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Saks Global, owner of luxury retail chains Saks 5th Avenue and Neiman Marcus, has announced the closure of most of its discount outlet stores, Saks Off 5th and Last Call. The store closures come weeks after Saks Global announced that it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Heres what you need to know about the store closures, including a full list of the locations being shuttered. Whats happened? Yesterday, Saks Global said it would close a majority of its discount outlet stores. While Sak Global is best known for its high-end luxury department store chains, Saks 5th Avenue and Neiman Marcus, the company owns several other retailers, including Bergdorf Goodman, Saks Off 5th, Last Call, and Horchow. The company has now announced that two of these retailers will be hit by store closings. The first is Saks Off 5th, the companys outlet store chain, which sells discounted apparel and accessories for shoppers on a budget. The company also announced that it will close all its Last Call stores. Last Call is the discount outlet chain originally owned by Neiman Marcus, which Saks Global acquired for around $2.7 billion in 2024. Why are Saks Off 5th and Last Call stores closing? Saks Global is closing these locations as part of its Chapter 11 bankruptcy process, which the company filed for earlier this month. The goal of the bankruptcy is to strengthen the foundation of our business and position it for the future, Saks Global CEO Geoffroy van Raemdonck stated earlier this month. Over the past several years, the company now known as Saks Global has become saddled with debt, driven by factors affecting many retailers, including reduced sales, declining foot traffic, increased online competition, and inflationary pressures. But the companys debt problems also increased significantly after it acquired competitor Neiman Marcus in 2024. This weeks announcement of store closures doesnt come out of the blue. Earlier this month, when Saks Global announced it was filing for bankruptcy, the company said it was evaluating its operational footprint to invest resources where it has the greatest long-term potential. That evaluation has now led to the closure of a majority of its Saks Off 5th and all of its Last Call stores. Saks Global now says the store closures are the result of a thorough review of its off-price business. Which Last Call stores are closing? Saks Global has confirmed that all of its remaining Last Call stores will close. This encompasses five locations in three states. Those locations are: California Desert Hills Premium Outlets (Cabazon, CA) The Outlets at Orange (Orange, CA) Florida Sawgrass Mills (Sunrise, FL) Texas Grapevine Mills (Grapevine, TX) San Marcos Premium Outlets (San Marcos, TX) Which Saks Off 5th stores are closing? Unlike its Last Call stores, Saks Global will not shutter all of its Saks Off 5th stores. However, the majority of the stores will be closing. The company says that 12 Saks Off 5th locations will remain open, while the other 57 locations will close. Those 57 locations are spread across 18 states. Here is the full list of Saks Off 5th stores that are closing: Arizona Glendale, AZ Phoenix, AZ Scottsdale, AZ Tucson, AZ California Cabazon, CA Camarillo, CA Costa Mesa, CA Livermore, CA Beverly Connect, Los Angeles (West), CA Milpitas, CA Palm Desert, CA Petaluma, CA Ontario, CA San Diego, CA Woodland Hills, CA Conneticuit Clinton, CT Stamford High Ridge (Stamford), CT Florida Destin, FL Ellenton (Tampa), FL Tampa (Lutz), FL Naples Park Shore (Naples), FL Orlando, FL Orlando (Vineland), FL Georgia Atlanta (Woodstock), GA North Atlanta (Woodstock), GA Hawaii Ala Moana (Honolulu, HI) Hawaii (Honolulu, HI) Illinois Aurora Chicago (Aurora), IL State Street (Chicago), IL Northbrook, IL Rosemont, IL Massachutses Boston (Somerville), MA Wrentham, MA Maryland Clarksburg, MD Arundel (Hanover), MD Minnisota Eagan, MN Navada Las Vegas N (Las Vegas), NV Las Vegas S (Las Vegas), NV New Hampshire Merrimack, NH New Jersey Bridgewater, NJ Elizabeth, NJ Shrewsbury, NJ New York Deer Park, NY Eastchester, NY Greenburgh, NY Riverhead, NY North Carolina Charlotte, NC Mebane, NC Ohio Columbus, OH South Carolina Hilton Head (Bluffton), SC Charleston, SC Texas Cypress, TX Dallas Park (Dallas), TX Grand Prairie, TX Katy, TX San Antonio, TX Sugarland, TX In addition to the above Saks Off 5th closing locations, Saks Global also announced that the retailer’s website, Saksoff5th.com, “is winding down operations. When do closing sales begin? Saks Global says Saksoff5th.com online closing sales will begin today, Friday, January 30. Physical store closing sales will begin on Saturday, January 31. The company says that gift cards to these physical retail stores will continu to be accepted, but only until Saturday, February 14th. Gift cards for saksoff5th.com will only be accepted until Friday, February 13th. All merchandise purchased during the closing sales is non-returnable or exchangeable.
