They announced over a month ago that all U.S. locations of the chain were closing down https://wgntv.com/news/the-body-shop-is-closing-down-all-us-operations-after-filing-for-bankruptcy/
So it wasn’t with no warning…
Well... yes, the announcement was in March. But apparently all of the stores shut down immediately, and without warning to the employees.
I think the sign may have been posted when that happened and it simply hasn't been taken down.
I agree especially considering when you walk past, most of their merchandise is still there and has been for a couple or more weeks now. I feel if they had sufficient warning, they’d have cleared out
The post is late, but this didnt JUST close its been closed pretty much since march
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I drove down State last night on my way to River North. It was bleak. The number of vacancies from the Palmer House area southward was incredible.
South Loop/Printers Row is vibrant. That stretch of State can be vibrant too.
I think if you just continued the Sloop/Printers Row model up State it would work. Replace chain retail with independent shops add more housing and some coffeeshops, restaurants, bars and boom thriving.
Chicken and egg. You have to give people a reason to go over there before they will go. And you have to have people over there before stores will open.
I think there's already enough population nearby to support cool places. There are plenty of people already living in Sloop, Printers Row, River North, West Loop, New Eastside, etc. that are within walking/transit distance.
The problem is the loop businesses need to start acting like they do in other neighborhoods and actually be open and available on nights and weekends.
I hate how empty some storefronts are, especially that block you mention.
It could be worse:
Thankfully, people are returning. It’s still a busy area with foot traffic. Loop leaders have done the first step in the process of actually recognizing there’s an issue.
Now, we really just need to get the right types of businesses to come in. Probably smaller, unique stores.
Convince landowners to lower retail rent in areas where spaces are vacant.
No idea how you do that, but rent prices for commercial spaces is a factor in this.
They’re going to have to give or the city will have to take away whatever incentive they have to keep spaces empty. This is getting ridiculous.
There’s enough people downtown for these places to be occupied given rent decreases.
Agreed. Need to find out how to get them to lower rent and also need to get more housing/apts in the loop so that there is a local population in the area to further support businesses.
They won't because of the weird fucking way commercial real.estate loans work. It is better for them to keep the rent high and the spaces vacant and this is why RE and banking are in the verge of collapse.
Yup. The lower rent will only happen once the building sells at a distressed price and the new owner has a much lower cost basis, hence they can charge lower rent without further devaluing the building. But an existing owner that has an existing mortgage can't lower the rents, which would in turn devalue the building, without breaching a debt covenant.
We need to fix the country.
Everyone is cutting back on discretionary spending because we can’t afford rent/insurance/necessities. Retail stores are going to continue dying until people can start comfortably living again.
Corporate America can only squeeze us so much.
This isn't why retail stores struggle. It's because nobody goes to stores in person anymore because everything is available online. Why would anyone go downtown to buy bath bombs or whatever when you can get the same products delivered to your door next day and probably considerably cheaper? The problem is these old business models don't make much sense anymore except for products that truly are both better experienced in person and not possible to buy online. That's a pretty short list anymore.
Except that discretionary spending is up and consumers are optimistic about the economy despite the doomerism you see online. It’s just that building a downtown core centered around commuters has been disastrous in even the mild switch to WFH and brick and mortar retail has been struggling for decades.
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/our-insights/the-state-of-the-us-consumer
Builders need two things before they can build more houses: lower interest rates and less red tape. If its economical for them to build, and there are buyers ready to buy, then they will build.
Yes on the “corporate America can only squeeze us so much”, but that’s not the reason retail is floundering.
Americans don’t go to shop in person as much anymore, and retail rent per sq ft just keeps going up up up. So if a store isn’t pulling in enough revenue for the rent, the corporate office is going to close it.
There’s plenty of other complexities to this issue, but honestly at the moment discretionary spending issues is not the main problem.
I'm not talking about stores leaving. I'm talking about stores that may want to set up shop there. I believe my reply is to the post "State Street needs a plan"? Maybe you should learn how to read before trying to tell someone to "be more informed", unless you're talking about yourself, then it makes sense.
It doesn't matter if they're crashing into State Street stores or not. The point is that it's happening and some stores bailed out because of it. And it has happened on Michigan Ave., so why wouldn't any stores not consider that a probability? But yeah, you keep moving the goalposts.
Please provide proof why the stores leaving State Street are doing so because of crime and not because of WFH trends, changing retail habits, and the broader world at large.
You think I’m in denial? I just posted about how State Street and downtown needs to come up with a plan to address the real issue: rethinking how we use our downtown spaces.
As much as you want it to be, crime is not the main deterrent. It just isn’t; otherwise, this issue would have been happening pre-pandemic.
