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Back in January, Kohls announced that it would be closing 27 of its stores across America in order to help the company control costs and increase operational efficiency. At the time, Kohls described the closing locations as underperforming and said the closures will occur by April 2025. And now it looks like Kohls remains on track for that by April deadline. As first noticed by USA Today, the 27 stores that Kohls had previously announced would be closing now list their last day of operation as this Saturday, March 29, on Kohls store locator tool. For example, the store locator listing for the Kohls located at 1116 1st Street in Napa, California, now lists, in bright red letters, This store will be closing soon. Our last day of business at this location will be Saturday, March 29th. Other closing locations also show the same message. The listing for the Napa store goes on to reveal that its store hours for the last day of its operation will be from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. After that, the store will shut its doors to customers for good. Kohls store closures 2025 full list The 27 Kohls stores that are closing are spread across 15 states, with California being hit the hardest with 10 stores closing there. After the stores are closed on Saturday, Kohls will still operate over 1,120 locations across the country. Announcing the closures in January, Kohls CEO Tom Kingsbury said, “We always take these decisions very seriously. As we continue to build on our long-term growth strategy, it is important that we also take difficult but necessary actions to support the health and future of our business for our customers and our teams.” The full list of store closures is below. Alabama Spanish Fort – 21000 Town Center Ave. Arkansas Little Rock West – 13909 Chenal Pkwy. California Balboa (San Diego) – 5505 Balboa Ave. Encinitas – 134 N El Camino Real Fremont – 43782 Christy St. Mountain View – 350 Showers Dr. Napa – 1116 1st St. Pleasanton – 4525 Rosewood Dr. Point West (Sacramento) – 1896 Arden Way San Rafael – 5010 Northgate Dr. San Luis Obispo – 205 Madonna Rd. Westchester – 8739 S Sepulveda Blvd. Colorado Arapahoe Crossing (Aurora) – 6584 S Parker Rd. Georgia Duluth – 2050 W Liddell Rd. Idaho Boise – 400 N Milwaukee St. Illinois Plainfield – 11860 S Route 59 Spring Hill (West Dundee) – 3000 Spring Hill Ring Rd. Massachusetts Stoughton – 501 Technology Center Dr. New Jersey East Windsor – 72 Princeton Hightstown Rd. Ohio Blue Ash – 4150 Hunt Rd. Forest Park (Cincinnati) – 100 Cincinnati Mills Dr. Oregon Portland Gateway – 10010 NE Halsey St. Pennsylvania Pottstown – 351 W Schuylkill Rd. Texas North Dallas – 18224 Preston Rd. Utah Riverton – 13319 S 3600 W Ste 13LOT Virginia Herndon – 2100 Centreville Rd. Williamsburg – 100 Gristmill Plz
Category:
E-Commerce
At eight months pregnant with my first child, I walked into my bosss office, ready for a pivotal meeting. I had spent months designing a new crisis management program for our universityone that would improve student outcomes and reduce institutional risk. This was the moment Id learn whether my work would be implemented. I had poured everything into this project. It reflected my expertise, positioned the university at the forefront of best practices, andfor me personallyoffered the challenge and recognition I craved. My current role felt stagnant, and this opportunity was exactly what I needed. My boss was thrilled with my proposal and agreed I was the right person to lead it. Then, she hesitated. But, she said, you may not want it. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/acupofambition_logo.jpg","headline":"A Cup of Ambition","description":"A biweekly newsletter for high-achieving moms who value having a meaningful career and being an involved parent, by Jessica Wilen. To learn more visit acupofambition.substack.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/acupofambition.substack.com","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} I was stunned. Of course, I wanted it. It was a promotion I had essentially built for myself. But she smiled and, with what she saw as kindness, said, Once the baby comes, you may find that youre less interested in work. You might be less . . . ambitious. Youre going to find that youre a different person. I assured her I wanted the role, and the promotion was official. But her words cast a shadow over the good news. Less ambitious? Change my identity? What kind of sexist nonsense was that? I knew exactly who I was, and I wasnt about to prove her right. When motherhood becomes a career liability I hadnt even given birth, yet I was already experiencing the motherhood penaltya term that refers to the economic and career disadvantages that mothers often face in the workplace compared to their childless counterparts and fathers. Sociologists have long studied this phenomenon and have found that, to compensate, working mothers often feel pressured to downplay their parental responsibilities to be taken seriously at work. When I returned to work after maternity leave, I found myself doing exactly this. I shared my parenting experiences with only a small group of trusted colleagues, wary of confirming anyones biases. My bosss words still echoed in my head. Even in an institution more supportive of working parents than most, I didnt want anyone to doubt my dedication. The COVID-19 pandemic briefly shattered this illusion. When kids interrupted Zoom meetings asking for help with virtual school, hiding our parental roles became impossible. But now many of us feel pressure to return to the pre-pandemic norms of keeping motherhood in the background. The unspoken expectation remains: Be present as a professional first, a parent second. Of course, the pressure to separate our professional and personal identities comes at a steep