The coronavirus pandemic has been particularly hard on troubled retailers, and there’s hardly a more troubled retailer than Sears. But for the unceasing, incomprehensible and, it must be said, ghoulish and tortuously perverse loyalty of one Edward Lampert, it would already be dead. Certainly, it’s among the most vulnerable of populations to infection by COVID-19, ready, it would seem, to join J. Crew, J.C. Penney, Neiman Marcus, Stage Stores, Pier 1 and Dean & Deluca in the ICU.
But it hasn’t—yet—in part because Lampert, in typically diplomatic fashion, has allegedly kept it well-quarantined from all of the clothes he had made for it in Bangladesh, which hasn’t been having the best pandemic to begin with.