We’ve had a longtime joke here at Consumerist that Sears Holdings isn’t actually a retail company, but an advanced anti-capitalist prank pretending to run a retail company. We expected the company to either turn things around or go out of business. What’s happening instead is something that some retail observers had predicted: the company is profitable for the first time in years, but only because it sold a few hundred million dollars’ worth of stores.

If Sears Holdings’ manifesto-writing CEO, Eddie Lampert, were here, he would point out that this is just another step on the company’s journey back to profitability. Actually, that is what he said in a statement included with the company’s quarterly results:

During the quarter we completed many of the objectives we laid out to transform Holdings from a traditional, store-network based retail business model to a more asset-light, member-centric integrated retailer leveraging our Shop Your Way platform.

Leasing stores from Seritage Growth Properties, an affiliated real estate investment trust, means that Sears will be able to “transform” their existing stores and “recapture” space, which might mean subdividing stores to rent out unneeded space to other retailers, as they began doing even before spinning off real estate ventures.

Sears Holdings Reports Second Quarter 2015 Results [Sears Holdings]

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