-jm1wr not this guy😂
let's go, all
okay loonabrain
I worked for Sears in the early 2000’s as a receiving manager at a large store. The guys who sold tools, appliances and electronics/TV’s worked on commission and made good money, much more than the hourly employees. It was a fun job and great place to work, our store was busy and profitable. I miss those days
I sold electronics on straight commission; first real job after high school while I was in college. I averaged 12.50 an hour which was nearly double what most other jobs were paying at that time. It didn’t last long as every quarter commission got lower and lower and all the experienced associates were leaving or retiring. It was once a coveted job to sell at Sears. It was sad to witness their very slow demise.
I worked for Sears in the 1990s and NEVER made good money. Instead of a base plus commission, they had draw which meant you owed money if you didn't make your goal(s). Plus they kept lowering commission rates. I got recruited by a big box retailer and off the commission circus. That being said Sears upper management never listened to anyone outside the Tower.
At Sears? I saw some guys at a Sears store and they were complaining about the sales.
In 2,000 years, nobody will remember that Sears ever existed. "For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind" (Isaiah 65:17, KJV).
@@davidlafleche1142 2,000.??? Try 90.
It's strange seeing a building I have spent so much time in on a urbex video.
When exactly was this building abandoned? Those computer monitors look really old.
@@TheGAMESHARQ I went back and turned my equipment in (computers/docking station/etc...) as well as retrieve my personal belongings from my cube in October 2020. At that point it was a ghost town with only absolutely essential employees and normal security then. They (Transformco) finalized the sale Sept '23, so I would have to imagine that somewhere around that time, the final SHC employees turned off the lights and locked the doors (well except the one our explorer got in). The monitors you see are ones that were long replaced and the majority got put in storage. Majority of us all had Dell flat screen LCD's in our cubes. Obviously there were exceptions for certain groups. Sears was really good for holding on to old stuff. You could go in to storage areas and find tons of ancient stuff, even paperwork and SEC filings, etc, dating back to the move from the Sears Tower in the early 90's.
@@TheGAMESHARQ The stuff that was left there was done so on purpose. It was easier to just junk it with the building instead of paying someone to come haul it out of a building that was going down itself. Anything worth any money would have been auctioned off by the pallet long before demolition started. Also with a building that large there is plenty of room to leave old junk that corporate won't let you get rid of.
I worked in this building during a summer internship in ‘09. Wild to watch you walk through the main entrance and see all those leaves on the ground. Nobody tending those indoor trees anymore.
Incredible video 👏🏻
I was thinking the same. They had the private company, Rentokil IIRC there constantly maintaining all the tress and plants in the lobby.
It’s sad that the trees are the only living things left behind and slowly dying 😢
What do you mean? I tend to the trees. I sneak in every three days and water them and give them sunlight.
Sad to think that despite its modernist underpinnings, it's still a hell of a lot more interesting architecturally that whatever monolithic data centers will take its place.
Don't be so pessimistic! It could easily become a massive warehousing complex.. /s
First it was Amazon warehouses. Now its ai data centers lol
I used to work for Kmart to. 10 years. 1989 to 1999.
The incumbency of the data centers or warehouses is in a holding pattern. Unless and until our technocratic overlords figure out how to reverse the demographic collapse of their consumers worldwide. We're in a stagflation until that "solution." Because, fundamentally, none of us had enough "hopium" to have 2.1+ kiddos "at scale" (Peter Zeihan's catchphrase).
also, HQ should never be resort style mammoths.
My dad is an architect and used to help design these big corporate buildings in the burbs back in the 80s up to the early 2000s. I’ve sent him videos of other buildings like this that are abandoned and scheduled for demolition. It’s truly a sad waste. The trend of the suburban corporate campus barely lasted 30 years. If some people thought that working in these buildings was kind of a dystopia, seeing them being knocked down, with not too many middle class jobs, makes it feel like a real dystopia.
Have you seen the proper people's video of the TRW headquarters? Fascinating.
@@Nickles5Khad friends who worked for T.R.W.
@@Nickles5K A lot in there that could be smashed up before the demo. Classic new wave urbex smash fest property.
@@Nickles5K Yes, I saw that video. It was excellent.
Does your dad know anything about the former Kmart headquarters in Troy, MI? It's being demolished. I wonder because it has a facade of a unique metal that won't rust. My metals teacher during my apprenticeship mentioned it but I forgot.
Love the small details here - like the Sears font used for captions in your video!
That’s a cool touch indeed!
2 people in my life worked in this corp HQ building for HQ Sears when it was built. I would go there often to meet up with them for lunch. This place was amazing! It was like what Silicon Valley became. It had a bunch of restaurants / food court places to eat even a Taco Bell inside it. It was sooooo cool. It wasn’t like that for long though as I recall my last visit 2001-2002ish and already it was turning into a ghost town and soooo many empty spaces in the building. The cool restaurants were already gone by this time . When it first opened, there was such a wonderful energy from the employees, you just really wanted to go work at Sears! Then by my last visit you could literally feel the thickness of the stress in the air. More then 60% of the parking lot was empty where it was once full. It was as if it was here and gone overnight. So crazy to see this video. Thanks for sharing ❤.
