July 9, 2017: The Sears store in Peru, Illinois, will close before the end of the year.
Peru, Illinois — I needed a pit stop, Wi-Fi, and food, in that approximate order. Peru Mall, the only major shopping center on I-80 between Davenport and Joliet and the first one directly on I-80 east of Coralville, was an easily accessible option for the first two.
It ended up being an experience I wasn’t expecting.
After I walked past the theater entrance and an arcade with no one in it on a hot summer Sunday, I passed one of the mall’s interior intersections. Three of the four corners were vacant. It was only slightly better down the main hallway (and forget about a food court). In the other direction was Sears, whose eventual closure had been announced days before. That doubled the mall’s pain because J.C. Penney was already in liquidation mode, selling everything at 70% off. The mall had announced a month earlier it would close an hour earlier six days a week and lop two hours off Sunday time.
This isn’t my first dead mall, so to speak; Southridge in Des Moines began spiraling after Jordan Creek opened or even before then since Montgomery Ward was an original anchor. Half of the interior was demolished in 2012 for revitalization — not too long after the J.C. Penney closed, and a few years before it also lost its Sears — but that mall’s issues had an external factor and the Great Recession in general. Southridge still has a Younkers and a Target. (I haven’t been to Crossroads in Waterloo in years and now I’m a little afraid to look.)
This experience at Peru Mall was the first to make me think Oh, that collapse in retail. It looked emptier than it did even in Nathan Bush’s photo gallery from December 2012. After JCP and Sears go, the mall’s largest stores left will be Marshalls and Jo-Ann Fabrics. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that Sears’ serious financial woes and waves of closures threaten a cascade of bad effects for malls across the country.
Even if the JCP was already out of three-button shirts in my size, at least the Wi-Fi was top-notch and trouble-free.