ouch

[dmx10101]

UPDATE 1-Pacific Sunwear to close remaining demo stores
Fri Jan 4, 2008 9:45am EST

NEW YORK, Jan 4 (Reuters) - Pacific Sunwear of California Inc (PSUN.O: Quote, Profile, Research), the surfing-inspired teen clothing retailer, said on Friday that it would close its struggling chain of 154 demo stores "as soon as is practical" and take a charge of up to $50 million.

"It is in the best interests of our investors to close our remaining demo stores and concentrate our efforts on our core business," Chief Executive Sally Frame Kasaks said in a statement.

In October, Pacific Sunwear said it would close its trendy One Thousand Steps shoe boutiques and was exploring alternatives for demo, which sells urban-inspired clothing.

Wall Street had complained for years that demo was a drain on profits at Pacific Sunwear.

Demo, which launched in 1998, has struggled to find an audience at malls for hip-hop fashions that are at odds with the colorful, California surfing-inspired looks seen at Pacific Sunwear's main chain of PacSun stores.

Sales at stores open at least a year, a key gauge of retail performance, had been in a slump at demo.

Due to the demo store closures, Pacific Sunwear said it expected to incur pretax charges of $35 million to $50 million for items like severance payments, inventory reserves and lease terminations.

The company expects to incur $3 million to $4 million of the charges in the fourth quarter ending on Feb. 2 and the rest in the first quarter ending on May 3. (Reporting by Nicole Maestri, editing by Lisa Von Ahn)

[NJxxJon]

its just like hot-topic stores....they kept trying to flip things around and it did not work :goodidea:

[beachgal26]

This is such a dumb move on their parts to add all these stores to malls and then close them down the following year!  We had a great section of one of our malls in the food court area that was completely eliminate to install a mega Pac Sun store.

:huh::huh: