California-based 99 Cents Only Stores is closing down, citing COVID, inflation and product theft

SAN FRANCISCO – California-based 99 Cents Only Stores stated Friday it’ll shut all 371 of its retailers, finishing the chain’s 42-year run of marketing an collection of bargain-basement products.

The corporate has retail outlets throughout California, Arizona, Nevada and Texas that may start will promoting off their products, in addition to fixtures, furniture and apparatus.

Interim CEO Mike Simoncic stated in a commentary that the store has struggled for years on account of the COVID-19 pandemic, adjustments in client call for, inflation and emerging ranges of product “shrink” — a measure that encompasses losses from worker theft, shoplifting, injury, administrative mistakes and extra.

“This was an extremely difficult decision and is not the outcome we expected or hoped to achieve,” stated Simoncic, who might be stepping down. “Unfortunately, the last several years have presented significant and lasting challenges in the retail environment.”

The shuttering of 99 Cents Only Stores comes after fellow cut price store Dollar Tree ultimate month stated it was once closing 1,000 stores.

99 Cents Only Stores was once based in 1982 via Dave Gold, who opened its first retailer in Los Angeles on the age of fifty, in line with his 2013 obituary in the Los Angeles Times. Gold, who have been running at a liquor retailer owned via his father, discovered that marking down surplus pieces to 99 cents brought about them to promote out “in no time,” fueling his need to release a brand new spin at the buck retailer.

“I spotted it was once a magic quantity,” he told the Times. “I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to have a store where everything was good quality and everything was 99 cents?”

Brushing off doubting buddies and members of the family, Gold solid forward. His thought stuck on briefly, even in middle-class and upscale neighborhoods, permitting the corporate to move public at the New York Stock Exchange in 1996. It was once later offered for kind of $1.6 billion in 2011.

Gold changed into a multimillionaire however lived modestly. His circle of relatives informed the Times he lived in the similar middle-class house for just about 5 many years along with his spouse of 55 years and drove the similar Toyota Prius he bought in 2000.

While the chain first of all offered maximum pieces priced at 99 cents, in contemporary many years that changed into untenable, even though the corporate saved its trademarked identify.