Express to Close All 17 Canadian Stores
By Simon Hung
May 5, 2017Express, an American clothing chain with 17 locations in Canada, has announced that they will close all of their Canadian stores.
No specific timeframe has been given, but closing sales will begin this month and the company has stated that they will pay all 340 employees their salaries and benefits until at least June 15.
The chain operates over 650 stores in the United States and Puerto Rico and expanded to Canada in 2011, with plans at one point to open 50 stores. In a press release, Express CEO David Kornberg cited a challenging Canadian retail environment and unfavourable exchange rates as the primary reasons behind the decision to cease operations in Canada.
Court filings also show that their Canadian stores contributed a net loss of $6 million USD this past year and the company has lost $56 million USD in Canada since 2011. Rising rent costs were another reason behind the closures, as Express is still responsible for $120 million USD in property leases.
Express has stores in Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario -- click here to find the location nearest you. The company also estimates Canadian customers have around $400,000 in unused gift cards, which will be honoured during the liquidation process.
Unfortunately for shoppers, this marks yet another American chain that has opted to leave Canada after underestimating the difficulty of the Canadian retail market, joining a growing list that includes American Apparel, BCBG, Bebe and Target.
Showing 40 Most Recent Comments
View allRIP Express Canada. I'll miss you.
Might be a stretch but if dress shirts turn 50% off hopefully the one I wanted still has my size.
The issue with Express was that it was *yet another* mall retailer attempting to sell relatively expensive clothes manufactured in the Asia Pacific region. That market is saturated and doesn't do well in a challenging economy.
The second it hits 50%, I'm splurging!
I used to always get a dress shirt or 2 during their boxing day 50% sales so I will miss that.
https://www.thestar.com/business/2017/0 ... rvive.html
Do you remember Warden Woods Mall (later rebranded "Warden Power Centre")? Doomed from the start by its poor location. I grew up in the area and I remember seeing both Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II in the Cineplex there! Demolished and townhomes built on that huge plot of land:
https://www.uer.ca/locations/show.asp?locid=23270
Whitby Mall would have been bulldozed if not for the passport office that still occupies the back of it. The foot traffic it draws keeps the few other retailers (especially the passport photo guy) afloat:
http://www.deadmalls.com/malls/whitby_mall.html
Lawrence Square is sad -- being so close to Yorkdale, of course it'll get the dregs, check out the store mix. Doesn't make me want to rush over there!
http://shoplawrencesquare.com/directory/
Similarly sad malls include Dufferin Mall and Galleria Mall. Both I believe are slated for redevelopment. Also add Malvern Town Centre to that list of dead ducks.
You probably remember Don Mills Centre, which was almost as bad as Lawrence Square. Developer wisely bulldozed it and rebuilt it as the upscale Shops of Don Mills, which has some nice restaurants and the flagship McEwan Grocery!
Woodbine Centre only stays afloat because they had the foresight to put kiddie rides in it so it can draw families from a wider area. Without those, guaranteed it would have been bulldozed and replaced by condos or townhomes. The store mix is sad:
http://www.woodbinecentre.ca/store-index
Finally there's Eglinton Square, which I call the Geriatric Mall since that seems to be their target market. I guess that's a wise strategy given that seniors outnumber youth these days...
https://www.eglintonsquare.ca/stores
Bottom line: If a mall has way too many dollar stores, convenience stores, long distance phone card dealers, mobile phone accessory kiosks, book liquidators, ink cartridge refillers, and mom-and-pops owned by certain ethnicities, call that mall dead. And that's what all of the above have in common... they are hopeless.
Eaton Centre, Yorkdale, Sherway Gardens, Fairview, Scarborough Town Centre, Bayview Village, Square One will never meet that fate unless there is a major global depression like the 1930's -- any mall owned by Cadillac-Fairview or Oxford basically.
The ones that could go either way include places like Pickering Town Centre, Centerpoint, Oshawa Centre, Parkway, and any of the RioCan SmartCentres (the ones with the penguins at the entrance). They're hanging on, for now. One bad downturn with a mass exodus of nice chains (followed by an influx of the garbage listed above) and they're done. RioCan is toast if all the American big boxes like Best Buy, PetSmart, Lowe's, Home Depot, Winners, Toys-R-Us, Michaels leave Canada. RioCan stands to suffer the worst as online grows. There will always be a market for the CF's and Oxfords.
I'll even include Vaughan Mills in this category. It was built to be upscale big box retailing in a fully enclosed space like the rest of the Mills malls in America. Maybe it was at the time, but just look at the crap in the surrounding plazas... It's a wannabe Yorkdale surrounded by Malvern Town Centre... Mall management kept the riff-raff out of their mall... so the riff-raff just bought up the surrounding land and crashed the party... and you know what they say about property values if your neighbors are slobs? That's Vaughan Mills for you.
