Big Lots, which has 16 stores in Connecticut, has announced in an SEC filing that it plans to close between 35 to 40 stores in 2024, according to multiple media reports.
The SEC filing reported, “existence of ‘substantial doubt’ regarding our ability to continue as a going concern. The company has previously said it missed its sales goals “due largely to a continued pullback in consumer spending by our core customers.”
The Ohio-based discount chain said in its June Q1 results that Big Lots, Inc. had “reported a net loss of $205.0 million, or $6.99 per share, for the first quarter of fiscal 2024 ended May 4, 2024. This result includes a net after-tax loss of $72.7 million, or $2.48 per diluted share, associated with impairment charges, fees related to Project Springboard, and distribution center closure costs.”
“Excluding this loss, the adjusted net loss in the first quarter of 2024 was $132.3 million, or $4.51 per diluted share… The adjusted net loss for the first quarter of fiscal 2023 was $98.7 million, or $3.40 per diluted share,” the company said in June.
A request for comment was sent to the corporation.
Bruce Thorn, president and CEO of Big Lots said at the time in the June announcement: “While we made substantial progress on improving our business operations in Q1, we missed our sales goals due largely to a continued pullback in consumer spending by our core customers, particularly in high ticket discretionary items.
“We remain focused on managing through the current economic cycle by controlling the controllables. As we move forward, we’re taking aggressive actions to drive positive comp sales growth in the latter part of the year and into 2025, and to maintain year-over-year gross margin rate improvements, all driven by progress on our five key actions,” he said.
“Our operational initiatives to offer a larger assortment of new and exciting extreme bargains, cut costs, and increase productivity exceeded our targets in Q1. This enabled us to improve consumer perceptions about our brand and the value we offer, and to deliver a year-over-year improvement in gross margin and operating expenses, despite significant sales pressure,” he said in June. ” As a reminder, our five key actions are to own bargains, to communicate unmistakable value, to increase store relevance, to win customers for life with our omnichannel efforts, and to drive productivity. We still have a lot of work ahead of us, but remain confident that the five key actions are putting us on the right path to turn around our business.”
The SEC report said” “Forward-looking statements that we make herein and in other reports and releases are not guarantees of future performance and actual results may differ materially
from those discussed in such forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, including, but not limited to, the current economic and credit conditions, inflation, the cost of goods, our inability to successfully execute strategic initiatives, competitive pressures, economic pressures on our customers and us, our inability to implement strategic actions and alternatives to improve our performance and liquidity and mitigate the existence of “substantial doubt” regarding our ability to continue as a going concern, our inability to increase cash flow to support our operating activities and fund our obligations and working capital needs, the availability of brand name closeout merchandise, trade restrictions, freight costs, the risks discussed in the Risk Factors section of our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K, and other factors discussed from time to time in our other filings with the SEC, including Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and Current Reports on Form 8-K. This report should be read in conjunction with such filings, and you should consider all of these risks, uncertainties and other factors carefully in evaluating forward-looking statements.
The company has not named which stores could close.
