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Article snippet: PHILLIPSBURG, N.J. — Every year on Black Friday, Angela Buzatto has come to Sears to buy two new vacuum cleaners, at steep discounts, for her house cleaning business. This year she was going to buy four of them. Ms. Buzatto couldn’t resist. The Sears in the Phillipsburg Mall is closing its doors for good and everything has to go. Along with vacuums on sale at even bigger discounts, she bought her 8-year-old daughter a shimmering white dress for $24 and a $10 pair of fuzzy blue shoes. “It’s sad,” said Ms. Buzatto, who has shopped at the Sears in this town on the Pennsylvania border for 16 years. “The business is not there.” Black Friday is the most celebrated shopping day of the year, when parking lots fill up early with bargain hunters and online frenzy crashes the websites of even the most established retailers. In Los Angeles, a line formed overnight at a sneaker boutique on Melrose Avenue, and a throng of shoppers stood behind fences in the early morning darkness waiting to get into the Mall of America near Minneapolis. But for Ms. Buzatto, standing in a dim hallway in the Phillipsburg Mall, it was a different scene. Next to Sears were rows of empty storefronts for retailers like Payless Shoes and Radio Shack, both of which have gone through bankruptcy. The bleak scene was emblematic of the difficult challenges confronting many brick and mortar retailers, which are struggling to figure out how to survive Amazon’s seemingly unstoppable march to dominate the Ame... Link to the full article to read more