Retailers and restaurants always close stores by the thousands when the economy is growing, unemployment is plunging, and incomes are rising. Right?
Use your brains people. Stop believing the storylines. Open your eyes and see what is happening. Count the number of Space Available signs on your next road trip through suburban hell.
Does the story peddled by the government and legacy media match the reality you see with your own eyes?
This list of store closings is just the tip of the iceberg. There are tens of thousands to go over the next five years.
Guest Post by Tony Sanders
Jobs Recovery? 17 Retailers Shutting Down Stores (And Not All From Internet Competition)
This is the worst employment recovery in American history from a credit bubble. And the news just keeps getting worse and worse, particularly for service workers at retail shops. You can’t blame Amazon.com for stealing sales from Red Lobster, Ruby Tuesday’s, Sbarro’s or Quizno’s, however.
Here are 17 companies that have closed stores or will close stores soon:
* Office supply company Staples has announced plans to close 225 stores by 2015, which is about 15 percent of its chain. Staples already closed 40 stores last year.
* Office Depot, Staples’ main competitor, which bought OfficeMax last year, is expected to announce its own round of store closings soon.
* Radio Shack has announced plans to close 20 percent of its stores this year, which is as many as 1,100 stores. The company, which operates around 4,000 stores, reported that its sales fell by 19 percent last year.
* Albertsons closed 26 stores in January and February according to Supermarket News. Analysts expect many more Albertsons could soon be shuttered because Albertsons owner hedge fund Cerberus Capital Management just bought Safeway Inc. Some Safeway stores could soon shut down as well.
* Abercrombie & Fitch, the clothing retailer, is planning to close 220 stores by the end of 2015. The company is also planning to shut down an entire chain it owns, Gilly Hicks, which has 20 stores, 24/7 Wall Street reported.
* Barnes & Nobles is planning to shut down one third of its stores in the next year: about 218 stores. The chain has already closed its iconic flagship store in New York City.
* J.C. Penney is closing about 33 stores and laying off about 2,000 employees.
* Toys R Us has plans to close 100 stores according to The Record newspaper in New Jersey.
* The Sweetbay Supermarket chain will close all 17 of the stores it operates in the Tampa Bay area, The Herald Tribune newspaper reported. Many of the stores might open as Winn-Dixie Stores. Sweetbay closed 33 stores in Florida last year.
* Loehmann’s chain of discount clothing stores in the New York City area has entirely shut down. Loehmann’s once operated 39 stores, The New York Times reported, and was considered an institution by generations of New Yorkers.
* Sears Holdings, which owns both Sears and Kmart, to close another 500 stores this year, according to industry analyst John Kernan to CNN. Sears has already shut down its flagship store in Chicago.
* Quiznos has filed for bankruptcy, USA Today reported, and could close many of its 2,100 stores.
* Sbarro which operates pizza and Italian restaurants in malls, is planning to close 155 locations in the United States and Canada. That means nearly 20 percent of Sbarro’s will close. The chain operates around 800 outlets.
* Ruby Tuesday announced plans to close 30 restaurants in January after its sales fell by 7.8 percent. The chain currently operates around 775 steakhouses across the US.
* Red Lobster will sell an unknown number of stores. The chain is in such bad shape that the parent company, Darden Restaurants Inc., had to issue a press release stating that the chain would not close. Instead Darden is planning to spin Red Lobster off into another company and sell some of its stores.
* Ralph’s, a subsidiary of Kroger, has announced plans to close 15 supermarkets in Southern California within 60 days.
* Safeway closed 72 Dominick’s grocery stores in the Chicago area last year.
The culprit? Among other factors, personal consumption growth YoY has declined from 9.04% in March 2000 to 3.45% in January 2014. And real median household income has plunged as well.
And if I want fresh half-and-half for my White Russians (aka, Caucasians), I go to my neighborhood Ralph’s like Jeffrey Lebowski (not Amazon.com). I hope they didn’t close Lebowski’s neighborhood Ralph’s!!
I wonder how many more grocery stores would close if not for the huge EBT card subsidies that the government has handed out. Side note here in the great state of Massachusetts our fine state congress is on the verge of passing a budget of over 36 billion dollars and it is only giving the legislatures and public 2 days to review the budget. This in a state that has the highest debt to citizen ratio in the country. On top of that they have passed a parliamentary procedure that blocks any any new bill on welfare reform and local aid. This is a state legislature that is 90% Democrat. It never ceases to amaze me how contemptuous our state legislatures are to the public and how the idiots citizens continue to vote in these same jackasses. It is time to move.
Bob.
bob,
you have my condolences, it definitely is time to pack up and move on.
…and MSM is telling us the truthabout this recovery??? SHTF is coming and maybe these prestitutes will pay.
Yo,
Definitely. Our state must make Howie’s job so easy. So much corruption, both legal and illegal, it’s like an endless orchard of low hanging fruit. For those not from Boston Howie is a local legend who writes and talks on the radio about the local and national hackery known as our politicians and government workers. This state just oozes with inside deals, padding of payrolls, and outright theft. A recent retired Congressman, who is collecting two pensions, one since he was 55, just received the rights to open three pot shops. No insider dealing here. HAHAHAHA.
Bob.
