Discount retailer Nordstrom Rack will close another one of its New York City locations this summer, according to an unemployment filing made public Wednesday — just months after the Seattle-based parent company turned the lights off in Downtown Brooklyn.
The Nordstrom Rack at Gateway Center Mall in East New York will shutter for good Aug. 31, ahead of its lease expiration later this year in the 500 Gateway Plaza Drive shopping center, according to the public notice and a spokeswoman for the company.
Thirty-nine of the location’s 44 employees will be handed the pink slip, the filing indicates. It’s unclear if the remaining five employees will be relocated elsewhere within the company.
The unemployment warning comes after Crain’s reported in February that the discount retailer’s parent company, Nordstrom, which also operates a luxury department store chain of the same name, was pulling the plug on a Fulton Street Nordstrom Rack, with all 51 employees who worked there slated to lose their jobs. A month before that, discount retailer T. J. Maxx also announced it was vacating its 25,000-square-foot location on Fulton Street, in the same structure as the Nordstrom Rack.
It’s still not totally clear why Nordstrom Rack closed in Downtown Brooklyn earlier this year. In a statement to Crain’s after the initial publication, the company said only that “Decisions like this are never easy.” The company provided the same statement to Crain’s Wednesday following the announcement about its second Brooklyn closure at the Related Cos.-owned mall — the last in the borough. The Manhattan-based developer, who is eyeing building a massive casino development in Hudson Yards, did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Nordstrom Rack’s departure or the details of its lease.
As of February, the 51-year-old department store firm reported that it had 258 Nordstrom Racks in operation across the U.S., according to its most recent financial statements, and that it recorded net earnings of $134 million for the fourth quarter of 2023 — up from the $119 million it made during the same three months in 2022. In that same report, the parent company said it expected 2024 to be a “year of continued momentum in its growth and profitability drivers, including opening new Rack stores.”
The company still operates a handful of Nordstrom locations in Manhattan — two Rack stores, in Union Square and Chelsea; its flagship luxury department store, which includes the men’s shop next door, at 57th Street and Broadway; and two Nordstrom sites for online pickups and returns, on the Upper East Side and in the West Village. They are all that remain in the five boroughs.
Julianne Cuba , 2024-05-09 18:19:30
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