It is truly heartbreaking to see another corporate building in Illinois that my father had done construction on getting demolished. I watch this with the knowing that he walked the same floors and possibly put up a lot of those walls, stairs, floors, light fixtures, windows, desks, cabinets and etc.. I heard that they finally tore down Stratford sq. My dad helped put that beautiful waterfall in. My dad passed away years ago but he left a legacy of beautiful buildings behind that are either wasting away or just being destroyed! They just don’t make buildings like that anymore! What a shame that we live in such a throw away society ! Thank you for making and sharing this video 🙏🏻
did the floors, light fixtures, windows, desks, and cabinets? what a guy...
They haven't demolished Stratford, yet, I live like 5 minutes away from it. Only one of the anchor stores. But they want to tear down the whole thing
Sears was the backbone of many malls in the US, and when they began closing stores there, some malls couldn’t get a replacement for the Sears store and eventually shut down themselves
A good portion of the MA locations were in malls, and every NH location was within a mall too.
My mall in Cali has a empty SEARS store they couldn’t replace it turns into a Halloween store every year around Halloween
Local mall here just tote down it's old sears anchor it couldn't sell to build a apartment high rise attached to the mall. Going to have a bit over 400 rooms in it.
Domino effect
34 minutes in, that was the retail systems point of sale lab. I spent many hours there as a software developer.
looks like another dude above @tman4915 was a software dev there too
Yes you did.... Russ Becker
I still have my Kenmore dryer that I bought from Sears 23 years ago as it's still going strong as it gets used multiple times a week as my only dryer. Sadly it's sister Kenmore washing machine died about 7 year ago, but I still can't complain as it was replaced with a Speed Queen top load.
That dryer probably a Whirlpool or LG with a Kenmore badge.
@@ForkLiftCertified most likely whirlpool if its 23 years old
I replaced my old Sears washer (brown - it was that old) with a Speed Queen several years ago. I went for durability, not fancy features.
Yes the old conventional units are perfected, very basic and reliable.
I've had a Speed Queen for ten years now. It's been working very well. I sought out something like Speed Queen because I didn't want a newer style machine that relied on PCBs and flash memory to operate. My Speed Queen, and all the older machines, just have a simple timer and some switches.
I like how you explain your plans and the extra graphics to show what is going on.
It's a nice touch
The way the corporate world waste our resources and walk away rich still makes me sick...no accountability for all the waste!
And no taxes on naked shorting profits. They should be forced to close out their short positions when a company goes into bankruptcy.
Eh, I mean it's your choice as a consumer to support them or not lol, but either way the land here isn't really unusable or permanently salted, I'm willing to bet give or take a few years and after the whole AI gimmick has pretty much lost its appeal that area will probably become some sort of housing area or something else.
@@Randomusername56782curious what you mean by AI gimmick. Please explain.
@ Oh yeah sure, at the moment AI is kind of a big thing, and people especially at its start kinda hyped it up to he this massive thing that’ll replace writers or artists, which it really hasnt or doesnt. At the moment its kinda in a similar place to cars in the 50s.
@ it has though, many people are using it for ads, students are using it to cheat whole assignments, it’s being used to develop games, it’s a big thing, all those ai bots on websites that offer help, the list goes on
IBM SurePos register @31:56. That was the last round of Point of Sale registers Sears used before falling to pieces. Sears used custom written software at one point; the software was originally written for the CompuADD registers in the '90s and the migrated to the IBM systems. I think there may have been a merging of software technologies when Kmart bought Sears, but they continued to use the same registers.
Sears never known for high tech. I worked there and there back up plan for one segment of the business was using spreadsheets if the very old system went down. Which it did at times
were those using a 4690 Controller?
It was very controversial when Sears left the Loop-based tower. Thousands of Chicago employees didn't make the move because the only way to get to the campus was by a 90-minute car commute. CEO Brennan lived in the Barrington area -- ritzy suburbs a half-hour away. Brennan's "Edifice Complex" cost $100 million plus... in 1990 dollars. Not much of an ROI. Ironically, most Chicagoans still refer to the original HQ as the "Sears Tower."
The Hoffman Estates sht was state subsidized too with incentives. The state never made it's money back. Ironically the KMart distribution center in Manteno is sold to Chinese Communist Party owned Gotion which is also getting subsidies. Illinois sucks.
Curious how much less taxes would have been. Downtown corrupt chicago vs not quite as corrupt where ever the campus was. What they did at the tower vs what they did at the campus, and then getting supplies, etc.
