City Move Paves Way for Rural King on Old Sears Property at Anderson Mall

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

Anderson City Council approved a move on Monday that could bring new life and foot traffic to the Anderson Mall.

The old Sears box at the has been empty long enough to become a kind of civic ghost: 8.14 acres of parking and poured concrete, bordered by crepe myrtles and the murmur of traffic on Clemson Boulevard.

City Council took up the question of what, exactly, to do to exorcise that ghost. In a unanimous vote, members approved designating the long-vacant site—dark since Sears pulled out in 2018—as an abandoned building under South Carolina’s 2013 Abandoned Buildings Revitalization Act; a bit of legislative choreography could revive a building and clear the stage for someone else to try.  The designation opens the way for tax incentives, allowing a would‑be redeveloper to claim state income‑tax or property‑tax credits in exchange for the costly work of resuscitating a big box that the retail economy has, for years now, treated as expendable.

The company, RK Holdings, LLC, the family‑owned parent of Rural King, a Midwestern “farm and home” chain whose brand of square‑jawed pragmatism—feed, seed, tools, boots—feels a world away from the perfume counters and soft carpeting that once defined Sears.

RK Holdings has signaled its intent to remake the roughly 91,000 to 95,000 square feet of former department store into a Rural King, and it sought the abandoned‑building certification precisely so it could tap those state credits tied to rehabilitating long‑empty properties.

The outlines of the transformation are already visible, if mostly on screens. Rural King has added an Anderson location to its official website, a digital placeholder for a store that does not yet exist.  Job postings have begun to appear—department leads in livestock and agriculture, among others—suggesting an interior less concerned with mannequins and more with mineral blocks, gate hardware, and fifty‑pound sacks of feed.  Local commercial real‑estate notices have confirmed what the council’s vote implies: the mall’s western anchor is being drafted into a new life, with tractors where the Kenmore washing machines once rested.

The timing fits into a larger, carefully paced migration. The announcement of the Anderson store surfaced in late December, accompanied by estimates that doors could open before the end of 2026, a horizon that says as much about permitting, construction schedules, and supply chains as it does about enthusiasm.  The Anderson project follows Rural King’s first South Carolina outpost, which opened in Spartanburg in October 2025, part of a slow southern arc for a company that began, in 1960, in Mattoon, Illinois, when two men—Keith Beaird and Kermit Speer—opened a modest farm‑supply store aimed squarely at the people who worked the land around them.

Rural King has since grown into a multi‑state big‑box retailer, but it has retained the unglamorous ethos of its origin story.  It remains family‑owned under RK Holdings and continues to describe itself, without irony, as “America’s Farm and Home Store,” a slogan that frames its customers as stewards of acreage, animals, and households in places where the nearest skyscraper is a silo.  The typical Rural King sells what rural life requires and suburban life romanticizes: livestock feed and fencing, seed and ag supplies, tractor and implement accessories, tools, and hardware—objects meant to be used until they are nicked, dulled, dented, and used again.

The community hopes the Anderson Sears site becomes a small parable about what happens to the American mall in late middle age. The state’s Abandoned Buildings Revitalization Act, with its carefully enumerated credits and definitions, is the policy instrument that makes this new life financially plausible, but the emotional calculus is more local: better, perhaps, to have pallets of seed and aisles of work gloves than a darkened anchor decaying behind locked doors.

If all goes as planned, by the end of 2026 the former Sears—its vacancy officially acknowledged, its abandonment bureaucratically certified—will reopen under bright lights of a different color.  Anderson shoppers will park where they always did, walk past the same brick and glass, and find a new world inside: not Kenmore and Craftsman in their old livery, but feed scoops, muck boots, and the faint, earthy smell of a store that assumes its customers have somewhere to go home and fix.