With Sears on death’s doorstep for good this time, this may be my final written piece on the former iconic retailer. And I am OK with that, really. It’s time to move on, for both me and Sears.

My coverage on the demise of Sears began more than 10 years ago as a retail stock analyst. I can vividly recall analyzing terrible quarters from Sears and providing insight — from a flip phone on the floor of a busy New York City Penn Station — to one of the best retail reporters in the game, Anne D'Innocenzio at the Associated Press. Anne and I would simply marvel at the eye-popping sales declines at Sears and Kmart and the subsequent mind-blowing losses. We wondered why billionaire hedge fund manager turned Sears CEO Eddie Lampert refused to invest in the stores.

The stores looked dreadful during a period of massive investment by rival chains Walmart, Target and Macy’s. In effect, Lampert was saying he didn’t want to be part of the future of retail. At the same time, he was pumping a new “membership” program that was sucking profits from Sears’s bottom line. Lampert never seemed to realize that Amazon and Costco make people pay to be members in order to offset the costs of doling out rewards to loyal shoppers.

Sears’s awful quarters and a series of sweetheart real estate deals by Lampert to keep the chain afloat led me to visit scores of locations to see what was truly going on. Snapping photos of derelict Sears and Kmart stores became an obsession. I would study these photos in my living room and think: “I am watching one of the greatest retailers ever go out of business in real time.” Broken cash registers. Busted refrigerators that held milk at Kmart. Dents in new furniture and appliances. All of this became the norm at Sears as employee morale vanished and operating systems broke down.

I got asked to leave several Sears locations, presumably because corporate alerted stores that I was there taking photos.

By October 2013, The New York Times plastered my Sears photos in a cover story. By January 2014, the very talented Robin Farzad coined me a “guerilla stock analyst” in a Bloomberg profile for snapping depressing Sears pics. That story triggered a Twitter attack on my work by former Sears Communications Chief Chris Brathwaite. Brathwaite jumped the burning Sears ship in October 2018 (around the time of the bankruptcy filing) for Tenneco Inc. He still has me blocked on Twitter, as does current Sears Communications Chief Howard Riefs.