Sears tower will always be called thst by natives
It'll always be the Sears Tower.❤
@@Mr.Weskers@Mr.Weskers, I wholeheartedly agree. Sears Tower, Comiskey, Hancock Tower, and possibly more.
I was in that building and it was extremely impressive. The economics of allowing it to be demolished boggles the mind. It’s right up there with the decision of Sears leadership, when starting to drown, asking for a Kmart anchor instead of a life preserver.
It was a Kmart acquisition by real estate mogul Eddie Lampert who wanted to drain both companies dry and sell off their real estate. Unlike most big box stores who lease their building from someone like CBRE, Sears and Kmart still owned the majority of their buildings and the land it stood on. He had every intention of bankrupting both to enrich himself.
@@LockelyFoxboth were 100% doomed and would have been liquidated very quickly if not for ESL. He obviously has zero talent in running retail stores, but it is undeniable that those failed companies would have logically been liquidated immediately. As you said they owned vast real estate but their stores were losing money like crazy because nobody wanted to shop at outdated, dirty stores that hadn’t been maintained since Reagan was president.
ESL sold the land off gradually and used some of the proceeds to fund the project of continuing to cosplay as a retail company for some reason. A more heartless buyer would have simply skipped the pretending and sold everything asap.
@@dgpsf His entire intention was to liquidate immediately but the real estate market crashed, so he swapped to vampire mode instead. He could have reinvested into both the stores and the people, but he's a parasite. Don't defend these people, they don't care about you and would sell you up the river without a paddle at the first chance they get.
@@dgpsf Yup! Eddie did not appear out of thin air. He saved Autozone when it was failing and seemed intent on trying to do so with Sears - else he wouldn't have held onto it for so long - but by that point he had made some very powerful enemies. If you look back through his history years before Sears, when he spoke out against shortselling he made a long list of people who were doing it, which included prominent businessmen and politicians.
During the Sears troubles the board of directors seemed totally hostile to him and kept pushing out anonymous statements to the press about his supposed behavior behind closed doors and just generally trying to damage the brand's image with rumors. If he were really in it to skin it, he would not have kept as many contracts going as possible with quality producers for sears-branded items, he would have gotten his bag ASAP and left like the other vultures that exist.
It really shows the amount of research you did, I really liked the old pictures and backstory before the video! And the visuals of the layout around the building, trying to avoid security was awesome.. Keep going man!
Sears was a big part of my life - the Christmas wishbook, going to town and always visiting Sears. Sad to see where it is now.
The Xmas catalog, yes!
I am 51. We even had Sears stores in Costa Rica in the 80s , I used to go with my mom as a kid and they were highly regarded as a piece of the US in my country geared towards upper middle and higher income customers. Such a great piece of Americana. My mom always said “ if it’s from Sears, it’s high quality”.
Sears is thriving in Mexico. There's like 30 stores in the Mexico City region alone.
Mexico is a separate company now.
@@Ponchoed Carlos Slim I think owns the brand name and logo but that's about it, it's otherwise its own company that's been unrelated to the American Sears since the late 2000s - which is why it survived the dismantling of the original Sears.
I was employed by Sears and worked in that complex for a few months in 2014. Unreal. Lampert robbed us all blind.
I hate seeing a good building get torn down. Such a waste. Thanks for exploring.
30:00 YES! I love you, you know. Thank you for pointing out the apostrophe my brain was screaming about, too! You just earned a subscriber for life. We have got to be related, LOL.
I worked at the Sears HQ in Hoffman Estates back in the late 90s\early 2000s as a contractor. They had a very nice lunch room and a section for fast food like Taco Bell. We use to go outside and feed the fishes during lunch. I remember walking in to the building on Sept 11, 2001 and the TV's by security in the E building had all the news playing the planes hitting the buildings in NY and people were just standing there watching. I remember Christina Aguillera showing up and did a small concert because she was doing a commercial for Sears a long with a few WNBA players, Colin Power and I think George Foreman was there too. Some of the people working in the Sears HQ were big A$$holes especially in the F building. They felt they can treat the contractors like crap and get away with it.
A bunch of employees brought their kids to the Aguilera thing and they weren't allowed in because it was for employees only.
@@MilwaukeeF40C That kind of treatment is de-humanizing.
35:04 “Eddie Lampert LOSER”. I imagine a disgruntled employee writing that before the facility close and it never got erased 🤣
Bro how come you barley have 5k subs, this editing and quality of this video is outstanding and just flat out amazing props to your dedication to this video,
Its too bad. I unironically love early 90s corporate chic
How do you "ironically" like something anyway? You either like it or you don't.
@@suspiciouswatermelon7639You would ironically like a certain type of architecture because you know it's kitsch, impractical, whatever, but you still enjoy it.
The person you answered genuinely likes early '90s architecture; thus, unironically.
@@mediochreeuchre8391 Only gays use the word 'kitsch".
