It's hard to believe some retailers had a rough holiday season considering it took almost 20 minutes to get from 57th and Louise to 41st and Louise in mid December. Traffic was horrible and stores were crowded - at least when I tried to holiday shop.

Forbes recently reported that there are five store chains that face an uphill battle this year. It was recently announced that K-mart will close its Pierre and Mitchell stores, but they're not even one of the big retailers on the Forbes list.

A tough holiday shopping season and a disappointing sales and earnings performance in 2015 were the reasons given for Macy's closing 36 stores. Gap Inc. will close 175 under-performing stores and Walgreens has plans to close 200.  J.C. Penney has said they are preparing to close seven mall stores before the end of the year. There is no word on if any of these closings will occur in Sioux Falls.

An independent agency named Rapid Ratings measured several factors to determine which retailers were most at risk for closures:

They measured the financial health of companies across the sector using public filings, assessing their efficiency based on 62 weighted data points from profitability to cash flow.

Here's the list of the stores most at risk:

  1. JC Penney
  2. Aeropostale Inc
  3. Pacific Sunwear of California Inc
  4. J Crew Group Inc
  5. American Apparel Inc

So, what's the reason for the dip in sales? You can blame a lot of it on online shopping. Amazon and the off-price retailers have put enormous pressure on the sales and profits of traditional retailers, according to Forbes.

 

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