Arcadia Group to close up to 260 high street stores

[Kingofthedead4]

http://www.rte.ie/news/2011/1124/arcadia-business.html

Arcadia, the Topshop-to-BHS UK retail group owned by billionaire Philip Green, added to the bad news coming from the UK high street, posting a 38% fall in yearly profit and a further deterioration in recent trading as mild weather deterred winter clothing purchases.
The group, which also owns the Topman, Burton, Dorothy Perkins, Miss Selfridge, Wallis and Evans brands, said it made a pretax profit of £133.1m sterling in the year to August 27, down from £213.2m the previous year.

Ok the profits have fallen by 1/3rd BUT they are still in profit, he is now on about closing half of the shops next year because the leases are up. He obviously does not care about the staff the works in these shops. This is why people become so fed up with big business's.

[v0id]

They'll probably close the smaller shops and move them as 'franchises' into bigger stores

[beeman]

Originally Posted by Kingofthedead4

http://www.rte.ie/news/2011/1124/arcadia-business.html


Ok the profits have fallen by 1/3rd BUT they are still in profit, he is now on about closing half of the shops next year because the leases are up. He obviously does not care about the staff the works in these shops. This is why people become so fed up with big business's.

The clue is in the highlighted bit. Unless there is a steep decline in sales you'll probably find the final amount of closures amount to half or even a quarter of the announced amount. Many big retailers make this claim when leases are up as a way of playing hardball with the landlord. "half the rent or we'll close shop".

Ontop of that many big chains with the number of stores arcadia have will routinely close 30-50 branches per year for 1 reason or another (branch loosing money, not making enough money to justify necessary renovation, building beeing demolished for "regeneration", landlord goes bust etc). You can bet the figures released include these "natural losses".

Also when figures like these are published in the press they don't tend to take into account of NEW stores the company may bee opening.

An example for all this was in September (i think it was) another large chain who i do occational contract work for announced it will bee closing 100 stores in the next 12 months. But none of the reports took into account the fact that 40 of those stores were concession stands inside a (bankrupt) company's stores and so they had no choose but to close them. nore was there any mention of the 30 new stores they planned to open in the same 12 months. Meaning the net closures (that were within the company's control) was 30 not the 100 the papers were shouting about.