cost. When employees feel they cant be authentic at work, they disengage, burn out, or leave. This isnt just a loss for individualsits a loss for organizations that miss out on the creativity, resilience, and leadership working parents bring to the table. Bridging the gap Ironically, my boss was rightbut not in the way she expected. After having my son, I did change. I returned to work with a broader perspective, increased flexibility in my thinking, and with a deeper well of empathy. And these changes made me a different kind of professionalthey made me better. Parenthood forces us to develop skills that translate directly into leadership: patience, conflict resolution, adaptability, and emotional intelligence. It forces us to prioritize, make decisions under pressure, and manage competing demands. These skills and perspectives are deeply needed in todays workplaces. We need to stop pretending that work and parenting exist in opposition. The more we integrate these identities, the stronger we becomeas professionals, as leaders, and as humansand the stronger our organizations become. Its time to rewrite the narrative. Parenthood deepens our capacity for leadership, strengthens our problem-solving skills, and fuels our drive to create a better world for the next generation. The real challenge isnt whether working parents can stay committed to their careersits whether workplaces can evolve to recognize the full value they bring. So instead of downplaying our role as parents, what if we embraced it as an asset? What if we stopped proving our worth by pretending caregiving doesnt exist, and instead reshaped professional culture to reflect the reality that so many of us live? The more openly we integrate our identities, the more we create space for others to do the same. I didnt lose my ambition when I became a mother. If anything, it sharpened. The question isnt whether we change after parenthoodits whether we allow those changes to make us stronger. And whether the workplace is ready to keep up. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/acupofambition_logo.jpg","headline":"A Cup of Ambition","description":"A biweekly newsletter for high-achieving moms who value having a meaningful career and being an involved parent, by Jessica Wilen. To learn more visit acupofambition.substack.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/acupofambition.substack.com","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
Category:
E-Commerce
Last week, President Donald Trump fired more people as part of his ongoing quest to prevent the government from doing the basic work of governing. This time, his targets were the two remaining Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission, Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, whose continued service Trump declared to be inconsistent with his agenda. Their terminations, along with the resignation of FTC Chair Lina Khan earlier this year, mean that three of the Commissions five seats are, at least for the time being, vacant. They also mean that only remaining members of the federal agency charged with promoting fair competition and protecting consumers from the worst excesses of corporate greed are Andrew Ferguson, the newly-promoted chair, and Melissa Holyoak, two Republicans who now can do more or less whatever they want. Bedoya and Slaughter have promised to sue, and for good reason: Firing commissioners without cause is, to use a technical term, extremely illegal. Under the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, which established the agency, commissioners serve seven-year terms, and presidents may only remove them for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office. In 1935, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of these for-cause protections in Humphreys Executor v. United States, a case in which President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to fire an FTC member with whom he had political differencesin other words, exactly what Trump is trying to do almost a century later. Humphreys Executor is basic, first-year-of-law-school stuff; if this fact pattern were to appear on a final exam, every law student would answer correctly. Conservative activists, who abhor even modest impositions on executive power, have been whittling away at Humphreys Executor for years. Trumps attempts to fire Bedoya and Slaughter, among the other independent agency heads hes tried to dismiss of late, could be the Republican Partys best chance yet to dispose of what remains of this annoying constraint on his authority. Already, Trumps Department of Justice has said it wont defend Humphreys Executor in court, which is roughly the equivalent of holding up a giant sign outside Brett Kavanaughs house that says PLEASE OVERTURN ASAP. But Trump wants to do more than generate yet another test case to get the Courts conservative supermajority to get rid of yet another legal precedent the Republican Party doesnt like. Since President Joe Biden appointed Khan, then a 32-year-old antitrust lawyer, as the FTCs youngest-ever chair in 2021, conservatives have portrayed the Commission as an anti-capitalism supervillain, bemoaning its insistence on burdening virtuous corporations with onerous regulations that snarl the beautiful, frictionless operation of the free market. Firing Bedoya and Slaughter is one of Trumps many gifts to his plutocrat backers. If upheld in court, their terminations will make it easier for corporations to rip you off, and less likely that the government will do anything about it. Congress formed the Federal Trade Commission in response to the explosion of corporate power in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and charged the agency with preventing unfair methods of competition, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce. The FTC publishes rules defining what