I don't often comment on videos, but man, this is a well put together video! Love it
oh my gosh, thank you so much for this video. i worked at this building from 2007-2009 and while it was certainly not the best of times, it was so interesting to see it abandoned. i worked on C3, one floor up from the cubicles you showed. very sad to see what happened.
largest commissary second only to the pentagon..... that's what they told me. Consulted for them for like 5 yrs. We saved them $1B per year but is wasn't enough. WOW chills. Like haunted houses for companies. Great content man! Would NOT have added the last part about the videos!
Yes, and in that video of the cafeteria, you saw the outside of the main cafeteria where the Sbarro and Panda Express (and one time Taco Bell), used to set up shop.
What did you suggest to save them so much?
@@mitchellsteindler they were spending $2B per year on marketing and they achieved the same sales $$$ result with cutting the spend in half.😁
Nice video. A few years ago before they closed everything down, they were selling off various items from the workshops, office areas, etc. It almost felt like a real world version of American Pickers as you were scavenging through the relics that they left for people to look. I ended up scoring a 1992 Sears catalog which was pretty cool.
I wanted those OCC bikes.
Awesome!! I worked for SHC a total of 10 years and 2 of those were at Hoffman there. That campus was something to behold in its day. I was in building A. I remember the Kmart model store in the basement there as well. There supposedly was a vault on site with the jewelry but not sure of the validity of that. There also used to be a MyGofer store where you could shop a decent amount of the pantry and drugstore essentials. Will always live in my memories and this video definitely reminded me of some. Great job!
What year did you move from the Tower?
And that MyGofer store would do deskside delivery (if you ordered by like 10:30am). So many employees did their grocery shopping and had it delivered to them. It would come from the Bloomingdale Kmart.
Okay, so, this concept is awesome. Such a well executed video. Love the objective screen. Good amount of background without being boring. Loved the camera quality/sounds and commentary while exploring. And the ending screen was the cherry on top. Love how you "stuffed" one of those in your backpack. =P
Very well filmed. Was interesting throughout. Keep it up!! Subscribed for hopefully more of this in this exact format. 🎉
I worked in a Sears Auto center Way back in the 80a the pay was good, benefits good, they didn't play around with the Highering they had their own Dr to check possible employees for Lung issues before they could work in the auto center. This was also when the Auto center was fairly Honest , unlike the last decade they were trying to make $$$ any way possible. They ripped customers off a lot at a store I knew of guess they didn't care knowing their days of employment were numbered.
I worked there from July of 1998 to November 2005. What a magnificent building. A site to behold. A little city. I started in the repro graphics dept in the basement of the C building, went to the mailroom and then in July of 1999 went to E building 3rd floor. Worked in the utilities dept. Memories that I will not ever forget. It was the best job I ever had. The best team I ever had. So much laughter and so much food. I will cherish my time there. Thank you for the video.
How did you find this video? Surely you weren’t already subscribed? Is RUclips’s algorithm that good?
Even though this building was built 32 years ago (in 1992, and is has that definitely 1990s fashion sense to it), it always struck me as strange when I see perfectly good, attractive, clean, well-maintained buildings intentionally being destroyed. It's worse when good, attractive buildings are destroyed to create a unremarkable huge tin sheds.
Yeah. Seems such a shame.
The issue with these grand complexes again and again is the only ones that can seem to really "afford" them are well-functioning multi-million or billion dollar industries. So if their underpinning company fails, who really needs this grandiose building now? Data center buildings might be "boring", but at least they'll be doing something and providing jobs, unlike this gigantic carcass.
These buildings were not maintained, going back 10+ years. Sears was slowly headed toward bankruptcy and money for the buildings was skipped. The cool main building lobby with a super high ceiling and lots of glass was leaking pretty bad 4-5 years ago (I have friends who worked there).
You have to maintain the gaskets on the glass roof installation every 20 years otherwise it leaks and becomes worthless. Would imagine you need 5% of the cost of the buildings to maintain em every year? That's a Lotta money.
@@smok4101 Good points.
This is REALLY well-done. Thanks for this, man. Super entertaining.
Sears decline began back in the 60's with its aging, apathetic workforce who were unmotivated and just hanging around waiting for retirement. Closing their catalog operation, just at the beginning of the internet, sealed their fate. They attempted to rebound with online sales. I tried ordering a couple hoodies online but their systems were so screwed up it turned into a nightmare. But nobody cared by then. Sears used to be the go-to store for a lot of stuff. I still have Sears and Kenmore appliances, still working after decades and boxes stuffed with Craftsman tools, fortunately purchased in the 60's and 70's when they were still made in the USA and lasted.
One funny part is watching other retailers repeat Sears’s early online mistakes! Walmart is actively trying to destroy its online shopping experience with third-party seller garbage and irrelevant search results as we speak!
