Big Lots files for bankruptcy
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https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/09/business/big-lots-chapter-11-bankruptcy/index.html
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Big lots was awesome back in the 90s when it was closeout prices on name brand stuff...but then it just got to be another outlet for cheap stuff from China
I loved going to Big Lots to find the weird shit that Walmart and Kmart couldn't or wouldn't sell. These days, I go to Ollie's for that dose of bizarro capitalism.
An Ollie's score means something because you have to be there at the right time, and even then you have to dig through shit to find what you want. I don't have a lot of Ollie's scores, but somehow they're special.
Thus follows the inevitable spiral of stores who tried to be odd-lots outlets and got too big for their britches, failing to realize that odd-lot, irregular, factory second, and closeout merchandise is actually really hard to repeatably and reliably source over the long term, especially when you need to stock it nationwide at zillions of locations.
All of these retailers can't help themselves from pivoting to stocking pretty much exclusively cheapshit mass market products instead, vainly trying to turn themselves into little Walmarts and just selling the same shit everyone else already has. The problem with that is, you inevitably subsequently just get crushed by Walmart. Because Walmart is better at being Walmart than anybody.