Bed Bath & Beyond has been one of the best run retailers of the last decade. They consistently had sales gains of 5% to 10% every quarter.
They just reported 4th quarter results:
Sales down by $200 million – Negative 6%
Operating profit down by $71 million – Negative 12%
Inventory UP by $113 million, meaning major price cutting to come.
These boobs used $1.3 BILLION of their cash to buy back their own stock at all-time record highs in order to enrich the executives.
The beat goes on and these delusional retail CEOs don’t see the train headed down the track.
Ruby Tuesday just reported earnings (I mean losses)
Sales down $12 million – 4%
$2 million loss versus a $9 million profit last year, bringing the YTD loss to $51 million.
Closing 9 more restaurants in the 4th quarter bringing the total to 33 for the year. With 755 restaurants they have many more to close as the middle class consumer runs out of money.
As I reported yesterday, people are paying more in taxes than food, clothing, and, well, everything else combined. Obama and the democrats are taxing everything that has a pulse, moves, breathes or shits. They need more and more of other people’s money to fund their voting-machine FSA.
Maybe the government will start “food loans”, like student loans or car loans, so people can afford the food they want, or simply double or triple SNAP benefits. The FSA and SNAP recipients are well fed, over-fed, well, just plain obese slobs. I expect as food prices continue to skyrocket, the government will take over the food supply, and issue everyone SNAP cards and ration food. There is no better way to control an obese population than to control their food supply.
The Office Despost and Staples reports should not shock anyone.
These massive retailers were once supported by SMALL BUSINESS. The small biz employees, and other, consumers, that shopped there were just icing on their over-marked-up cakes.
Amazing how hundreds of thousands small businesses have went away, along with millions of their family-supporting jobs, yet their is little, to no, reporting on the fact by the business “experts” or the MSM.
Just what did the smart guys think would happen when you off shored and over-regulated the little guys out? Those were the big guys CUSTOMERS. I knew in the ’90s that it was only a matter of time before those that pushed for these lopsided sales treaties would start to see their mistakes. They didn’t just offshore the jobs and prodution, they offshored their own CUSTOMERS. Which is the EXACT reason why GM & Chrysler, and nearly Ford, went belly up. They voted in the 90s to offshore their customers. Strange how they actually believed (as did Wally, and Staples, and Caterpillar) that a country that pays $1 an hour with little regulatory overhead, would somehow produce CUSTOMERS that could buy the overpriced inventory they were producing.
And, just what would one think would happen when your regulations and legislation continuously wipe out American jobs and the business gobbled up by mega-corporations that have offshored, or imported, the labor?
These jobs were also the jobs that supported places like Red Lobster.
Shocking that you can’t sell cars, lobsters, pasta or fancy desk blotters to the under and unemployed.
But, no worries, Ob ama announced yesterday that he is going to fix the (bullshit) gender gap by enacting another strata of regulations, rules and lawsuits. The women in government (already paid to scale, not gender/skillset) will rejoice. Another few million of us will see our opportunities further cut, our futures further diminished.
So, let’s take account of the realities that are coming for us schmucks still working in the private sector:
1. Larger percentage of pay to health care. Even more if you actually need to use it.
2. Increased cost of compliance to government taxes even for the lowest of incomes. Guys making $40k have to pay $200 to find out they owe the government more money. Those getting food stamps, free health care and housing, if they bothered to work 10-15 hours a week, will get thousands and thousands. Warren Buffett will pay his 10%, or less. The cost of this on our productivity and paychecks is mind-boggling.
3. Automatic paycuts as the least skilled are granted five years worth of raises, overnight. If you think your bosses can afford another $3 for those of us that already make more than $10 an hour, HA! Good luck with that and this will lead directly to even more of these stores closing. Watch productivity fall (at first) as the bosses figure out they are now making the same as the losers that barely show up and work.
3. Gender gap pay issues, loss of pay for high earning women, and men. Opportunities will be moved elsewhere to avoid what we know will be a complex clusterfuck of new rules private business will have to follow. Businesses will live in fear of violating the new regulations. Our damn checkbooks will be thrown open to the gubment to make sure we are “fair.” Not only will this cost $$ and jobs, it is going to mandate MORE gubment intrusion into previously, sacredly, private information. What the healthcare law has done to the individual, I’ll bet this POS will do to the business. All in the name of fairness, of course.
4. Carbon schemes. Estimated to add 10-30% to our utilities. If we look to Europe, we would see those are as bright and rosy guesstimates as the cost of Ob ama care. Read an article about rates DOUBLING in England as the gubment was called in to subsidize the “poor.” Additional layer of bureaucracy and cost on the nation’s businesses (jobs).
So, by the end of O’s term, we are going to get paycuts again (2nd since the recession was first declared), increased mandated expenses on sickcare, increased utility rates, and another billion pages of regulation for Ma and Pop to adhere to. I see multiple laws that are going to directly shed hundreds of thousands more jobs.
Oh the fucking recovery is surely here and for real. In the bank going forward.
And I forgot the illegals. Add 15 million LEGAL job applicants to the pool of newly indebted-for-life college grads.
Socialism, and fairness, and Stalin are a GREAT way to run a democracy!
Free shit for all, until it is a free for all.
cripes