Off-cost retail pioneer Century 21 Retailers filed for individual bankruptcy on Thursday with a system to shut all its stores, citing the refusal of its insurers to deal with its losses from the coronavirus pandemic.
The liquidation of Century 21’s property through the Chapter eleven individual bankruptcy method would finish a run of nearly sixty a long time for a company that was started by the Gindi relatives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, in 1961.
The firm, which has 13 stores generally in New York Town and the bordering metropolitan space, generated around $747 million of earnings in fiscal 2019 but, like other vendors, had been strike difficult by the pandemic, which forced it in mid-March to shut all its spots.
Even with stores possessing reopened, Century 21 said it could no more time keep in company because its insurers “have turned their backs on us at this most significant time,” declining to give the $a hundred seventy five million it was trying to get in protection for company disruption losses resulting from the pandemic.
“We are self-assured that had we gained any significant portion of the insurance coverage proceeds, we would have been ready to save hundreds of work opportunities and weather conditions the storm,” co-CEO Raymond Gindi said in a news release.
Century 21 sued its insurers in July but CFO Norman Veit said the firm had to file individual bankruptcy in element to reduce its landlords from pursuing eviction proceedings to judgment and/or seizing its stock to fulfill rents because of.
“The debtors imagine that [the individual bankruptcy] court docket can give an expedited resolution of the insurance coverage motion that will yield significant proceeds and certainty for the debtors and their estates,” he said in a court docket declaration.
As New York Magazine studies, Century 21 was famed as “a price reduction mecca: a treasure trove wherever, if you were willing to spend hrs digging (and probably get into a combat), you could uncover a holy-grail luxurious item at anything like 99.99 p.c off.”
But even in advance of the pandemic, Veit said, it had been adversely influenced by “the shifting of gross sales from traditional brick-and-mortar vendors to online vendors, and altering client tastes.”
