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Exit Ames
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Business New Haven
8/19/2002
By: BNH
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That's about all she wrote for national discount department-store retail chains based in New England.
Following in the fatal footsteps of Massachusetts-based Bradlees and Norwalk-based Caldor, Ames Department Stores Inc. announced August 14 that it would cease operations in about ten weeks, one year after seeking bankruptcy protection and struggling to reorganize.
Ames will shutter all 327 of its retail stores, idling about 22,000 workers in all, including some 2,100 in Connecticut. Ames' Rocky Hill headquarters will close as well, a blow to that central Connecticut community which counted on Ames as its seventh-largest property taxpayer.
Ames' fate was sealed by the triple-whammy of a slowed economy (in its closing announcement, the company cited back-to-school sales far less than it had projected - an ominous harbinger of holiday-season sales to come), rapidly evolving competition and a crushing debt burden. After it acquired the Zayre discount chain in the late 1980s, Ames was forced into its first bankruptcy filing. Its 1990s purchase of Hills Stores Co. of Massachusetts saddled the company with a debt load it ultimately could not carry.
Ames, which once earned $4 billion annually, at its peak was the country's fourth-largest discount retail chain following Wal-Mart, Kmart and Target.
The demise of Ames will be a body blow to the economy of the state and especially Rocky Hill, as well as a blow to New England pride. It likewise bodes ill for consumers, who find their range of bricks-and-mortar retail choices narrowing day by day.
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