Big loss if you love Big Lots: These Philly-area stores are closing

Big Lots is closing four stores in the Philadelphia area amid a larger shuttering of stores across the county.

The discount retailer, which sells a range of products including furniture, home appliances, and groceries, is headquartered in Ohio, and has over 1,300 stores in 48 states. Big Lots has 73 stores in Pennsylvania, 27 in New Jersey, and five in Delaware, according to the company website.

The discount retailer had previously announced plans to close between 35 and 40 stores in 2024, and open three locations, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from June. According to another filing from earlier this month, the company noted it could close up to 315 stores.

“While we made substantial progress on improving our business operations in [the first quarter of this fiscal year], we missed our sales goals due largely to a continued pullback in consumer spending by our core customers, particularly in high ticket discretionary items,“ company president and CEO Bruce Thorn said in a statement in June about the company’s quarterly results. “We remain focused on managing through the current economic cycle by controlling the controllables.”

The Philadelphia-area store closures are listed on the company’s website, along with a note of discounts at the locations. The website does not list when the stores will close. Big Lots did not respond to a request for comment about the closures.

Big Lots sales grew during the pandemic, as customers invested in their homes, in part driven by stimulus checks and additional unemployment benefits, CNN reported in 2020. While some of the company’s competitors shut their doors, Big Lots was considered essential because it sold groceries and home essentials, so it remained open, CNN reported.

In January 2022, the company announced it would open over 500 stores in several years after years of stalled expansion, according to CNN, but Big Lots saw its sales decline amid rising inflation, the Wall Street Journal reported in May. The company’s shares dropped to the lowest they had been in 30 years in May 2023, and the company announced it would close four distribution centers as a cost-cutting measure, according to the Journal.

Other retailers have shuttered stores in the Philadelphia area recently amid reductions in their overall footprint. In March, Family Dollar announced it would close six stores in Philadelphia after its parent company, Dollar Tree, said it would close nearly 1,000 locations. Express, the clothing retailer, held closing sales in April at 100 of its various branded stores, as the company prepared to close locations amid a bankruptcy, with five stores slated to close in the Philadelphia area. Rite Aid was set to close an additional six stores in Southeastern Pennsylvania and South Jersey amid the company’s bankruptcy, after closing other locations in the region, The Inquirer reported in April.