I hear you. When they dropped their Weatherbeater paint line, I knew something was very wrong. You're right about their apathetic sales force, too. They could be found jabbering with one another at our now-defunct and torn-down Sears store.
I still remember when my parents in 1962 bought a brand new beautiful Kenmore kitchen gas range. It was really impressive!
All old farts do is complain how people don't work hard enough as the cause of any downfall, and boastfully talk up your hundred dollar washing machine that miraculously keeps working.
So you observed ALL the workers at these stores huh? Sounds like you are real accurate in your counting. Just like the 2024 election scam where we were all sold to Musk and Putin for a couple million
Good on you for uploading the commercials! I salvaged a bunch of VHS tapes from a giant paper mill I explored, it was footage after a couple of explosions at the plant and they were pretty fascinating. There were also several late '90s safety videos which are priceless! Phenomenal explore!
Just sad. A once mighty, vibrant company, part of all our lives from Toughskin jeans to Craftsman tools and Die Hard batteries-brand names sold off and just plain gone. And thousands of white and blue collar jobs too. Farewell once mighty Sears. So much a part of many lives in America.
Our leaders FAILED US! SOLD ALL OF OUR FUTURES TO CHINA. And for what?
i used to work for Sears back in the 1980's and 1990's. They began floundering even back then when the launched the Discover and AllState insurance Companies to get more intwined in their customer lives. Stores, service centers all gone.
I dont know why I was recommended this video but I'm glad I was. What a gem. Very backrooms feeling to it with real nostalgia. Great video.
Wow what an absolutely fantastic video! Amazing work documenting the history and your cool exploration of the defunct HQ. Subscribed for sure.
What’s scary is how one person can destroy so much.
Wasn't just one person, Covid paranoia didn't help.
@robertwhite7071 sears basically didn't exist long before covid. Covid killed millions of people. It almost killed me, an active healthy 20 something.
I LOVE THIS VIDEO! The story telling in the beginning was great, the animations were super cool and it was a wild ride going through there. Earned my subscription can’t wait for more!
Our society what an unbelievable waste, think of the millions and millions of dollars I went into building that complex and then just basically torn down like it’s nothing. Our just disposable society.
Exactly what I was going to say. That’s money lying around there. I bet the initial outlay was astronomical, now it is waiting for a landfill.
When your company goes out of business, someone else gets to buy the land and change what's there.
That's just business...
Craftsmanship means nothing to business people. But they'll be the first to withhold payment if anything goes wrong, because it's an excuse to justify their greed and flex their power.
Corporate greed and corporate waste
@@OneAdam12Adamcorporate greed is when they tore down an old office building to make something completely different... got it
My mother worked there for a few years in the late 90s until major layoffs started in the early 2000s. I saw a lot of the facility in operation many times. Here's what I remember.
Immediately inside the main entrance to the right was a light up model of the building, push a button and the location would have a light.
At the foot of the escalators to the left was a Chinese gift shop selling greeting cards and Hello Kitty junk. There was an elaborate series of waterfall fountains in the atrium running along the escalators that I think were turned off for cost in the middle of the time my mother worked there. On the mezzanine was a museum with changing displays like antique appliances and there were some very old open cars with squeeze horns and a motorcycle.
I always wanted lunch from the Taco Bell. In retrospect I wish I had tried some of the fancy looking entrees they always did in the main chow. They always put sample plates under lights.
There was a production studio including a green screen. Somewhere was the product testing department with a copper Faraday cage and an old tank like soundproof room on springs that was moved from the demolished ORIGINAL pre tower headquarters and warehouse on the west side of Chicago. I never did see the model stores.
Outside were two ponds with pairs of breeding swans, one couple was named Beverly and Higgins after the nearest main roads and the other was Bonnie and Clyde or something dumb like that. The names were from employee voting contests. The swans were brought to Florida for the winters.
Along the access road to the west was a helipad one of the previous CEOs used a lot. A van was used to get to the building.
I believe my mother was always in cell block B with the bulk of HR. The executives were on the sixth floor. G may have never been fully used or finished.
The model may have been the same one shown with Brennan in the video.
I do believe it was saved per one of the demolition people I talked to. Cell block B, or Building B is where I was, on 5, just under the execs. Eddies personal toilet (up on 6) actually sprung a leak on my desk once.
@@MilwaukeeF40Cwhat video with Brennan? Is there more videos of this place?
you're so cool. your care for the details is so satisfying. I love how organized the description is. the wobbling intro is incredibly aesthetic. your music taste is sophisticated. your voice during the exploration is soothing and the ambience is ASMR to me. 34:00 is my favorite part. From the bottom of my heart I wish you all the best.
btw you might want to review your "Urbex With Nemf" playlist as the 1st video is still public since it's in a playlist
At 20:00 can you ask why one particular room was so dusty; it's because vandals activated a fire extinguisher shown at 19:06. They make a huge mess.
