2300 retail locations going bye-bye.
Oh my God.
They’ve been terrible for years.
Sure, but that’s still thousands of people out of work.
Fake news, sir! Those people will be immediately employed by the Kushner Koal Kompany.
I know my wife stops by the one in Torrance occasionally for girl shoes so this sucks.
True. This is their second bankruptcy though, not a recent first. They did… very little different after emerging from the last one. Heck, they even had a Social Media smash hit on their hand with no plan to, whatsoever, on hot to capitalize on it if they were successful. Their leadership, or lack of, let them down. It doesn’t seem like the raiding Sears got but still just… well. I don’t know why this is a surprise other than it happened so soon after their media splash.
They were always the place to go if you needed women’s shoes in larger, traditionally men’s sizes. So I’ve heard.
That may have been dependent on the store. They were neither trendy nor a large selection of sizes here. It could very well be true elsewhere. They didn’t stand a chance against online though which offers, well, a lot more.
spam flagged
Continuing neutron decay in the mall half-life
Still:
:(
True. But when you need to get shoes for a growing kid who has literally run the soles off his shoes…
…and often grows out of them before he has a chance to wear them out, it was a decent stopgap alternative to shopping online.
-xtien
Well yeah they had cheap shoes.
I am not saying they didn’t have any value, just… they world moved on and they didn’t move with it. They made no real effort to standout, just kind of hung out in malls and strip malls waiting for people to show up. It didn’t work… twice.
I remember going there as a kid too, but never after that.
I think they tried to stand out with 2-for-1 sales, but by and large you are right. They certainly didn’t distinguish themselves with customer service in any of the stores I went to, and the one closest to me went out of business years ago. Their one saving grace was that they had a location near my kid’s school, so if we needed shoes in a pinch, it was easy to stop there after school.
Shoes can be really expensive if you have an active kid. And soccer cleats…oh my lord.
Recently my kid had to get new shoes and he got them at the mall. He was supposed to get sneakers that he could wear to P.E. But instead he got Vans because the girl he likes told him Vans are cool. We had to then go out and find a pair of sneakers for gym. He wore the Vans for two days, and has only worn the sneakers since because they feel better.
Yeah. Vans look nice, like Chuck Taylors look cool, but they feel like crap.
Sorry. Ranting about shoes.
-xtien
You would think that shoestores would be insulated from online purchases because you really do need to try them on, but free returns managed to erase that advantage.
We’re going to try out the shoes from the company I’m contracting at and see how it goes. They have these ridiculously cute unicorn shoes that the girls will love. Kid shoes and clothes are online only though. Will also hit the Payless closing sales whenever they start and try and stock up.
When my girlfriend, the last bastion of, “must try everything on first,” has now jumped ship to the free-return-and-exchange of online shopping, you know it’s doomed.
One last standing category of stores around here actually benefiting from the surplus of online purchases are the consignment and thrift shops that have been spreading like wildfire.
I don’t need to try them first. I either return them for free or I just take them to a local store even if I ordered online. Ordering online is 100x better than ordering in the store. The store never had what I liked and if they did it wasn’t in my size. Payless’ selection was pitiful, not exciting and you didn’t want to buy them unless they were running the 2 for 1… which often meant their selection was even worse than before during that sale.
My girlfriend loves an online store called eShakti that makes custom dresses that are really affordable. Their return policy for custom-made dresses is ridiculously easy. Lower the barrier for entry, and that makes a huge difference.
It’s a little harder with kids. We’ve gotten my kid shoes online and they worked okay. But kids like to test out running in their shoes. There’s this mental thing about, “Do they feel fast?” that happens. And with soccer cleats, the last store we went to had some artificial turf and a soccer ball so he could have me toss him the ball and he could control it and pass it to me. That made a difference to him in his selection of shoes.
-xtien
Sounds like Payless might have been better off not tricking people into paying 600 dollars for their fake designed shoes and better off catering to just kids and their parents.
Payless sold $600 shoes? I thought they were supposed to be cheap. What a disappointment.