Will Big Lots come back to the Tacoma area?
The discount home-goods retailer’s location in the city was at 2401 N. Pearl St., in the Westgate South Shopping Center. The site closed at the end of 2024.
Another store, just off 72nd Street East in the Tahoma Vista Shopping Center, also closed last year. Other Pierce County locations, including Big Lots’ Puyallup site at 120 31st Ave. SE (South Hill Village), and in Lakewood, 5401 100th St. SW, also have closed.
The retailer has shuttered hundreds of stores nationally; in summer 2024 it had 26 in operation in Washington state and around 900 nationwide.
Just four locations remain in operation in Washington state, according to Big Lots’ website: Kennewick, Longview, Moses Lake and Yakima. Each remain listed as “closing” amid the retailer’s previously announced nationwide liquidation after a failed rescue buyout deal with Nexus Capital Management.
On Dec. 27, the retailer announced it had agreed to a sale transaction with Boston-based Gordon Brothers Retail Partners. The transaction, approved Jan. 2 in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, allows for the “transfer of Big Lots assets, including stores, distribution centers, and intellectual property, to other retailers and companies, including Variety Wholesalers, Inc.,” according to Big Lots.
The sale could involve reviving 200-400 stores under the Big Lots brand, according to the court filings.
Variety owns more than 400 stores, primarily in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic United States “under the Roses, Roses Express, Maxway, Bill’s Dollar Stores, Super 10, Super Dollar, and Bargain Town banners,” the Dec. 27 release noted.
Could the Big Lots retail comeback include stores that closed in Pierce County?
The media representative assigned to the bankruptcy case did not respond to request for comment, but at least one representative for the owner of one of the former Tacoma sites did not foresee a comeback at that location.
The Tahoma Vista Shopping Center’s former Big Lots site is owned by an LLC affiliated with Rhino Investments Group in Henderson, Nevada. The News Tribune first reported on that planned store closure in July.
A banner advertising the store closing was on display at the Big Lots at Tahoma Vista Shopping Center in September 2024 in Tacoma. Pierce County Assessor-Treasurer online property portal
A Rhino Investments representative told The News Tribune via email in response to questions that the firm did not “anticipate reopening” the site as a Big Lots and was deciding whether to lease the space to one tenant or divide the space into two units.
He wrote that Rhino had reached a termination agreement with Big Lots over several of Rhino’s properties to regain the space ahead of the retailer’s bankruptcy in order to lease to other tenants.
The representative did not specify the number of locations covered in that agreement, but the latest list of site landlords on file with the court show three Rhino-affiliated sites. Those include Tacoma (Tahoma Vista), a store site in Pueblo, Colorado, and another in Houma, Louisiana.
Rhino Investments was not the only local property landlord affected on a national scale. The LLC that owns the former Lakewood Big Lots site had five other locations in the United States tied to its affiliate LLCs under the Kamin Realty umbrella that appeared on the Big Lots’ landlord list.
A Kamin representative as well as other area store property owners or leasing representatives/real estate agents did not respond to requests for comment on what’s next for their now-vacant storefronts.
For some, Big Lots clearly served as an important anchor.
In one example, a 2024 marketing brochure for the Big Lots location in Westgate South shopping center, 2401 N. Pearl St., said, “This Big Lots location has consistently been a top performing store and will be the only Big Lots located in Pierce County based on the announced store closures.”
The brochure further claimed, “This Big Lots location is the No. 1 performing store in Washington state and ranks in the top 6% nationally for total visits over the past 12 months.”
It also stated that “50% of the visits for Big Lots are within a 1-mile radius of the site, containing average household incomes of over $130,000.”
‘Melting ice cube’
According to a Big Lots’ motion entered Dec. 27 requesting sale approval, the retailer’s attorneys noted that time was of the essence for Variety to take on the business.
“As this court rightly observed … the debtors can now be fairly ‘categoriz(ed) as a melting ice cube,’” the filing stated, noting the end of inventory orders and diminishing returns on the continued liquidations.
“The debtors have ceased all go-forward purchase orders thereby cutting off all future inventory for their stores, and with each passing day the value of these estates decreases, to the detriment of creditors,” the filing stated.
The filing also indicated that the store liquidations and closures would continue even with the sale to Gordon Brothers/Variety Wholesalers.
Meanwhile, the previous proposed buyout partner isn’t finished with Big Lots despite the collapse of its previous agreement.
In Jan. 3 legal filings submitted one day after the Variety deal was approved by the court, Nexus Capital Management disputed Big Lots’ depiction of the reasons behind the failed-asset purchase agreement and contended it was still owed millions in reimbursement of expenses from Big Lots as well as “release of a $2.5 million deposit held in escrow.”
Attorneys for Nexus subsidiary Gateway BL Acquisition contended that as they worked to salvage the deal, “Debtors were entering into contracts and taking steps to liquidate the business (including the purchase of millions of dollars’ worth of GOB (going out of business) signage, which worsened the financial situation, hurt employee morale, and breached the asset purchase agreement.”
The next filing deadline for Big Lots to respond is in mid-January.