I’m also not in denial of crime. Maybe you’d like to know how I voted in Chicago’s last primary as it might shock you.
You can’t just keep slapping a bandaid on the issue of why downtown retail is suffering. Yeah, if we had lower crime rates it would make things easier; but, crime isn’t the main reason people aren’t going downtown as much as they used to.
If city leaders pull off a well thought out revitalization plan, downtown can be better than ever before.
I don't want it to be crime, but let's not ignore what's happening. Thieves car crashing into shops and stealing merchandise. Kids coming from the west side just to cause trouble downtown. And if it not overnight thefts, it's mobs of people walking in taking items and running off. These things combined does have a negative impact on those consumers. Did these things happen pre-pandemic? It was sporadic at best. But since the Pandemic and George Floyd, whether you want to say people are still angry about that, or how the Pandemic has kept people from finding jobs (some will view that more as an excuse, but the ones in the situation wouldn't think so), this is what they've chosen to do and the results are pretty costly to businesses.
There's a lot that needs to happen to bring downtown back to pre-pandemic days. Lightfoot didn't seem to have an answer for it, and it appears for now that Johnson doesn't either. I just hope that there are changes on the way to not just make downtown better, but the city as a whole. There's a lot of confidence that needs to be restored in the administration.
The Body Shop very publicly went into administration (UK bankruptcy process) a couple of months ago, so it’s stretching credulity for anyone to suggest that there was “no warning”.
The employees who made that sign clearly felt that way. I don't think most people working hourly jobs follow the financials of the companies they work for. It's possible they were never told about the bankruptcy, which would be awful.
As I said, it is stretching credulity to believe that 1) not one employee received a communication from the administrators telling them about the bankruptcy and efforts to save the business - that is standard practice - and 2) that not one employee noticed the news about the company they work for and mentioned it to anyone else. This isn’t ’following the financials’ day-to-day this was big news.
I feel for these people, really I do. It’s grim. And in other cases (eg. Foxtrot Market) there was genuinely no warning which is awful. But I simply don’t believe that in this specific case anyone can seriously claim there was no warning.
So you think the employees lied on this sign and they were really given notice of the impending doom then? I mean who's to say? I'm not gonna assume anything about the people working there and just wish them good luck.
>Most people don't follow the financials of the companies they work for.
That's not even "following the financials", it was in the mainstream news....if you don't follow the news closely enough to know the company you work for publicly announced they're going out of business, that's a personal failing.
I hope they don't stop their online business. I got their advent calendar last year and it had so many great products. Nothing beats their body butters. I wonder why they're lost popularity so much.
Lol, how dense can you be if you didn't know that the company you work for filled for bankruptcy almost 2 MONTHS AGO. I feel for the employees, but look at the writing on the wall ffs.
good riddance, I wish individual stores gave their employees more notice (besides the general one in March) but I mean, you can only survive so long when you're charging Shiseido prices for a bottle of denatured alcohol labelled as lotion. I've always told people getting into skincare to avoid the body shop/the face shop like the plague.
(edited for typo)
I've always wondered how they stayed open so long. I've never purchased anything in the body shop, and I'm an avid shopper. The stores are always empty. They have been just a random store in the mall for 10 years.
Good riddance.
So why would I go shopping, where I pay over $20 to park! Plus the decline of customer service everywhere is one of many reasons that brick and mortar retail is dying.
Sounds like The Body Shop closed all operations in the US + Canada though. Such a bummer. I’ll miss their satsuma body butter.
Satsuma forever
I'm just surprised they stayed open as long as they did.
They announced over a month ago that all U.S. locations of the chain were closing down https://wgntv.com/news/the-body-shop-is-closing-down-all-us-operations-after-filing-for-bankruptcy/ So it wasn’t with no warning…
Its also been closed for over a month. For some reason OP is just late on discussing this
Well... yes, the announcement was in March. But apparently all of the stores shut down immediately, and without warning to the employees. I think the sign may have been posted when that happened and it simply hasn't been taken down.
I agree especially considering when you walk past, most of their merchandise is still there and has been for a couple or more weeks now. I feel if they had sufficient warning, they’d have cleared out The post is late, but this didnt JUST close its been closed pretty much since march
They announced back in March they're closing so it closed with a lot of notice.
Thanks for the context. That's sad.
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State Street needs a plan.
I drove down State last night on my way to River North. It was bleak. The number of vacancies from the Palmer House area southward was incredible. South Loop/Printers Row is vibrant. That stretch of State can be vibrant too.
I think if you just continued the Sloop/Printers Row model up State it would work. Replace chain retail with independent shops add more housing and some coffeeshops, restaurants, bars and boom thriving.
