A local TRU reversed their "closeout" temporarily. Anyone seen that before?

[canprime]

So TRU Canada has been shit-canning locations for the better part of a year now. From new locations they opened a year, or less, before to longstanding locations. Another round of locations started their closeout procedures in the past month. One of the few remaining ones in my city had, as of about two weeks ago, gotten up to about "up to 40% off." Although action figures were still at 20% off.

Anyway I was away on vacation so I only just went back today to see what was happening and all the closeout stuff (signage, discounts) were gone!!?? At first I thought they had just closed the location, but then I realized the parking lot had a bunch of cars in it and people going in and out. I went in and sure enough it was operating as if nothing had happened. Pricing was the same as the remaining locations and they were honouring the current weekly sales. So maybe they had found a way out and TRU Canada was keeping the locations open??

Well I had to check with an employee (nice older gentleman about my age). He said that they were still closing the location, but the timeline had changed and wasn't finalized. As such they went back to running the location as a normal TRU until the closure date is finalized??? He was certain that the store would still be closing, just not sure when....yet.

Now I don't know much about closeout procedures, and of course the laws may be different in Canada versus the US (or other countries). However I was under the impression that once a store/location is closing the inventory/process is sold off to a liquidator or something who handles everything and the company is hands off going forward. Is that a thing?

Anyway I was kind of shocked as I had never seen a store go into closeout and then come back and operate as normal, albeit temporarily according to the employee.

 

[Damien]

Now I don't know much about closeout procedures, and of course the laws may be different in Canada versus the US (or other countries). However I was under the impression that once a store/location is closing the inventory/process is sold off to a liquidator or something who handles everything and the company is hands off going forward. Is that a thing?

It's because not all locations are closing at the same time. I'd imagine they're going to operate this exactly like Zellers did, if you remember.

Zellers would strategically close X number of locations across Canada at a time. The stores that were closing would run pretty decent, but not necessarily incredible, sales. Definitely enough to get people inside and spending, though. Buuuut... because there were other locations still open and operating as normal, the product still belonged to Zellers. Once they got close to closing day, product got packed up and shipped to a different Zellers location, and the cycle would repeat.
So they'd keep bouncing product from locaton to location until they got to the last locations in Canada and that's when it became basically a giant clearance sale and anything that couldn't be sold ended up liquidated. That amount of stuff was actually surprisingly little, as your 40-60% off sales across dozens of stores over the course of a year or so was enough to get rid of most of it.

It's possible either your location was changed from 'closing now' to 'closing much later' and will actually receive product from other stores that are closing sooner, or it just got bumped back a little bit in the timeline and they can't close down when they wanted to because there aren't enough stores left in Canada to take in all the inventory from all the stores they wanted to close at once.