Retail Therapy: Smaller Kohl's Coming to Dallas, Pottery Barn Outlet Opens in Arlington and More

Kohl's is bringing its small format store to Texas.The retailer has started shrinking its Medallion Center store on Skillman St. in Dallas and is remodeling the rest of it.Kohl's was short on specific details about the store, which is about 80,000-square feet, except to say it's open during the construction and that it will be smaller when work is done later this summer. A fitness center is probably going into the space, but the company declined to say. Kohl's and Planet Fitness said in March that they've formed a partnership to open 10 Planet Fitness locations adjacent to Kohl's in 2019. The fitness centers will be about 20,000 to 25,000 square feet. Kohl's first started talking about shrinking some of its 1,100 stores in 2017 as legacy retailers competing with digital shopping stepped up the pace of store closings. Instead, Kohls said it makes more sense to shrink its big boxes as customers shift to e-commerce, because consumers will still want to shop in stores. Closing a lot of stores removes that opportunity. Kohl's is calling this idea a pilot and said it's looking for more partners. Discount grocer Aldi and Kohl's have been working on the concept since 2018. The first Aldi adjacent to a Kohl's opened in February in Waukesha, Wis. The Medallion store in Northeast Dallas was one of the first Kohl's stores in Dallas-Fort Worth. It first expanded into competitor J.C. Penney's turf in 1999. Not all Kohl's stores need "rightsizing," the company has said. About half of Kohl's existing stores are smaller and it has about 13 location that are only 35,000 square feet, but the stores in Texas are bigger. Kohl's has also been adding Amazon package capabilities to its Texas stores. The retailer said it would begin expansion of the service in July. But the Medallion store had a temporary set up for it Friday morning and people were making returns. Kohl's first tested that relationship for 18 months in Chicago and Los Angeles and said Amazon return customers did drive traffic and brought a younger shopper to its stores.  Continue reading...