Noah Croy, left, a sales associate at La Grande’s Sears Hometown Store, helps customer Mike Boicourt load an item into his vehicle on Saturday, June 4, 2022. The store is closing its doors for good on June 23.

LA GRANDE — La Grande will soon lose a longtime appliance and hardware store.

Sears Hometown Store, 1700 N. Portland St., is set to close in about two weeks. The store’s last day of operation will be Thursday, June 23.

The Observer was unable to reach anyone with the Sears Corporation to comment on the closure. However, a Tuesday, May 31, story on CNN’s business website by Jordan Valinsky said that approximately 100 Sears Hometown Stores would be closing in the next several weeks. This represents about half of the remaining retail footprint of the franchise. Sears Hometown, Valinsky wrote, had 750 stores in the United States as recently as 2019.

Sears first opened a store in Union County 1972, according to the records of Bob Bull, a Union County historian and author. Sears was first located at 1413 Adams Ave. The store was there until 1980 when two different Sears stores opened at different locations — a Sears product services store at 808 Adams Ave. and a Sears catalog sales store at 216 Chestnut St.

Sears closed its two La Grande stores around 1992 and moved to Island City where it opened a store at 10601 Walton Road. Sears was at its Walton Road location until about 2000 when it moved to its present site.

Bull said he has been impressed with the service Sears has provided him in La Grande. He noted that he once purchased a chain link fence from Sears when it was at 1413 Adams Ave. He recalled that the customer service did not end with the sale — the store arranged to have someone come to his home and install the fence. The man even dug postholes for the fence.

“I did not have to do anything,” Bull said.

The present Union La Grande store has been corporately owned for about 1-1/2 years, according to Noah Croy, a sales associate at the store. Prior to that the store had a franchise owner.

A close-out sale is now being conducted at Sears. Croy said that any merchandise not sold by June 23 will be sent to Sears stores in the region. The nearest Sears stores to La Grande are in Pendleton and Ontario.

Shaunie Hamilton, the franchise owner of the Sears Hometown Store in Ontario, said the recent Sears closures are not an indication that the corporation is in trouble. She noted that Sears is closing stores that are not profitable and has opened a number of new stores recently.

“It is like any business, you have to go where the market is,” she said.

Sears Hometown locations operate under Sears Hometown and Outlet Stores, Inc., which separated from Sears Holdings Corporation in October 2012. Transformco acquired Sears Holdings after the company filed for bankruptcy in 2018. Its remaining stores are operated primarily in small towns by independent dealers or franchisees of Transformco affiliates. The stores are typically between 6,000 to 8,000 square feet — a fraction of the size of Sears department stores, which were each more than 100,000 square feet — and sell mainly tools and appliances.