Cheapskates, skinflints, tightwads: tip out some of your off-brand energy drink for the demise of a onetime giant in the field. I'm Jason Toon and this is Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about the stuff people make, buy, and sell - sometimes, very cheaply. (As always, but it seems especially good to mention this time to clear up any sense of bias or angle, Shoddy Goods is from the point of view of me, Jason Toon, not Meh.) Here's the thing about discount retail. Sometimes wider struggles in the retail industry can work to your advantage: more overstock, more closeouts, more cheap opportunity buys. But ultimately, you're still in the retail industry. If you're not on top of your game - of maybe just not lucky - the same tidal waves that sink the flagships can swamp you too. So it is with Big Lots, the latest victim of the ongoing brick-and-mortar mass extinction event, who finally announced last month that they were going out of business after a bankruptcy proceeding. All locations would hold going-out-of-business sales, as would the website, and the company would stop buying new inventory.
Last dance in Mansfield, Texas. They're not the only bargain-bin store suffering: some 1,000 Family Dollar stores either closed last year or will close this year. But industry watchers point out that others, like HomeGoods, are growing while Big Lots has seen sales drop every year for years. "When you look at a lot of the things it sells, you can actually get very similar products, if not better products, cheaper at places like Walmart and Target,” analyst Neil Saunders told Modern Retail. A brief meme-stock rally couldn't hold off the inevitable. Big Lots filed for bankruptcy in September and, after a potential sale fell through, announced in December that all of its stores would close. The shopping dead: zombie brand rises again! But wait! Last week, Big Lots announced that they'd struck a deal to sell between 200 and 400 stores to an outfit called Variety Wholesalers, who will keep them open under the Big Lots name. Variety Wholesalers operates discount stores across the South under brands like Roses, Maxway, and Big 10. It's anybody's guess to what extent the Variety Wholesalers version of Big Lots will resemble the one that dominated the bottom of the retail pond in the 1990s and 2000s. I've never been to Roses; this account from 2023 explicitly positions it somewhere between Walmart and Big Lots, but with a quirkier, more opportunistic inventory in keeping with its smaller size. The arrangement was brokered by Gordon Brothers, an investment firm who have previously liquidated enough decrepit retailers to fill a 1990s mall: KB Toys, Bed Bath & Beyond, CompUSA, The Sharper Image, Linens 'n' Things, Hollywood Video… I'll give you a second to wipe away those wistful tears of nostalgia.
Superheroes never stay dead. Will anyone miss it? Look, I'm cheap. I'm the kind of guy who will tell you all about how little I spent on something, whether you want to hear it or not. And I've made my living mostly in the field of deal-driven ecommerce. I'm in the family. But I never caught the Big Lots bug. Something about it seemed even more depressing than the usual overstock atmosphere. Maybe it was the off-putting animation style in their commercials. Maybe it was their pioneering "just ransacked" look: once retailers like Target and Walmart saw that you could get away with your stores being a total mess all the time, they stopped trying, too. Or maybe it was Big Lots' jarring combination of furniture and random dollar-store junk. "Save on brands like Broyhill, Swiffer, & Doritos," their website says to this day. It never made any sense to me: who goes out to grab some Little Debbies and comes home with a leather sectional? Now that I think about it, the sheer lunacy of random inventory was probably the only thing I liked about Big Lots. But no doubt, there will be diehards anxiously awaiting news of which of their local Big Lots stores will be saved. Some closures have already happened or been announced. The rest may be hanging in limbo for a while, as Big Lots and Variety Wholesalers told a court they'd need until April to decide which stores to keep open. In any case, whatever form it takes, bargain-hunters in a couple of hundred American towns will still be able to walk the messy aisles of something called Big Lots for the foreseeable future. Who knows? Some of them might even stop by for some off-brand dishwasher pods and walk out with a new recliner.
They can never close out your memories. Oddly, I don’t think I’ve ever been in a Big Lots, even though you might guess I have some interest in seeing random crap sold well below it’s original prices. Maybe if they had a version where they only showed me one thing at a time. What are your favorite stores that are now gone? If you could bring back one business from the corporate graveyard, which would you pick? Chime in, and find out where everyone else loved to shop in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat! Hurry! For a limited time*, every article in the Shoddy Goods archive is 90% off the usual price of $0! That's a $0 savings! *-Until the heat death of the universe
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