JCPenney Co. will close its flasghip Ala Moana Center store, its Pearlridge Center store and its Hilo outlet, all on Jan. 10, costing 458 employees their jobs.
The company will vacate its Ala Moana,
Pearlridge and Hilo stores on Jan. 10
458 workers will lose their jobs;
the company says the stores
have not been profitableBy Russ Lynch
rlynch@starbulletin.comThe move, the largest retail closing announced so far this year, will end the 36-year JCPenney presence in Hawaii, except for one store on Maui.
"The stores have not been profitable," said Tim Lyons, a spokesman at JCPenney corporate headquarters in Plano, Texas.
Lyons said that, counting management, the retail-clerk "associates" and other employees, the closures will cut about 200 jobs at Ala Moana, 150 at Pearlridge and 108 at the Prince Kuhio Plaza store in Hilo.
Hawaii missed a big cut at the start of last year, when the company said it would close 50 stores as a cost-cutting measure to battle continuing losses. In an earlier cost trimming, however, JCPenney closed its Windward Mall store in 1998.
Its first store in the islands, the Ala Moana unit, opened in 1966. That three-level store has about 280,000 square feet of floor space.
There has been speculation in the retail industry for some time that it might become the location for Nordstrom's first full-range department store in Hawaii.
Nordstrom has said only that it is still interested in bringing such a store to Honolulu despite the recent cancellation of an agreement to put it in the Victoria Ward Ltd. complex.
Ala Moana Center officials could not be reached for comment this morning. Ala Moana Center and Victoria Ward Ltd. are both owned by Chicago-based General Growth Properties Inc.
JCPenney managers told their employees about the closings this morning, Lyons said.
Nationally, JCPenney had a second-quarter net loss of $6 million on sales of $7.2 billion. That was an improvement from a year-earlier loss of $69 million on about the same level of sales.
JC Penney