That’s my best guess too. The fire extinguisher at the entrance to the room had its hose pulled out and looked like it was briefly discharged into the room.
I can concur with that… I had to discharge a dry chemical fire extinguisher at a small kitchen fire. The powder comes out at an amazing velocity, and it gets everywhere right away, and it is so fine that we were finding a layer of yellow dust all over the house.
For those down about Sears being nearly gone, don’t worry in Mexico they’re everywhere, as much as Walmarts. Last year I traveled to a few and they felt like the Sears I used to go as a kid in the early 2000s.
Their logo color is read and white instead of blue and white
I like reading those old papers strewn about, even if it's some miscellaneous stuff it gives a nice snapshot of the work life they had. also love the quiet dark empty spaces, i was going to compare it to caves but maybe that doesn't really fit in with man-made stuff.
What a video. Your editing is fantastic & the storytelling as well, your effort in documenting something like this is admirable
Its sad to see these places where not so long ago, people like me, working in their careers, visiting these places every day and then it all shuts down leaving behind all this waste and brokenness.
I was hoping you'd pick up one of those dvds and upload it, glad you did. You went above and beyond giving people a glimpse of the past and it's awesome I'm going to check those out
Hoffman Estates, what a massive majestic complex. Many people that worked there detested that place. But it really did represent Sears’ last gasp of prosperity before everything went to shit with the new Millennium.
I'll play old man for a second...I remember when everything west of Barrington Road was corn. The announcement that Sears was moving to Hoffman Estates happened right before I left the Chicago area so I haven't seen HE with the sports arena and the rest of the added development that began with Sears.
@ haha so cool, I have no clue there was virtually nothing out there prior to Sears building their HQ. Really must’ve been exciting back then.
I’m surprised they didn’t keep any of it just because of how somewhat modern the complex was.
@@garbagebanditdayz819 I lied (or forgot)...Poplar Creek theatre was out there. Maybe three or four miles west of Barrington Road but that's the only thing I remember being there before Sears.
I guess it doesn't seem that exciting now, but it was what I knew. Far worse places I could have grown up.
All those reports, wall charts, etc that were shown abandoned in the office cubes. Some low level flunky made those, with his boss looking over his shoulder, probably had to go through 4 or 5 revisions. Got told it was super-important to get it right and was pressured to get it done now!, because we needed that info now! and the bigger boss was waiting for it now!
And what did it all mean in the end? Nothing. Now they lie there abandoned, left behind and covered with dust. Not even worth the effort to throw away when the last person turned out the lights for the last time.
something to think about. I'm sure there's some philosophical lesson in there somewhere .
Looks like they left in a hurry, probably called into the conference or break room and given 15 minutes. Or locked out the next morning when they came to work, judging by that newspaper.
@@bernieschiff5919 I noticed that as well. Everything is still strewn about, as if the HQ shuttered operations in the middle of a regular office day. It almost reminds me of what happened at airports and airline personnel the day Pan Am went out of business.
It means nothing really, same with most jobs. The quicker the hurry the less valuable the thing is in the long run.
Back to the land
Sounds like you've had bad work experiences
47:06 you should totally back these up on the internet archive! would be so cool to have it backed up in a more reliable form than youtube
Why does it sound like you're walking around with a Geiger counter at Chernobyl?
I was wondering that too can't tell if just the camera he using making that noise or he has something else with him
Sounded like an insulin pump. Although, that’d be a lot of insulin.
Fairly certain that it's the camera's autofocus struggling a little bit...
Autofocus motor
If that's autofocus then it's really loud and it makes it a bad camera.
19:01 Fire extinguisher leads to 20:00 all that "dust" you see everywhere.
The fact the the author had no idea what the "dust" was. Common sense is lost amongst our youngins.
@@James01520most people haven't seen the aftermath of a fire extinguisher discharge, much less a powder based extinguisher as they typically aren't used for training.
i knew what that "dust" was upon seeing it.. i was one of those punks that had fired multiple of those dry cam ones multiple times and places. they make a real mess 😂
@@James01520 it sounds amazing but not everyone has discharged a dry chem fire extinguisher.
Was going to comment the same thing, but figured I’d scroll the comments first. Was obvious as I noticed the fire extinguisher sitting on the floor when he walked in the room. Good fun except when some asshole fired one off at a party in my house at college one year.
Fun fact: Sears used to have a corporate aviation department at the DuPage Airport (DPA) in West Chicago, IL until Sears made the decision to close it down in 2010. I know this because back then, I worked for a 3rd party janitorial service company they hired out to clean their offices and part of the shop. They had two Bombardier Learjet 60s.
Each Territory also had a Jet (or two) assigned to the Territorial Vice President. I was privileged to fly in one a couple of times. Of course that was in the 80's.
There was also a helicopter during the 90s (larger tricycle wheeled type), and a helipad near the HQ with a shuttle van to the building.