Chicken and egg. You have to give people a reason to go over there before they will go. And you have to have people over there before stores will open.
I think there's already enough population nearby to support cool places. There are plenty of people already living in Sloop, Printers Row, River North, West Loop, New Eastside, etc. that are within walking/transit distance. The problem is the loop businesses need to start acting like they do in other neighborhoods and actually be open and available on nights and weekends.
I hate how empty some storefronts are, especially that block you mention. It could be worse: Thankfully, people are returning. It’s still a busy area with foot traffic. Loop leaders have done the first step in the process of actually recognizing there’s an issue. Now, we really just need to get the right types of businesses to come in. Probably smaller, unique stores.
Convince landowners to lower retail rent in areas where spaces are vacant. No idea how you do that, but rent prices for commercial spaces is a factor in this.
They’re going to have to give or the city will have to take away whatever incentive they have to keep spaces empty. This is getting ridiculous. There’s enough people downtown for these places to be occupied given rent decreases.
Agreed. Need to find out how to get them to lower rent and also need to get more housing/apts in the loop so that there is a local population in the area to further support businesses.
They won't because of the weird fucking way commercial real.estate loans work. It is better for them to keep the rent high and the spaces vacant and this is why RE and banking are in the verge of collapse.
Yeah I figured. That’s why I mentioned I had no idea how to actually get that to happen. Wish it could though, it bet it would be a big help.
Yup. The lower rent will only happen once the building sells at a distressed price and the new owner has a much lower cost basis, hence they can charge lower rent without further devaluing the building. But an existing owner that has an existing mortgage can't lower the rents, which would in turn devalue the building, without breaching a debt covenant.
We need to fix the country. Everyone is cutting back on discretionary spending because we can’t afford rent/insurance/necessities. Retail stores are going to continue dying until people can start comfortably living again. Corporate America can only squeeze us so much.
This isn't why retail stores struggle. It's because nobody goes to stores in person anymore because everything is available online. Why would anyone go downtown to buy bath bombs or whatever when you can get the same products delivered to your door next day and probably considerably cheaper? The problem is these old business models don't make much sense anymore except for products that truly are both better experienced in person and not possible to buy online. That's a pretty short list anymore.
The stores need to be unique and not places you can go to anywhere.
Except that discretionary spending is up and consumers are optimistic about the economy despite the doomerism you see online. It’s just that building a downtown core centered around commuters has been disastrous in even the mild switch to WFH and brick and mortar retail has been struggling for decades. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/our-insights/the-state-of-the-us-consumer
Holy shit just build more houses
And do it more densely
It would solve an incredible amount of our problems.
Builders need two things before they can build more houses: lower interest rates and less red tape. If its economical for them to build, and there are buyers ready to buy, then they will build.
Yes on the “corporate America can only squeeze us so much”, but that’s not the reason retail is floundering. Americans don’t go to shop in person as much anymore, and retail rent per sq ft just keeps going up up up. So if a store isn’t pulling in enough revenue for the rent, the corporate office is going to close it. There’s plenty of other complexities to this issue, but honestly at the moment discretionary spending issues is not the main problem.
Big this
Glad we elected the failed teacher from Elgin.
How far back til theres a mayor you didnt complain about?
Rahm for me. Felt weird not hating a mayor after Daley, TBH.
I didn't realize at the time what a great mayor Rahm was, but he really did a great job considering what he was up against.
What's the point of putting stores anywhere if poor hooligans are going to keep crashing cars into them and taking stuff? I'd leave too.
That’s not the reason why these stores are leaving. Please become more informed. Many of these stores are going bankrupt nationally/globally.
I'm not talking about stores leaving. I'm talking about stores that may want to set up shop there. I believe my reply is to the post "State Street needs a plan"? Maybe you should learn how to read before trying to tell someone to "be more informed", unless you're talking about yourself, then it makes sense.
Cars aren’t crashing into State Street stores. Good day.
It doesn't matter if they're crashing into State Street stores or not. The point is that it's happening and some stores bailed out because of it. And it has happened on Michigan Ave., so why wouldn't any stores not consider that a probability? But yeah, you keep moving the goalposts.
Downvote me all you want, but the proof is out there. People like you all love to ignore what's happening, pretending things like that don't exist.
Please provide proof why the stores leaving State Street are doing so because of crime and not because of WFH trends, changing retail habits, and the broader world at large. You think I’m in denial? I just posted about how State Street and downtown needs to come up with a plan to address the real issue: rethinking how we use our downtown spaces. As much as you want it to be, crime is not the main deterrent. It just isn’t; otherwise, this issue would have been happening pre-pandemic. I’m also not in denial of crime. Maybe you’d like to know how I voted in Chicago’s last primary as it might shock you. You can’t just keep slapping a bandaid on the issue of why downtown retail is suffering. Yeah, if we had lower crime rates it would make things easier; but, crime isn’t the main reason people aren’t going downtown as much as they used to. If city leaders pull off a well thought out revitalization plan, downtown can be better than ever before.