Category:
E-Commerce
President Donald Trump said he plans to announce his choice for chairman of the Federal Reserve on Friday morning, a long-awaited decision that could set up a showdown on whether the U.S. central bank preserves its independence from the White House and electoral politics.For the past year, the president has aggressively attacked Fed Chair Jerome Powell, whose term as the head of the U.S. central bank ends in May. Trump maintains that Powell should cut the Fed’s benchmark interest rates more drastically to fuel faster economic growth, while the Fed chair has taken a far more judicious approach in the wake of Trump’s tariffs because inflation is already elevated.“I’ll be announcing the Fed chair tomorrow morning,” Trump told reporters Thursday night as he went into a screening of the documentary “Melania” about his wife. “It’s going to be, somebody that is very respected, somebody that’s known to everybody in the financial world. And I think it’s going to be a very good choice. I hope so.”Trump stayed relatively cryptic about his pick. His search was led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent with four known finalists: Kevin Warsh, a former Fed governor; Christopher Waller, a current Fed governor; Rick Rieder, an executive with the financial firm BlackRock; and Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council. Trump previously suggested Hassett was the frontrunner, only to recently say that he wanted him to remain in his current post.Trump did say on Thursday night that “a lot of people think that this is somebody that could have been there a few years ago,” fueling speculation that he had chosen Warsh, who was a finalist in the 2017 search for Fed chair that led to Powell’s selection.Tensions between Trump and the central bank had been steadily mounting as the president used the renovation costs of the Fed’s headquarters to further lambaste Powell, a campaign that resulted in the Fed getting subpoenas from the Justice Department earlier this month. The Fed chair took the rare step of issuing a video statement in which he said, “The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the president.”Trump has long teased his Fed choice while saying his nominee would slash interest rates that influence the supply of money in the U.S. economy, the rate of inflation and the stability of the job market.On the cusp of Trump’s announcement, Powell might have the ability to block him in an effort to ensure the Fed preserves its credibility by staying away from political considerations.While his term as chair ends in roughly three months, Powell’s term on the Fed’s board of governors runs through 2028 and he could choose to remain in that post, likely blocking Trump’s ability to have his nominees control the majority of the seats on the board. Of the seven Fed governors, former President Joe Biden picked three of them in addition to renominating Powell to a second term as chair.If Powell stays on the board, he could also create a small procedural hurdle for Trump’s ability to nominate someone new to the board. This would mean Trump would either have to choose an existing board member as chair or replace Stephen Miran, who is on leave from his job as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers to fill a term as governor that technically ends on Saturday. If Trump chooses to replace Miran, he could name someone new to the board.At a Wednesday news conference, Powell declined to say whether he would leave the board. But he did offer some advice to any successor about balancing the need for independent judgment with public accountability.“Don’t get pulled into elected politics don’t do it,” Powell said. “Another is, that our window into democratic accountability is Congress. And it’s not a passive burden for us to go to Congress and talk to people. It’s an affirmative regular obligation.” Josh Boak and Darlene Superville, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
Hello, and welcome back to Fast Companys Plugged In. When Amazon announced this week that its shutting down Amazon Go, its 8-year-old chain of cashierless convenience stores, the news did not come as a shocker. Almost two years ago, the company shuttered all its Go stores in San Francisco, along with some locations in New York and Seattle. Another round of closures came in 2024. Now its going from a few stores to no stores, a footnote given that the same day brought the news that Amazon is laying off 16,000 people across the company. Having shopped at the Amazon Go near my San Francisco office almost 200 times, I counted myself as a fan. Even back then, though, it felt like the company either didnt understand what it had created or had already lost interest. The piece I wrote when the San Francisco stores closed felt like an obituary, even though other