They would land at KDPA and take the helicopter to the helipad at the HQ.
My dad used to sell animal furs to Sears back in the day. And I bought most of my cloths from Sears. It was the store to buy anything anyone could possibly want.
Were you raised in a log cabin?
Was this the 1880s?
@@SRW_ No, lol it was in the 40's. I wasn't born yet.
Nice explore. I was part of a construction crew that remodeled the Sears buildings in the Twin Cities around the year 2000. In the 2010s My daughter and I walked through the Sears at Mall of America twice a month because we parked in the Sears lot. Was sad seeing it slowly die. They didn't seem to try very hard to stop it though. They kept doing what wasn't working even though the rest of the mall was still fully busy until the pandemic came along.
Crazy thing is MOA signed a 100 years lease with Sears. Still 70 years left and MOA can't touch the Sears corridor. MOA are now suing the company that owns Sears to break the lease.
@PaleOpal21 yeah, Sears is all walled off. I don't park in that lot anymore because we have to walk around it.
If we allow trump and Putin to seize power this will be your future everywhere! No cap.
Did alot of sprinkler work in my 31 years as a Union Sprinklerfitter in buildings like this. Now its warehouses and highrise condos here in NJ.
At 16:37 those are the largest indoor Ficus Trees I've ever seen all of those leaves are because they are no longer watered and are going into drought/ cold shock. A waste for large specimens like that to die.
i will support saving them
imagine working night security in a massive abandoned office facility. like bro you work in the backrooms
this is a fantastic video. keep pumping these out and you’re gonna be super successful. proud to be an early subscriber
"Our business is doing bad. Should we innovate? Use more technology? Learn from Amazon and Walmart?"
"No. Let's sell our prime piece of real estate, and spend a lot of money on a brand new complex in the middle of bum#uck nowhere."
At the time Amazon only sold books. It was a convenient bookstore, but just a bookstore. Walmart was the growing competitor and that was before they converted their stores to Supercenters and added groceries. It's true that Sears really missed the boat on innovating and leveraging its existing logistics chains and store prevalence to become a king in the eCommerce sector. Mismanagement set up the company for a plunderer like Lampert to pillage the rest.
the quality of this video made me think this guy was a 500k+ channel, wasn’t expecting it to only have 3k subscribers!
I'm listening to this while at work lol this is potent ty bro your like that guy from metal gear solid
Wow, what am amazing exploration! I really thought it might be just a relatively unexciting office space, but it has some really interesting surprises. There's that Chatillon force gauge, which looks a bit out of place in the relatively modern office setting, in its fancy wooden box and all. And being a vintage computer and tech nerd generally I almost screaming at the screen for you to turn around and check out some of the cool equipment I saw. If it were me I'd contact the people responsible and ask if there's any remaining things I could take off their hands before demolishing the other buildings. I saw a bunch of stuff that vintage computer nerds like me would love to get their hands on.
That gauge was in a room used for a liquidation sale, you can find some videos about the sales. You missed your chance. Demo guys sometimes know good antique store fodder though.
dude that's an insane video🤯 100% will blow up🚀
Love that you took the time to take a dvd and upload it. Cementing a bit of history for all
Awesome video. Love seeing these types of abandoned corpo HQs. Wish you made it to the Executive Suites or the B Building; I heard a lot of under the table stuff happened in B.
I find it crazy to think there were people working in this building up until 2019. Even as a kid back in like ~2010 or so I could tell Sears was a dying brand, and by 2015 or so I imagine the writing on the wall had long since dried. Just shows how dedicated the few that were left were.
11:02 I used to work in the A building. Crazy to see it demolished now.
What was it like for you? Did you enjoy your time at this facility? If so what was your favorite thing about it?
I also was in the A building. The ability to have your groceries ordered and either delivered to your desk or your car was awesome. Truly miss working there
What was A building used for? Merchandising?
@@RobertHAbney A was the finance side of Sears and Kmart BU's IIRC and I think HR may have been in there for awhile. Or maybe straddled the connection between A & B.
