Discount Legend Century 21 Files for Chapter 11

Off-selling price retail pioneer Century 21 Shops filed for individual bankruptcy on Thursday with a prepare to near all its retailers, citing the refusal of its insurers to cover its losses from the coronavirus pandemic.

The liquidation of Century 21’s assets as a result of the Chapter 11 individual bankruptcy course of action would stop a run of just about sixty years for a organization that was established by the Gindi family in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, in 1961.

The firm, which has 13 retailers typically in New York City and the bordering metropolitan area, produced close to $747 million of revenue in fiscal 2019 but, like other vendors, experienced been strike tough by the pandemic, which compelled it in mid-March to near all its locations.

Even with retailers having reopened, Century 21 explained it could no lengthier remain in organization simply because its insurers “have turned their backs on us at this most important time,” declining to deliver the $a hundred seventy five million it was searching for in protection for organization disruption losses resulting from the pandemic.

“We are self-assured that experienced we received any meaningful part of the insurance proceeds, we would have been in a position to help you save thousands of work and weather the storm,” co-CEO Raymond Gindi explained in a information release.

Century 21 sued its insurers in July but CFO Norman Veit explained the firm experienced to file individual bankruptcy in portion to avert its landlords from pursuing eviction proceedings to judgment and/or seizing its inventory to satisfy rents because of.

“The debtors think that [the individual bankruptcy] court can deliver an expedited resolution of the insurance motion that will produce major proceeds and certainty for the debtors and their estates,” he explained in a court declaration.

As New York Journal studies, Century 21 was famed as “a discounted mecca: a treasure trove exactly where, if you had been willing to invest hours digging (and it’s possible get into a battle), you could locate a holy-grail luxury merchandise at a little something like ninety nine.ninety nine per cent off.”

But even before the pandemic, Veit explained, it experienced been adversely affected by “the shifting of gross sales from conventional brick-and-mortar vendors to on the web vendors, and changing shopper tastes.”

(Image by John Nacion/SOPA Photos/LightRocket by means of Getty Photos)

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