Coresight’s early store counts show a 2022 that so far is unfolding much like the year that passed, which showed a marked inversion of the trends from years past.
Store closures weighed on the industry’s collective mind in the latter half of the 2010s. Those years saw retailers downsizing footprints both piecemeal and dramatically, with large waves of closures that occurred both in and out of bankruptcy.
Sprawling chains such as Payless and Toys R Us liquidated entirely in bankruptcy as they failed to marshal a plan forward in an era of fierce competition, technological shifts and changing consumer behavior. (The debt loads from the private equity buyouts of those and many other retail names did not help either.)
