Major US retailer confirms another store closure as it cuts costs after filing for bankruptcy during ‘retail ice age’

A BIG department store has closed its doors after filing for bankruptcy during the ‘Retail Ice Age’.

JCPenney will close another of its locations in September once the store’s lease expires.

2

2

The legendary retailer expects to close over 800 stores nationwide after filing for bankruptcy in May 2020.

Another location in Austintown Plaza, Ohio will close in September 2023 once the lease expires.

The store chose not to renew its lease and will be added to the list of stores affected by the ‘retail freeze’.

This term, used by Burt Flickinger III, an executive at Strategic Resource Group, describes the rapid increase in store closures across the country.

“Before Covid-19, about one in eight retail purchases was made online,” Flickinger told the Los Angeles Daily News.

“Now it’s about one in five.”

Austintown trustee Robert Santos said he will try to keep the JCPenny location open.

“If there’s anything we can do to help the business stay put, we will,” Santos told WFMJ.

However, trustee Monica Deavers told the outlet she doubts JCPenney will be able to keep its Austintown Plaza location since the retailer has filed for bankruptcy and is closing its doors in the United States.

Deavers said, “I would never want to see an empty seat.”

“We’re going to do whatever it takes to get something different in this building,” Deavers added.

A new tenant for the Austintown Plaza site has not yet been finalized, Dion Akins, director of commercial real estate at Washco Management, which owns the building, told the outlet.

Akins added that they have some leads and are actively working to bring a new tenant into the Plaza location.

Another popular department store, Macy’s, began a streak of closures back in 2019 with another 125 store closures in the run-up to the pandemic.

This was originally all part of a three-year plan to close a fifth of its stores.

The pandemic brought a surge in digital sales, forcing Macy’s to close all of its 775 locations in response, while continuing to operate online.

The retailer announced the closure of an additional six stores in 2022 in Alabama, California, Colorado, Missouri, Texas and Florida.

Four stores in California, Colorado, Maryland and Hawaii were scheduled to close in January alone.

These include those in Los Angeles, Fort Collins, Gaithersburg, and Kaneohe, respectively.