practices, exactly, qualify as unfair or deceptive, and can sue companies that violate those rules. The rationale is simple: A basic premise of the U.S. economic systemthe notion that competition is good for everyoneunravels quickly when deep-pocketed players are free to jack up prices, suppress wages, squeeze out small businesses, defraud their customers, and otherwise manipulate the market. The FTC hasnt always lived up to its lofty promises. But Khan was far more aggressive than her predecessors about prosecuting anticompetitive practices, especially with respect to Big Tech, which had remained several steps ahead of a dated regulatory infrastructure ill-equipped to tackle all the ways that modern Silicon Valley behemoths grind competitors into dust. Under her leadership, the FTC brought high-profile lawsuits against Amazon and Meta, and reached a $150 million settlement with Twitter over alleged targeted-advertising privacy violations. When announcing a lawsuit against Amazon, which the FTC accused of squeezing third-party sellers on the platform while promoting its own products, Khan declined to rule out trying to break up the company or holding executives personally accountable for the alleged misconduct. Other aspects of the FTCs work had a more direct impact on consumers day-to-day lives. The agency passed a rule requiring companies to make it as easy to cancel subscriptions as it is to sign up, thus ending the days of desperately scouring Reddit for the number to an unlisted phone line that no one ever answers. Another rule requires sellers to disclose all those previously hidden junk fees that had a funny way of inflating ticket prices and vacation rental rates well beyond the advertised price. Perhaps the FTCs most significant recent accomplishment is a ban on the enforcement of noncompete agreements, which would free millions of employees to leave their jobs without fear of retribution, and by one estimate would raise wages by $300 billion per year. Corporate interests quickly challenged the rule, which is temporarily on ice as the case winds its way through the federal court system. Khans tenure earned plaudits from some politicians you might expect (Elizabeth Warren, who thanked her for showing what it loos like for the government to work for working people) and some you might not (JD Vance, who opined that Khan was doing a pretty good job in February 2024). But she infuriated the donor class, including the usual suspects on the rightthe Wall Street Journal alone has published more than 100 editorials, op-eds, and letters criticizing herand even some well-heeled Democratic fundraisers whod grown accustomed to permissive antitrust enforcement. The FTC, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, its analog for the banking and financial services industries, became reviled in boardrooms for doing the work of protecting normal people in this country at the expense of its oligarchs. Things, to put it mildly, have changed since Trumps re-election. After Khan stepped down, Trump elevated Ferguson, whom the Senate confirmed as a commissioner in 2023, to replace her. A former Senate staffer who worked on both of Trumps first-term impeachment defenses, Ferguson lobbied for Khans job by pitching himself to the White House as a Trump loyalist who would stop Lina Khans war on mergers, end Lina Khans politically motivated investigations, and thwart the anti-business, anti-innovation agenda of the radical left. He also said he would fight back against the trans agenda, because a prerequisite for getting Trumps attention is promising to inflict pain and suffering on members of a marginalized group. People whose outsized wealth and power felt threatened under Khan seem determined not to face such a nightmarish future again. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, whose companies have tangled with the FTC in recent years, are prostrating themselves at Trumps feet, writing seven-figure checks for his inauguration or, in Musks case, nine-figure checks in support of Trumps 2024 re-election bid. It is not a coincidence they are doing so as the FTC seeks Zuckerbergs testimony next month in its antitrust lawsuit against Meta, and prepares to take Amazon to trial this year over allegations that the company trapped customers in Prime subscriptions that were especially difficult to cancel. In an interview in January, Khan said she hoped the incoming administration would not offer a sweetheart deal to the tech executives cozying up to the president, but recognized that the matters were out of her hands. I cant predict what future people in my position are going to do, she said. Bedoya and Slaughter, the fired commissioners, have what feels like a pretty airtight case: a near-century-old Supreme Court precedent that protects their jobs through the end of their respective terms. Khan is backing her former colleagues, framing their blatantly illegal firings as evidence of the White Houses enthusiasm for selling out consumers to the highest bidder. If what we care about is freedom, and making sure that Americans enjoy real liberties, allowing big corporations to abuse peopleto bully them, to coerce themis so antithetical to that idea of freedom, she told MSNBCs Ali Velshi earlier this week. But precedent is only as useful as long as five justices are willing to uphold it, and this Supreme Court has functioned mostly as a rubber stamp for exercises of executive power, as long as the executive is Donald Trump. An eventual Supreme Court decision that empowers presidents to fire independent agency heads would further empower corporations to consolidate power and exploit regular people. In the meantime, Bedoya and Slaughters absence from the Federal Trade Commission will allow the Trump administration to get a nice head start.
Category:
E-Commerce
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