Are Mass Store Closings The Start Of An Inevitable Downward Spiral?

At the recent ShopTalk Europe event in Copenhagen, (now former) Hudson's Bay Company CEO Gerald Storch posited that retailers risk hastening their demise by taking an axe to their store counts. Clearly there are many factors that contribute to a brand's march to the retail graveyard, yet there is mounting evidence that Storch's observation is on the money. As I've said many times, show me a retailer that is shuttering a large number of outlets and chances are the intrinsic problem is not too many stores but that the brand is not sufficiently relevant and remarkable for the stores it has.

I first surfaced this concern more than four years ago in my post "Shrinking to prosperity: The store closing delusion" and revisited it more recently with an updated Forbes post. While in many cases store counts need to be rationalized to address the overbuilding of the past two decades and to optimize store footprints given the shift to e-commerce, with rare exception, the retailers that are closing a large number of stores are working on the wrong problem.

When physical retail still accounts for 75-90% of a category's volume, it's hard to understand how radical cuts in store counts help address a brand's ability to maintain, much less grow, market share. When we know for a fact that brick & mortar locations are key to supporting a viable and growing e-commerce business (and vice versa), mothballing dozens (or even hundreds) of stores only serves to undermine a retailer's ability to meet customers' evolving omni-channel demands. When we recognize that it is often far cheaper to acquire and serve customers through physical stores, reducing store counts substantially can worsen a retailer's long-term cost position. And, as Storch points out, mass store closings erode purchasing power and can send consumers a signal that a retail brand is on its way to oblivion, serving only to make matters worse.

In fact, I cannot come up with a single major retailer that has closed 20% or more of its stores and is now considered truly healthy. On the other hand, I can easily name many that went through multiple iterations of down-sizing that have either liquidated or are currently in bankruptcy proceedings--Sears Canada being the most recent example. I can also list many that seem to be in perpetual store closing mode (Sears US for one) that thus far have been spared a visit from the grim reaper yet continue to see their operating results deteriorate with little hope for resurrection. For many, sadly, it's dead brand walking.

We should also ignore any analysis that tries to estimate the number of store closings that a retailer must undertake to get back to prior store productivity levels. First, anchoring success on past store productivity metrics is largely irrelevant as it ignores a store's contribution to online volume growth. Minimally, we need to understand the growth and profitability of a trade area and incorporate both e-commerce and physical store performance. Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus--just to name two powerful examples--have seen their historical store productivity numbers weaken, yet they still have healthy financial performance overall. Second, any such analysis is merely a rote arithmetic exercise that erroneously assumes that massive store closings don't have any adverse impact on e-commerce, nor make a brand less relevant and competitive in consumers' minds nor serve to de-leverage fixed costs.

Ultimately, I don't see a scenario where store closings will be the silver bullet that troubled retailers need to get back on track. They may be a key piece in a needed reinvention, but the critical work centers on taking the required actions to make these troubled brands sufficiently relevant and remarkable such that they can stem the share of wallet loss that got them into trouble in the first place.

Said differently, if sales are the problem, working on the cost side will never help breathe a dying retailer back to life.

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