Posted on 04/19/2017 2:16:37 PM PDT by SoFloFreeper
More than 3,000 employees in 36 states will be laid off in the liquidation of one of the world’s largest Christian retailers.
More than two years ago, suppliers forgave Family Christian Stores $127 million in debt so that it could remain open. Today, the chain—which bills itself as “the world’s largest retailer of Christian-themed merchandise”—announced it is closing all of its stores after 85 years in business.
Family Christian, which employed more than 3,000 people in more than 240 stores across 36 states, blamed “changing consumer behavior and declining sales.”
“We had two very difficult years post-bankruptcy,” stated president Chuck Bengochea. “Despite improvements in product assortment and the store experience, sales continued to decline. In addition, we were not able to get the pricing and terms we needed from our vendors to successfully compete in the market.
(Excerpt) Read more at christianitytoday.com ...
Dang!
‘End Times’ scenario?
Internet competition.
I’m sure the Left is crowing.
IMHO, they started to go downhill when they changed from Family Bookstores to Family Christian Stores.
Less books, more trinkets.
No doubt, but Christian merchandise is selling very well online.
I would go in looking for music or books and find the same tchotchke that you could buy at the local Mega-Store but at a major markup.
It filled half the store and they shrank the book section to stuff more it in.
They would rarely have any of the titles in paperback even though I knew they were available.
In the end they didn't know what they wanted to be.
No they screwed the pooch during the first bankruptcy filing.
No indication of any effort for an online presence during the last two years
When I was a kid, I had this little handheld game. It was a little steel ball inside a small container and you had to tilt the game to navigate the metal ball around a maze. It was really hard because the ball would always fall into the holes in the game.
One the bottom were the words “Jesus never fails.” It always made me wonder if Jesus would have been really good at that game or what.
I think we sometimes jump to conclusions about what this says about our society at large, that a store selling Christian things would not be able to survive any longer.
Ultimately what it says is that poor business management led to it’s downfall.
What products to carry? Who is your base market? Were efforts made to go online to expand the customer base. Was here adequate outreach/advertising?
Hopefully someone with an acute business acumen will come along and do a better job.
Not enough family Christians?
There is going to be a coming shakeup in retail real estate. I know a lady who has a great idea for a business, the kind that can't be done on-line. Yet when she runs the numbers, the retail rents doom her before she starts. But the landlords would rather let empty retail space fester for years as eyesores rather than lower their rent.
While it’s not always sound to base “what’s happening” in a market based on your own experience, I found that in the 90s and early 2000s, I’d visit these stores frequently. Much of the time I’d get music there.
With the rise of on-line music, there’s just no need.
I think also, overall, the quality and impact of Christian music-—which admittedly only made up some of the FCS business-—has declined dramatically. Stephen Curtis Chapman, Michael W. Smith, Mark Schulz, the Newsboys, DC Talk (now broken up), Avalon, Point of Grace have either disappeared or have put out pretty unimpressive music in the last 3-4 years. What was, in 2003-2006 a real golden age of Christian music has tailed off into a bunch of sound-alikes.
This also corresponds to the waning of the Word of Faith movement, which (I know many Freepers don’t like it but tough) sparked an incredible outburst of Bible study and purchase of religious materials. For example, in the early 1990s, I remember buying not only Vines, but a Hebrew-Greek-English Bible, and an annotated/expanded edition of the Bible.
I’ll also add that I think Christian fiction, which was quite different at first with Frank Peretti fell back into very predictable stuff. And, remember, the whole “Left Behind” series boomed during that time, sparking sales.
So all these things combined to cut the legs out from under FCS.
I think their core customer base would be evangelical Christians , and other devout Christians??
I’ve heard there are about 80 million Evangelicals in America.,,And there are tens of millions of other various Christians. The question is- how many Christian themed products, such as Bibles and assorted knick knacks, do Christians buy? Can potential customers get their products elsewhere?? It seems as if the market has spoken .
Christian bric-a-Brac
Why would someone buy a bankrupt company that continued to lose money? Particularly, in this hostile retail climate in which money is spent online as opposed to brick and mortar stores. So, my question to you is, would you buy them if you had to money to lose your shirt? I didn’t think so.
Indeed. I went in one recently for the first time in years. Few books, but lots of little idols and religious trinkets. It was horrible.
You are aware of Amazon, I think? That is why Borders closed and B&N has closed many of their stores. This is why Best Buy has gone from a huge selection of DVDs and CDs to only a handful and in its place are selling men's shavers and blenders.
Family Bookstores got most of their revenue from books, CDs and DVDs, but brick and mortar can't compete with Amazon or Christianbook.com.
So they did what Best Buy has done. Replaced some of their selection with other items because they could not move their books or CDs.
What would you have done differently?
Christendom is sometimes more polite and less outreaching than God wants it to be.
I have some understanding about the music factor, being an aspiring songwriter in that genre. We need stuff that will shine the light good and hard into the world. And uber polite music won’t suffice. It needs to have verve and zest and make no bones about what it is saying and not be all full of theological code words. Official Christian attempts to do rock and roll, for example, are wimpy. I don’t know why there can’t be Christian metal that will boot the devil in the rear.
But again I got attitude because of my life. I’m like a kicked pit bull ready to bite back.
B&N has replaced a significant amount of shelf space with toys because no one can sell books retail anymore.
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