The drop dead date is June 5, by that date everything is supposed to be 100% wound down. Many stores seem to have been told June 3 is the latest date they will be open but nobody really knows when these will close.HoustonRetail wrote: ↑April 28th, 2024, 7:36 pmI agree. I visited a few final-day stores in Houston, all starting at 20 Items/$5. There was a tiny bit of food (canned goods and some moldy cookies), but other than that, only party supplies remained in any real quantity. Fixture sales were clearly booming, too. I only went to one non-closing store. It is the largest location I know of, a former Phar-Mor, and it was well stocked. It did not have produce, but it still had frozen and refrigerated food. Small sections of shelving were bare, but there were no large gaps. It is obviously all liquidator merchandise, though there are no vendor products. One of the stores I visited had liquidators there, and I found that the other stores' sales should be over by the end of May, at least in Houston.Bagels wrote: ↑April 28th, 2024, 1:27 pm I think the liquidation has been very successful. Many of the SoCal stores have only general merchandise remaining, with everything left marked 80% off. I don’t think the general merchandise was ever a hit…. 50-80% off sales were fairly common. This stuff was added in the last few years - high margin (at full price) stuff they hoped would turn fortunes around. But obviously most of it was junk that could readily be purchased for less at flea markets.
Foothills Ranch is still fully stocked, which is unbelievable. Really only laundry detergant and cleaning supplies are gone, with pantry gradually dwindling. Liquidation sales gives you some insight onto their sellers — they had boxes and boxes of deodorant and now they’re mostly gone. That’s gotta put a dent into Colgate’s production - who’s going to buy all that Speed Stick? Walmart and Target barely carry it anymore.
I was very surprised the fixture sales ended upon closure of the stores. I thought they'd stay open for a day or two to complete additional fixture sales, but they do not appear to be doing that.
I think they have some strategies they can use to empty these stores out very quickly if they have a block of say 50 stores they want to close within the next 7 days. They can start with the "cart" promotion of some flat price for an entire cartfull of goods, then this 10/20 items for $5 thing, etc.
There seem to be well stocked stores still scattered around. My read is these stores are ones that did not perform well. There is a store in Folsom, CA which I have been watching for a while as it seemed to have very little business, and it was on the list to close today. It did not close and is still at 40% off maximum discount and the aisles in there are still probably 80% stocked on non food and 50% stocked on food (more than that in frozen/refrigerated).
I haven't seen any liquidator merchandise yet in any of the closures I've been to. I've been in Los Angeles area, Sacramento area, and the 3 around Reno. Everything is 99 merchandise. A lot of it does look like liquidator product but it is actually their stuff. I wonder if the TX warehouse didn't have enough product so they got the liquidators to add stuff for them. I am sore about that TX thing because I honestly think TX has hurt them for many years.. I may be wrong. I have heard other theories that CA got to be a major problem the past few years due to theft and high operating costs. I just think the company didn't successfully transition from 99 cent price point to higher price points and did not have the right merchandise and lost a lot of customers and factors like TX being iffy for them in the first place combined with increasing issues in CA only made it worse.
Rite Aid liquidations on the other hand are getting a LOT of liquidator merchandise.