Walk into a Best Buy today and the experience is fine-ish. The floors tend to be clean. The displays work. A blue-shirted employee can probably point you toward the right laptop, and if you’re lucky, the one who helps you actually knows the difference between the models. The Geek Squad desk may or may not have a line. The store-within-a-store sections for Samsung and Apple are slick and impersonal, but without the feel you get at a real Apple Store. It is competent, not revelatory. Best Buy became good enough, and in brick-and-mortar retail, good enough is a high bar.
Now try to walk into a Joann Fabrics. You can’t. The last store closed on May 30, 2025. All 800-plus locations were liquidated. Nineteen thousand workers lost their jobs. But in the years before the end, former employees and customers described what it was like to watch the chain disintegrate from the sales floor: bare shelves, skeleton crews, fabric bolts in disarray, nobody at the cutting counter who knew what they were doing. A former district manager told Fortune the problem was self-inflicted: “the business is there.” What was missing was the capacity to run it properly. The stores had been hollowed out underneath the customers.
Best Buy’s customer experience didn’t transform. It stabilized. The company stopped the bleeding, restored basic competence, matched Amazon’s prices, and gave vendors a reason to invest in its stores. That was enough. Joann, meanwhile, didn’t lose to some technological revolution that made fabric stores obsolete. It collapsed because it could no longer afford to stock its shelves, staff its cutting counters, or maintain the store experience that had sustained a loyal customer base for decades. Ninety-six percent of Joann’s stores were cash-flow positive when it first filed for bankruptcy in 2024. The demand was there. The business worked. Something else killed it.
Understanding why businesses actually fail matters regardless of where you sit politically, because it is a matter of short- and long-term governance. When a retailer fails, state and local governments pick up the tab: lost sales tax revenue, unemployment insurance claims, economic development incentives to attract replacement employers. If those failures are driven by demand shifts, that spending is a reasonable cost of economic transition. If they’re driven by capital structure decisions made at acquisition, taxpayers are subsidizing the back end of a private transaction they had no part in. If we misdiagnose Joann as a story about consumer preferences or e-commerce disruption, every downstream decision, from unemployment policy to pension allocation, starts from the wrong premise.
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In 2010, Joann was the nation’s largest specialty fabric and craft retailer, founded in 1943 by two German immigrant families in Cleveland who combined the names of their daughters, Joan and Jacqueline Ann, to name the store. It had roughly 850 stores, carried zero debt, and its stock price hit a record high that year. In 2012, Best Buy’s stock had cratered below $15 per share. Analysts were writing its obituary. The company in crisis survived. The healthy one, beloved by wine moms, Etsy witches, and cosplayers, is gone.
What it looks like is that Joann was targeted precisely because it was healthy. It was loaded with debt to finance its own acquisition, and milked for returns until it could no longer invest in adaptation. Category dynamics and management quality matter, and we’ll address them, but the balance sheet story comes first.
The retail apocalypse in context
The phrase “retail apocalypse” took off around 2017, when more than 12,000 physical stores closed in a single year. According to Coresight Research, U.S. retailers announced more than 7,300 store closures in 2024, a 57 percent increase over 2023. Projections for 2025 suggest closures could reach 15,000.
The popular narrative attributes this to the “Amazon effect.” That’s a small part of the story. E-commerce still accounts for roughly 16 percent of total retail sales, per Census Bureau data. Amazon’s share of total U.S. retail is about 4 percent. Total retail sales have continued to grow. It’s a reshuffling, not an extinction.
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