SMITHFIELD – After 93 years in business, all of the family-owned Benny’s stores will close by the end of 2017, the company announced Friday, citing the threat of online retailers such as Amazon.com Inc.
The stores’ closure will put all 715 employees across southern New England out of work. Employees of the company found out on Friday before the announcement.
“We’ll miss our employees, who have been such a big part of what has made Benny’s successful for so many decades. So many of them are well-known to our customers and are literally part of the Benny’s DNA,” said Arnold Bromberg, co-owner of Benny’s.
The release characterizes the shuttering of the company’s stores as a “retirement” with a planned wind down of all 31 stores before the end of the calendar year. The company has been fielding offers for its real estate holdings.
“Our current ownership is all at the age where we would like to retire from the business and spend more time with our families, and we have collectively judged that the always-competitive retail landscape has shifted in a way that makes it almost impossible for small, family-owned chains like ours to reasonably compete moving forward,” said Bromberg.
“We’ve lived and breathed this way of doing business for a long time, but we could not, in good conscience, leave the business to the next generation of our family when these market conditions would so clearly conspire to work against them,” said Bromberg.
Benny’s also announced it will host a “retirement sale” in the coming weeks before it ceases its business operations.
“We feel that Benny’s has become part of what makes our small corner of the world so special. We’ll miss our loyal customers and our employees – friends and neighbors – generations of whom have shopped our stores for the past 93 years and have referred to Benny’s as ‘my favorite store.’ As we wind down this business, we want to do our best to ensure that our mark on local retail history will be as positive and lasting as possible,” Bromberg concluded.
Chris Bergenheim is the PBN web editor.