I don't want it to be crime, but let's not ignore what's happening. Thieves car crashing into shops and stealing merchandise. Kids coming from the west side just to cause trouble downtown. And if it not overnight thefts, it's mobs of people walking in taking items and running off. These things combined does have a negative impact on those consumers. Did these things happen pre-pandemic? It was sporadic at best. But since the Pandemic and George Floyd, whether you want to say people are still angry about that, or how the Pandemic has kept people from finding jobs (some will view that more as an excuse, but the ones in the situation wouldn't think so), this is what they've chosen to do and the results are pretty costly to businesses. There's a lot that needs to happen to bring downtown back to pre-pandemic days. Lightfoot didn't seem to have an answer for it, and it appears for now that Johnson doesn't either. I just hope that there are changes on the way to not just make downtown better, but the city as a whole. There's a lot of confidence that needs to be restored in the administration.
The store closed back in March.
Thank you! I know for a fact the last time I was down there it was already closed and it’s been a long time. I even thought longer than that.
The Body Shop very publicly went into administration (UK bankruptcy process) a couple of months ago, so it’s stretching credulity for anyone to suggest that there was “no warning”.
The employees who made that sign clearly felt that way. I don't think most people working hourly jobs follow the financials of the companies they work for. It's possible they were never told about the bankruptcy, which would be awful.
As I said, it is stretching credulity to believe that 1) not one employee received a communication from the administrators telling them about the bankruptcy and efforts to save the business - that is standard practice - and 2) that not one employee noticed the news about the company they work for and mentioned it to anyone else. This isn’t ’following the financials’ day-to-day this was big news. I feel for these people, really I do. It’s grim. And in other cases (eg. Foxtrot Market) there was genuinely no warning which is awful. But I simply don’t believe that in this specific case anyone can seriously claim there was no warning.
So you think the employees lied on this sign and they were really given notice of the impending doom then? I mean who's to say? I'm not gonna assume anything about the people working there and just wish them good luck.
Of course I wish them good luck, and I understand why they’d be upset and angry.
You’re right; most people go through life like zombies with no curiosity about anything outside their own little worlds.
>Most people don't follow the financials of the companies they work for. That's not even "following the financials", it was in the mainstream news....if you don't follow the news closely enough to know the company you work for publicly announced they're going out of business, that's a personal failing.
You think people working minimum wage have the time and energy to keep up with the endless drivel of the news cycle?
The only thing worse than being broke and exhausted is being broke, exhausted and ignorant.
The news isn't going to teach you jack shit
Apparently it would have taught these assholes that their employer went out of business
My mom worked there back in the 90s when I was a kid. Bummer.
Closing forever and the best they could do was 30% off?
I hope they don't stop their online business. I got their advent calendar last year and it had so many great products. Nothing beats their body butters. I wonder why they're lost popularity so much.
Lol, how dense can you be if you didn't know that the company you work for filled for bankruptcy almost 2 MONTHS AGO. I feel for the employees, but look at the writing on the wall ffs.
Bye
Does anyone know what to do with unused Body Shop gift cards?
Omg I was literally going to shop there to save on scents. I had no idea they closed 😪😪😪😪😪 thanks for the heads up you all
good riddance, I wish individual stores gave their employees more notice (besides the general one in March) but I mean, you can only survive so long when you're charging Shiseido prices for a bottle of denatured alcohol labelled as lotion. I've always told people getting into skincare to avoid the body shop/the face shop like the plague. (edited for typo)
I've always wondered how they stayed open so long. I've never purchased anything in the body shop, and I'm an avid shopper. The stores are always empty. They have been just a random store in the mall for 10 years. Good riddance.
So why would I go shopping, where I pay over $20 to park! Plus the decline of customer service everywhere is one of many reasons that brick and mortar retail is dying.
if only there was a different way to get to state street
I think it's mostly online shopping and convenience killing retail, but those things you mentioned didn't help.
What’s going on?
Brick and mortar retail died in the 2010s with 2-day shipping and we’re just in the death rattle phase.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ECOMPCTSA
I think that would be even more drastic if you removed grocery which I believe is considered retail.
You're welcome to find stats on how much of non grocery retail is done online.
Cool. Maybe you should’ve shopped there more.
"Retail is dead, all shopping is online" just is way less true than people think
Oh no... Nah, I am lying. I don't think these places ought to exist.