Bon-Ton Stores

The Bon-Ton Stores was an American department store company operating the Bon-Ton, Bergner's, Boston Store, Carson's, Elder-Beerman, Herberger's and Younkers chains, mostly in the Midwest and Northeast. Founded in 1898, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on February 4, 2018, and — after 160 years of trading — was sold to liquidators; all of its stores closed by the end of August 2018. The Bon-Ton name was later revived as an online retailer under new ownership, separate from the store company.

Company Profile

Bon-Ton's position was the regional department store: the anchor of smaller-city malls, selling clothing, cosmetics and home goods to communities the national chains served less closely. It had not posted a profit since 2010, and the February 2018 filing followed a missed $14 million interest payment. A bid to keep the business running as a going concern never materialised, and the bankruptcy court approved the liquidators' purchase in April 2018.

The closure of more than 250 stores and the loss of about 24,000 jobs made Bon-Ton one of the largest retail liquidations of 2018. Its several nameplates carried deep local histories — Carson Pirie Scott dated to 1854 and Boston Store to 1897 — so the liquidation ended a number of distinct retail stories at once.

The range behind the name is department-store clothing, cosmetics and home goods under seven nameplates. Its customers are shoppers in smaller cities across the Midwest and Northeast. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Bon-Ton Stores in the industry: it explains the company's costs, its competitors and the kind of news that moved its shares when it had them. A change in either half of the combination, a new product category or a new customer, is usually the first sign that the business described in the older summaries is turning into something different.

Scale should be read from the dated summaries with their dates attached. Store counts, sales descriptions and market positions quoted there were the company's own account of itself in that year, and they are the right basis for comparing Bon-Ton Stores with the other companies in this section — a component supplier against a retailer, or a catalogue house against a mall chain — as long as each figure is compared with figures from roughly the same period.

For current dealings, the snapshot at the top of this page is the place to start: it gives the company's present status — Closed in 2018 — liquidated after Chapter 11; the name was later revived online under new ownership — and links to the official website, which is where current product ranges, store information and investor or corporate contacts are maintained. Anything in the dated summaries that conflicts with the snapshot should be read as the older position: summaries describe the year they are dated, and the snapshot describes the company as it stands now.

For anyone researching the fashion industry's public-company era, Bon-Ton Stores is a useful case: the largest American department-store liquidation of its year. The summaries in this section were compiled while the story was still unfolding, which is exactly what makes them worth keeping — they preserve what the company said about itself at the time, before the outcome was known.