Sears was the retailer that dropped off the Fortune 500 in 2019 after 64 consecutive years on the list.
Fortune’s ranking measures companies by annual revenue, not profit, market value, or brand fame. Sears had been a fixture since the Fortune 500 began in 1955, but its sales had fallen sharply as shoppers shifted toward Walmart, Target, warehouse clubs, and online retailers. The company also struggled after its 2005 merger with Kmart, which created Sears Holdings.
The 2019 list was based primarily on companies’ 2018 fiscal-year revenue. Sears’s exclusion reflected its shrinking business, not the disappearance of the brand: Sears stores and online operations continued afterward under Transformco, the company acquired by Eddie Lampert in 2019. Kmart, often confused with Sears in this question, was part of the same corporate group but was not the canonical answer.
Sears’s decline is especially notable because it had once been America’s dominant retailer. Its mail-order catalogs, national stores, Craftsman tools, and Kenmore appliances made it a powerful part of 20th-century consumer life.