Express and The Limited have been around in the USA for a good amount of time. It's possible that their sale ~2007 affected their direction.
But how busy are the other malls like Langley or Coquitlam?
Canada isn't that viable for online shopping (relatively speaking) compared to the US where everything ships free from everyone.
Here in Canada most retailers still have shipping costs.
https://www.thestar.com/business/2017/0 ... rvive.html
https://www.thestar.com/business/2017/0 ... rvive.html
I remember cross-border shopping in the 1990's and two malls we often went to were the Rainbow Centre (it was spelled that way, not the incorrect "center") in Niagara Falls, NY, and the Summit Park Mall in Wheatfield, NY. They were fully occupied and always busy with both cross-border and local shoppers. Both are gone now. The Walden Galleria (which would be Buffalo's equivalent of Yorkdale or Eaton Centre) still thrives but it too has vacancies at times. In Western New York pretty much the Fashion Outlets in Niagara Falls and the Walden Galleria get all the Canadians, the rest of the malls there suffer.
I live east of Toronto (as my name suggests) and it seems like Oshawa Centre is trying to be the Eaton Centre of Durham Region (amazingly given how that city needs GM so badly and that plant is always on the chopping block) while its weaker cousin the Pickering Town Centre is slowly going downhill. Whitby Mall has been dead for years, and Ajax Mall (or whatever it was called, I wasn't here yet) is no longer enclosed, it's become Harwood Plaza with office space where the enclosed part used to be. Ajax is redeveloping that area and, of course, no mall -- just more high rise condos with street level retail.
I'd go so far as to say that the stores in the middle of the mall, have become an analogy for the middle class in America. Both are shrinking or sadly moving down scale or just plain giving up.
Malls now in the US... Even successful mega-malls now have tons of empty storefronts and for lack of a better word "junky" filler between their more well known anchors.
As Canadians we tend to think of American shopping as a positive experience, and just about everyone can list off those Anchors / massively successful Retailers & Big Box Stores, the stores that truly draw us stateside (either cause we don't have them here, or they are definitely different in America). And I am guessing where most of us do our shopping.
Macy's - JC Penney - Lord & Taylor - Bon-Ton - Bealls - Belk - Bloomingdales - Nordstrom - Neiman Marcus - Pottery Barn - Willams Sonoma - Crate & Barrel - Sears - Target - Christmas Tree Shops - LL Bean - Bass Pro - DSW - Victoria's Secret - Joanne's Fabrics - Hobby Lobby - Lowes - Home Depot - Costco - Sam's Club ... And an assortment of Grocery Stores, Dollar Stores and Sporting Goods Stores
Truth is a mall is like a sandwich, you need BOTH the bread as well as the more substantial assortment of fillers & condiments in the middle to make it all work.
Where once upon a time there were good assortment of clothing stores (like Express) and other decent clothing, shoe, housewares & gift stores, there is either nothing, or a whole lot of junk.
In my 30+ years of cross border shopping, I've seen a growing trend in the US where the gap between rich & poor is widening. The rich are getting richer... To the point where the mega rich is truly growing, and the middle class is shrinking at an alarming rate. Not to say that by economy of scale some of that is not happening here in Canada... But certainly not at the same amount it is in America.
This can be proven by just driving out beyond the cities anywhere in the USA. Middle America & the middle class is in decay. This is the heartland where Trump gained his support.
By contrast I find that most Malls in Canada still have an assortment of Retailers that is making a go of things between the anchors.
Perhaps another analogy for the difference between our 2 countries... under the current climate, most Canadians still have not given up... And are still trying to make a go of things economically.
Sure our Mals have lost some Retailers... Or they've come back as some reincarnation... But generally speaking I don't see our Big City Malls filled with empty storefronts or junk. A trip to a Mall here still sees us looking in the windows, browsing wares, or making purchases in the middle" as well as visiting the anchors.
Many US retailers are actually looking north to Canada to grow their businesses in these more stagnant times in America. But as several have discovered... They can never make "assumptions" about us in their marketing as the 51st state. They have to come prepared because although we are similar, we are also different... Be it the predictable (PST / GST) or the more subtle in how we are shaped by geography, weather, and culture. For example, Canadian Consumers are evidently a bit more cagey about how we spend our disposable income. As a lot, we are more educated on how things are marketed / work... And we ask a lot more questions "Do I need this better gizmo, and WHY is it considered a better gizmo anyhow"
Whereas when Canadians go shopping in the USA on their turf where "we adapt", I think a lot of US Retailers who come north are finding out (too late) that things are exactly reversed for them... It is not a case of just show up and open a store, there is also an element of them having to adapt to our needs / wants & culture. Something they clearly are not prepared for. Guessing this is probably what took Express down.