locations remained in business. I said at the time that regardless of what happened to Amazon Go, I hoped startups would pursue the goal of freeing us from the drudgery of waiting in line to pay for stuff. One I mentioned in that piece, Grabango, folded the following year. Reportedly, the expense and complexity of equipping stores with its technologywhich, like Go, involved a bevy of cameras using AI to keep track of shoppers and the products theyd plucked from shelvesplayed a part in its demise. I should note that cashierless retail is not entirely dead. Amazon is still working on the Just Walk Out technology that powered the Go stores, which it makes available to other retailers. Some of its Whole Food Market stores continue to offer a variant of the tech in the form of smart shopping carts called Dash Carts, which it recently upgraded. Startups that remain in the game include Zippin, whose Go-like technology is widely used at sporting and concert venues, and Mashgin, which eliminates the need to configure an entire store with cameras by having shoppers place items on a tray for AI-assisted checkout. The one place Ive encountered checkout-free shopping lately is at airports, where Ive bought items using both Amazons and Mashgins platforms. My experiences were positive. Lets be honest, though: It isnt tough to improve on airport retail in its traditional form. Cashierless checkout surviving for niche applications would be a dramatic reversal from the days when the first Amazon Go stores opened and I wondered whether human-dependent checkout was on its way to becoming as quaint as sales transactions involving someone eyeballing price tags on items and laboriously punching keys on a cash register. Maybe it will someday. But surely not in this decade, and I wouldnt bet on the one after that. Why is that? Along with the cost of the tech, theres the question of how well it works at all. In 2023, The Informations Theo Wayt reported that Amazon had 1,000 people in India reviewing transactions from its stores, and that 70% of sales required a human in the loop. That made it sound like the main thing the company had achieved was to remote-control the checkout process rather than eliminate it. It was also a reminder that shopping in Amazon Go stores involved being monitored by cameras, giving the whole process a Big Brother vibe. Amazon disputed details of Wayts report. And the fact that considerable human labor was required to train the Just Walk Out AI doesnt mean it would be so forever. Still, the more you know about how technology of this sort works, the more daunting it soundsespecially in the context of retail, a business that has traditionally been resistant to experimentation and long-term thinking. Back when I was popping into my neighborhood Amazon Go several times a week, I thought of what it was doing as being centered on making my life slightly better. Ultimately, though, retail technology is not about direct customer satisfaction. Its about increasing sales. Making shoppers happier is only one way to accomplish that, and probably not the easiest one. In 2018, my colleague Sean Captain wrote about Standard Cognition, which had opened a 1,900-foot demo cashierless shop in San Francisco and had plans to help retailers take thousands of stores cashierless in just a couple of years. That didnt happen. Now known as Standard AI, the company has pivoted away from grab-and-go toward using cameras to understand what shoppers actually see and respond to, its website says. Our proprietary models continuously track awareness, engagement, and conversion to prove media impact, refine promotions, and optimize performance across every in-store placement. Standard AI is not performing facial recognition or otherwise associating this data with specific identifiable individuals. But even in anonymized form, the idea of being monitored as I shop for the purpose of maximizing sales makes me wince. The companys sitewith close-up imagery of shoppers contemplating products, overlaid with stats Standard has collected about themdoesnt help. (Yes, I am aware that club cards have long tied shoppers to purchases, and that online shopping has always been a minefield when it comes to merchants spying on customers.) Much has changed since Amazon Go was a novelty. AI is now everywhere in our lives, and the list of areas where its impact is potentially transformative is almost literally endless. I still like the concept of grab-and-go shopping. For now, however, it seems most useful as a case study in why technology that workskinda, in certain circumstancescan fall so short of working as a real-world business. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on fastcompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky,
Category:
E-Commerce
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