Closures & Layoffs: Wind-Down Sale Starts at 568 Fashion Bug Locations

SB Capital Group LLC, Tiger Capital Group LLC, and Great American Group LLC have formed a joint venture to conduct a sale of all inventory in the 568 stores of women's retailer Fashion Bug. The shuttered store is a unit of Charming Shoppes Inc., a recently acquired subsidiary of Ascena Retail Group Inc.

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The "Total Inventory Blowout Sale" will be conducted across 39 states, and is part of Ascena's planned divestiture of the brand and the orderly wind down of the Fashion Bug operation.

Fashion Bug, which offers women's apparel in plus, misses and juniors sizes, opened in the 1960s in Audubon, NJ. The company grew with rapid expansion in the late 1970s, and reached a peak of more than 1,400 stores in the 1990s.

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SuperValu To Close 60 Underperforming Stores

Grocery retailer SuperValu Inc. plans to pare its portfolio of 60 underperforming or non-strategic stores including 38 in its retail food reporting segment and 22 Save-A-Lot locations. The majority of the stores are expected to close before Dec. 1.

The closures in the retail food segment include 27 Albertsons stores (19 in Southern California, including one previously announced location, and eight in the Intermountain West region), four Acme stores, and one previously announced Jewel-Osco location.

The company owns the real estate for approximately one-third of the retail food stores being closed.

Over the next three years, the company estimates that closing these locations will generate between $80 million to $90 million in cash from monetizing owned real estate, eliminating cash operating losses, and selling departmental assets.

Cash generated from these actions will be used to reduce outstanding debt and for other general corporate purposes.

"While we don't have square footages for all of the locations slated for closure, nearly all of them are in the traditional grocery format of between 50,000 and 70,000 square feet," said Garrick H. Brown, research director at Terranomics. "That being said, by Dec. 31st of this year, there will be another 3 to 4.2 million square feet of vacant mid-box space back on the market throughout the United States."

"This will come as extremely good news for the real estate opportunist chains out there like Tractor Supply, Hobby Lobby and others," Brown said. "But ultimately, what this really means is that there is a whole lot of space coming to market that the best immediate option for most landlords will be to chop it up.

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H-P To Cut Another 2,000 Jobs

Continuing with its restructuring Hewlett-Packard said this week it would cut an additional 2,000 jobs as part of its massive layoff announcement last May involving 27,000 job cuts.

A portion of the additional employee exits is coming from the company's voluntary enhanced early retirement program for U.S. employees.

The cuts will be carried out through 2014, the company said.

H-P expects to record aggregate charges of $3.7 billion through the end of HP's 2014 fiscal year. Of that amount, HP expects $3.3 billion to relate to the workforce reductions and $400 million to relate to other items, including data center and real estate consolidation.

H-P recorded an initial charge of $1.7 billion in the third fiscal quarter of 2012 relating to the 2012 plan.

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Kodak Cutting 1,000 More Workers

Eastman Kodak Co. has said it plans to dispose of its document imaging and personalized imaging businesses. With the decision, Kodak expects to reduce its workforce by an additional 1,000 employees by the end of 2012.

The company has reduced its workforce by approximately 2,700 employees worldwide since the beginning of 2012. The annualized savings generated by these headcount reductions, including compensation and benefits, is approximately $330 million.

Kodak said it is analyzing further operational and workforce reductions.

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Closures & Layoffs

.	Company	Address	City	State	Closure or Layoff	No. of Workers Impacted	Impact Date
.	Catalyst Paper	277 Spur North	Snowflake	AZ	Closure	266	9/30/2012
.	The Apache Railway Co.	W. Highway 277	Snowflake	AZ	Closure	26	9/30/2012
.	Jack In The Box	6800 Artesia Blvd., Bldg. 4	Buena Park	CA	Layoff	92	9/28/2012
.	Bel Air	8787 Elk Grove Blvd.	Elk Grove	CA	Closure	63	9/30/2012
.	Ralphs	3210 E Anaheim St.	Long Beach	CA	Layoff	63	9/17/2012
.	Labcorp	5300 Mcconnell Ave.	Los Angeles	CA	Closure	111	9/28/2012
.	The Cheesecake Factory	11647 San Vicente Blvd.	Los Angeles	CA	Closure	130	9/26/2012
.	MV Transportation	1001 9th St., Suite A	Modesto	CA	Closure	114	9/28/2012
.	Raley's	2401 E. Orangeburg Ave.	Modesto	CA	Closure	71	9/30/2012
.	Medimmune (Astrazeneca Plc)	319 N. Bernardo Ave.	Mountain View	CA	Closure	176	9/28/2012
.	Northridge Hospital Medical Center	18300 Roscoe Blvd.	Northridge	CA	Layoff	113	10/3/2012
.	Continental Commercial Products	15510 Blackburn Ave.	Norwalk	CA	Closure	47	9/22/2012
.	St. Joseph Health Revenue Cycle Services	1100 W. Stewart Drive	Orange	CA	Layoff	239	9/29/2012
.	JM Eagle	23711 Rider St.	Perris	CA	Closure	49	9/21/2012
.	USS-Posco Industries	900 Loveridge Road	Pittsburg	CA	Layoff	144	9/20/2012
.	Gen-Probe	10210 Genetic Center Drive	San Diego	CA	Layoff	75	10/1/2012
.	Intuit	7535 Torrey Santa Fe Road	San Diego	CA	Layoff	120	9/21/2012
.	Keolis Transit America (Mobility Plus Transport)	640 Cesar Chavez St.	San Francisco	CA	Closure	61	9/20/2012
.	Medimmune (Astrazeneca Plc)	3055 Patrick Henry Drive	Santa Clara	CA	Closure	88	9/28/2012
.	Crothall Healthcare	18321 Clark St.	Tarzana	CA	Layoff	76	9/21/2012
.	Brockway Mould Inc.	4189 Route 219, Wing M	Brockport	PA	Closure	54	10/13/2012
.	CemcoLift Inc.	2801 Township Line Road	Hatfield	PA	Closure	96	10/31/2012
.	Sykes Enterprises Inc.	830 Town Center Drive	Langhorne	PA	Closure	183	10/10/2012
.	Computershare	500 Ross St.	Pittsburgh	PA	Closure	156	9/30/2012
.	Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland	717 Grant St.	Pittsburgh	PA	Layoff	20	10/15/2012
.	General Dynamics	156 Cedar Ave.	Scranton	PA	Layoff	60	10/15/2012
.	Aramark Healthcare @ Geisinger, Community Medical Center	1822 Mulberry St.	Scranton	PA	Closure	117	Immediately
.	The Haven Group Inc.	195 Airport Road	Selinsgrove	PA	Closure	107	9/25/2012
.	Regional Elite Airline Services, University Park Airport	2535 Fox Hill Road	State College	PA	Closure	46	10/23/2012
.	Dove Industries Inc.	767 Sans Souci Parkway	Wilkes-Barre	PA	Closure	106	Immediately

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