As someone born in 1979 I never thought Sears would be going anywhere, even as companies like Wards went out in the early 2000s Sears was still huge and raking in business. When my parents used to take me to the mall as a kid we'd always park in front of Sears and enter the entire mall by going thru Sears to see what they had on offer. Their Craftsman tools used to be among the best you could get, my dad if he found a broken wrench knew that as long as it was Craftsman you could take it to any Sears and they'd replace it no questions asked with a new one. That's because they used to be made with American steel and made completely in America from start to finish. We'd have never guessed back then that Sears would be outlasted (altho just barely) by JC Penney's, but now both of those are nearly gone. Eddie the hedge fund Wall street crook certainly managed to kill off Sears and Kmart. Buying both dying brands and trying to combine them, which really all he wanted to do was get his hands on their assets and sell them off. Now you can find Craftsman at Lowe's and it's not American Steel nor made in America and there's no replacing tools that were at one point a lifetime guarantee. The catalogs used to be a highlight, Sears had one, Penney's had one, Ward's and even stores like Service Merchandise and those would come at least a few times a year and as a kid it's how you marked or could see all the stuff you wanted and dreamed about. Also any Sears would get your catalog order in in a few days and you'd go out and pick it up, we even had in my small town a Sears store that sold a few things like tires and appliances/tools, then we had a Penney's catalog center where you could pick up a catalog and your order would come to. The catalogs were essentially the internet shopping of their day, it was no different from online shopping. Then you had catalog showroom stores like Service Merchandise and that's a concept that I've read Amazon is looking into bringing back. So a showroom store for certain products so you can go in, look at them touch them and if you like order it and it'll come out ready for pickup on items most people want to see, feel, experience before buying.
I took an old craftsman ratchet to Lowe’s and they did replace it!
Just wanted to say, amazing video.
I worked here for almost 6 years. I stayed until the ship sunk. As a young 20 something I watched grown men get fired day after day before I realized what was happening. One of the craziest things I’ve ever been apart of
I actively remember the meetings we had when hundreds of stores would close. This erie “what’s next” feeling.
What could anyone expect from a guy who never visited any of his stores? He never would dare to leave his FL apartment.
The sears Christmas catalog is one of my most treasured memories as a kid..
this was one of the better urbex videos i've seen, subbed
It is a shame that corporations never use these old buildings already built. They always want a new, fresh building that cost 10 times more then just doing some minor remodeling.
these buildings are so old that most of the time it's just cheaper or more worth it to make a new fresh building. plus they're gonna make a data center, you can't really have a big data center in an office building
Brilliant stuff, love when smaller channels blow up like this and I check on your previous work and it's all of quality like this.
I worked in a fairly large complex like this once. Defense industry in my case, so the complex was a mix of offices (where I worked, as I was just an IT nerd), hardware build/test areas, and an on-site kitchen / cafeteria. Probably the largest and most "lavish" place I ever worked, and that wouldn't even compare to all the amenities it appears this HQ once offered. The contract I was hired under was cancelled, and it caused a 300 person layoff. And that was about a decade and some change before COVID even was heard of. Always kinda wondered what happened to it after that. The overall company still exists, but that really damaged that local satellite office complex. I'm not sure if they survived, but then, I don't live anywhere near there and it was a long time ago now, so I don't really care either way.
If the drive isn't too long and time's been indifferent enough it could be a fun, lawful trip. This is not legal advice and I have no idea what you're talking about. Safe travels.
its honestly sad to see architecture rot like this, while the company and parking lot were bad the building itself could've served another purpose
This building is by woodfield mall . It was great to live in the area . What a great mall and the memories of playing videos games buying stuff in Sears will never be forgotten
I was there back in 2003 for 2 weeks of training. Very impressive building. If you want to blame somebody for the failure Sears/Kmart his name is Eddie Lampert.
I worked in one of the business park buildings across the street from the K-Mart HQ about 10 years before it closed. This would have been around '94-ish. In those days, everybody in IT wanted to work for K-Mart, until they did. Then they wanted to just leave. One of my co-workers was former K-Mart, and he seemed to be happy being away from there. You couldn't get him to say anything bad about "the Mart", but neither did he ever say anything good about it.
I had heard stories of how the traffic right there would be absolutely nuts at 4:30 when all the K-Mart HQ people would go home for the day. 90% of them would be on the freeway within 5 minutes. It wasn't that bad when I worked across the street, but we rarely left work before 6 or 7 pm.
I have relatives in Troy and Royal Oak, so once in awhile I'd be back in the area. But it has been at least 10 years now, and I don't know if the K-Mart structure is still there. It was massively huge too, and it quickly became run-down once nobody worked in it anymore.
I just couldn't stay at the job I had across the street for more than a year; that company was just as mismanaged as K-Mart was, so I left Michigan for a 6-month IT contract gig in Indiana. Best decision of my career at the time; it was ultimately my path to real career development and success. I would never go back to Michigan for work. And Illinois was never on my list to begin with, although I did get a great steak dinner from a recruiter in Illinois once, lol.
Great video. Sad how Sears went downhill. Moving to nowhere in Hoffman Estates was plain stupid. One of many bad decisions.
Thank Illinois politicians for that waste.
here before this dude gets like 1M subs. great vids man keep it up!
thank you for documenting this before it's fully torn down or seriously altered like is being proposed now. this is a slice of time!
Thanks for sharing! stringer media also has a video of this place.
12:21 beginning of a COD mission
Stopped buying from sears when the craftsman tool production went overseas.
I actually went to this location just before it shut down in 2022. They were selling a bunch of equipment and my family got their hands on a bunch of the state of the art speakers they had in the studios.