Dick’s Sporting Goods announces closures with hundreds of Foot Locker stores at risk

Dick’s Sporting Goods is gearing up to close several Foot Locker stores, just months after scooping up the sneaker chain in a $2.4billion deal. 

The retailer didn’t say how many locations are getting the axe, but CEO Ed Stack called the closures a necessary cleanup to keep Foot Locker from weighing down the business by 2026. 

‘We need to clean out the garage,’ Stack said during an interview on CNBC. 

‘We’ve taken pretty aggressive markdowns to clean out old merchandise.’   

Foot Locker, the 51-year-old sneaker seller, operates more than 2,400 stores worldwide, including 665 in the US. Those shops have struggled for years. 

Its core customers tend to be lower-income than Dick’s shoppers, and the chain has been hit hard by a softer economy and rapidly shifting sneaker trends, especially from long-time best-selling brands like Nike. 

Dick’s, on the other hand, has been on a heater. 

Sales jumped 5.7 percent last quarter — far better than the roughly 3 percent Wall Street was predicting, about the same as selling 7.2 million more pairs of Nike track pants than analysts expected. 

The company’s profit landed at $75million, a major drop from the $228million earned during the same quarter last year. 

But much of the plunge comes from the cash paid to acquire Foot Locker. 

Investors have not been kind to Dick’s since the acquisition, and continued that trend on early Tuesday morning. 

In the past month, the stock has been down more than ten percent. Share prices plunged as much as seven percent in pre-market trading today. 

Most of that skepticism surrounds the curious decision to scoop up a retailer that has seen profits fall for several years.  

Stack’s announcement is the latest in a wave of closures for Foot Locker. 

In 2023, the sneaker retailer announced plans to shutter 420 underperforming locations in the US by 2026. 

Now, Dick’s is throwing a Hail Mary to recharge Foot Locker’s sales. 

Foot Locker, the 51-year-old sneaker store, has paired with A-listers like former basketball star Shaquille O’Neal, pictured above

Ed Stack, Dick’s Sporting Goods’ CEO, led the company through its $2.4billion acquisition of the sneaker chain. The deal closed on September 8

The company has been testing major changes in 11 Foot Locker stores across North America — including cutting back more than 20 percent of the products on shelves, bringing back more apparel, and completely reworking the ‘footwear wall.’ 

‘If you’d walked into a Foot Locker store before and you looked at the footwear wall, it was nothing but a run-on sentence,’ Stack said. 

‘It was just a whole bunch of shoes thrown up on the wall.’ 

Dick’s says the goal of the Foot Locker shake-up is to get all the painful changes out of the way now so the combined company can start fresh by 2026. 

The retailer didn’t immediately respond to the Daily Mail’s request for comment.