A fixture in Waxahachie for almost a century, the local JC Penney store will not be among the 30% of the stores recently slated to be closed.
As reported in an article by USA Today, the company filed for bankruptcy protection on Friday, May 15, 2020 and subsequently announced that it would close nearly one third of its 846 stores in order to mitigate losses and avoid outright liquidation.
A Business Insider list of the 242 stores to close did not show Waxahachie’s location to be among those scheduled for winding down by the end of the year. The local store will therefore remain, for now, operating among the 600 stores with better performance.
Waxahachie’s JC Penney has been temporarily closed since COVID-19 safety precautions were put in place back in March but will reopen as the state lifts its order for department stores to curtail their operations.
As a whole, the department store chain has seen declining sales for more than a decade as consumers gravitate toward online merchandise retailers and discount clothing stores. In response, JC Penney’s leadership has made several miscalculations and failed attempts at reversing the chain’s decline, and the arrival of a global pandemic along with the safety measures that it prompted only hastened the inevitable bankruptcy.