Why Kohls Announced 27 Store Closures in 2025
Kohl's issued the announcement on January 9, 2025. It said that 27 stores it identified as underperforming were slated to close by April that year. More than 1,150 stores made up the chain at the time of the release, so the list concerned a specific subset of locations. The company published the affected addresses in its announcement rather than describing every store in a state as closing.
The release also included a separate logistics decision. Kohl's said its fulfillment center in San Bernardino, California, would close in May when the lease expired. The facility had operated since 2010 and was one of 15 fulfillment and distribution centers in the company's network at the time. Kohl's said newer facilities and the option to ship online purchases from stores gave it room to handle orders without that site. The lease timing and the changes to the distribution network were the main reasons it gave for this part of the announcement.
For retail workers, the store decisions meant a local impact even though the chain remained in many markets. Kohl's said it informed workers at affected stores and offered a severance package or the chance to apply for other open roles. For shoppers, an address was more useful than the statewide location of a store. Different branches of the chain could be listed separately, and a notice about one store did not give the operating status of another in the same area.
The corporate leadership references also belong to that period. Tom Kingsbury was quoted in the January announcement, and Ashley Buchanan was the incoming chief executive around the time it was issued. Kohl's announced a subsequent leadership change in May 2025 and named Michael Bender interim CEO. The dates matter because a repost can make a 2025 closing notice look like a fresh store announcement. The original release records the timetable the company gave at the time, including which decisions involved stores and which involved its fulfillment network.
The company described the 27 decisions as part of an ongoing review of its real estate. It said the stores affected by the announcement had underperformed. The footprint of a national department store includes leases, buildings and local sales patterns that differ by location. Closing a listed branch was one company decision, while decisions about a different branch would need to be established from its own status. The January release was therefore specific about the stores it covered and about the month in which the changes were expected.
The announcement combined two parts of the business that customers encounter in different ways. A store has a public address, sales staff and a place for customers to shop. A fulfillment center sits behind the orders customers place online. Closing one can affect local jobs and the internal routing of parcels without necessarily changing which stores shoppers can visit. For Kohl's, the company said its ability to fulfill orders through other facilities and stores made the closing possible. The two timetables in the same release reflected those differences.
The original statement also specified the scale of the store list relative to the company at the time. That context helps explain why the number 27 could be significant for employees and communities without describing the chain's operations nationwide. The addresses and deadlines in the announcement are the details readers can use to identify the changes it actually covered.