Kohl's (Un)Stocking
The weirdness of stores going out of business, and a peek at a neat job
A couple of weeks ago we were at our local Kohl’s. We always go there after Christmas to check out the discounts—last year we got a cute Christmas-tree night light, the year before we got cheap Christmas dish towels and a really nice flannel sheet set with Christmas trees on it. (After-Christmas shopping is as much a thing we do as Christmas shopping!) But this time we were also there to return an Amazon item. And we were also browsing the going-out-of-business sale, because this Kohl’s location, in Herndon, Virginia, is closing in a couple of days.
First, I wonder how the Amazon returns deal works for Kohl’s. On the one hand, it gets a lot of people physically in the store. On the other hand, it maybe creates the perception that the store needs extra traffic or isn’t fully its own enterprise. If they’re closing locations, though, maybe they do need the traffic. Online comments from people who work for Kohl’s are mixed on the merits of the Amazon deal.
Anyway. It’s always fascinating to be in a store that’s close to going out of business. You feel almost like you’re not supposed to be there—like you’re trespassing. There’s a little bit of a free-for-all, exploring feeling to it, similar to an estate sale where an entire lived-in house is just up for sale. (In one such house, even the opened food items in the kitchen cabinets were theoretically for sale. In another, children’s toys and clothes were for sale, still in their drawers.)
It’s cool to notice all the little minutia when a store is taken apart; this little handwritten note, something scribbled during the moving of the furniture, or this old Twilight sticker that’s possibly been there for 15 years.
I always wonder what the oldest thing that turns up during a closure might be. In 2003, when electronics store The Wiz was closing, I remember they had a bunch of sealed Nintendo NES games. They’d long ago stopped actually selling them; they must have just discovered a box in the stockroom and thrown them out for sale. (They were a buck; we didn’t buy any because the line was a mile long, but I wish we had.)
The deals in corporate going-out-of-business sales are often not that great, in my own experience; anything really good gets scooped up fast. It’s also a little depressing knowing every worker you see is likely losing a job (sometimes they’re transferred to other stores, but everyone isn’t that lucky), and knowing that there may well be another long-term retail vacancy. In this case, though, the building is already mostly accounted for. A Lidl is going in, possibly a Hobby Lobby, and one more expected tenant which apparently hasn’t been found yet. That would be the second old department store in Herndon to be subdivided into a series of stores. It’s cool to see one of these awkwardly large standalone Kohl’s buildings get reused.
One of the guys working on the sales floor saw me taking some pictures, and I said to him I hoped he didn’t think I was making fun of him facing down unemployment in a couple of weeks. He said he wasn’t a Kohl’s employee, but a liquidator. He’d be assigned to this store until a couple days after it closed to the public, and he was overseeing the sales of the fixtures.
He did this at stores all over the country, managing the sale of everything at whatever store hires his company (he couldn’t sell me a handcart, though—Kohl’s sends those off to other locations). I was curious about the giant panels of tinsel and Christmas lights, and the electric Levi’s sign by the old jeans display. But I didn’t ask. Where the hell would I put them, anyway? But for the most part, everything means everything.
He was putting up yellow tape across a whole fifth or so of the store, blocking off a bunch of fixtures that had sold—you can quickly see why liquidation is different from garden-variety clearance sale. I had been taking a look at the fixtures in another part of the store. Store fixtures are quite sturdy—better craftsmanship than almost anything in a furniture store—but not really pretty. A few of them might make good rec-room or basement furniture in a home, but most of them very much looked like store display furniture.
So who buys this stuff?, I asked him. Small businesses, he said. Mom-and-pops, mostly, or new businesses. A bunch of display racks were going to a gun and sports shop. The clothing racks (I’m guessing) are likely to go to small boutiques or thrift stores. That kind of thing.
The prices are low for commercial-grade store furniture, but they’re not fire-sale prices. The liquidator does have haggling room though, and more as the closure approaches. He can take something like an extra ten percent off with each passing week.
What happens to the leftover stuff? It doesn’t necessarily get thrown away (though the broken ornaments or other dregs are probably carted off in the trash): usable toys might go to Toys for Tots, excess furniture could go to a handful of charitable or non-profit organizations that he’s got a list of. I guess when you’ve done this dozens of times, you develop strategies and procedures. It’s cool to imagine that somewhere there’s a department-store fixture sitting in the backroom of a nonprofit office because a professional liquidator needed it out to close out his job.
This was probably the coolest fixture in the store:
Santa’s chair! The liquidator had sold six of them previously; he’d done a bunch of Kohl’s, and every store had one of these chairs. From the internet, it looks like Kohl’s might not do Santa anymore, but the chairs are still in use as thrones for the Christmastime giant stuffed animals.
As we chatted, a few kids scootering on a shopping cart rolled by. He asked one of his crewmembers to go gently tell them to settle down and find their parents. One kid lost his teeth scootering in a store and falling, he said. The space is so wide open with most of the fixtures pulled away, the parents are shopping the deals, and the kids run wild. It sort of came down to him to keep some order in the store.
It sounds to me like a pretty cool job, actually. I remember once, sitting in the mechanic’s waiting room getting my oil changed, and overhearing a call about some body work. The clerk had to find a part, and called a few places to see if they had it in the right color, etc. There’s something about that kind of work that’s appealing to me somehow. Maybe because I’ve never really had to do it. But sitting at a simple desk with your coffee and printer and day’s paperwork and calling this and that place about some actual real-world thing you need to procure—it uses different mental muscles than the work I do.
I said I’ve never had to do this kind of thing, i.e. work in customer-facing and/or blue-collar jobs, but I did choose to do it a couple of times—I volunteered for a thrift store in high school, and then volunteered and worked for an architectural salvage store in grad school.
They were related to my interest in environmental policy and consumerism and all that, but I don’t really remember the ideas part of it. I remember trying to help sell a 1980s stereo, organizing switch plates and vent covers, discovering that some people stole the little nozzle caps off aerosol cans rendering them useless, trying to remember the maze-like backroom section of the warehouse to find the little old desk I was given to research possible uses for unsold doors and cast-iron tubs.
I suppose it was a break from studying, but I did genuinely enjoy handling and learning about real stuff, working in an old building with lots of rooms, occasionally talking to customers, getting to know items and prices, figuring out who was imperious or stuck in their ways in the shop and who was interested in new ideas, etc. It was a good break from the rest of what I did and do.
Anyway, I thought it was really neat to get a little insight into what actually happens when these stores close, and that there’s a whole professional infrastructure to deal with it that’s rarely visible to the customer.
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When I worked for Toys R Us ~20 years ago, I worked on the closing of three stores (two mainline TRUs and one standalone Imaginarium). As I recall, once the store closing is announced, everything within the building and the store's labor falls under the jurisdiction of the liquidator. Store management has no discretion as to what gets sold or for how much and the markdown schedule (20% this week, 30% next week) is also determined by the liquidator, not corporate. It was kind of strange to still show up to a Toys R Us building in a Toys R Us uniform but essentially to be employed by a third party contractor who specializes in closing down stores.
Bummer, Addison. Apparently, you didn't know that all the really cool people have a Levi's sign.