Ritz Camera Centers Inc., the bankrupt parent company of Wolf Camera, will close 300 stores nationwide – three in the Raleigh-Durham area – and will sell all of those locations’ merchandise in liquidation sales that started Saturday.
The three Triangle stores that are shutting down operate under the Wolf Camera brand. They are at Cary Towne Center mall, Durham’s The Streets at Soutpoint mall and Raleigh’s North Hills mixed-use center.
The closings will leave Ritz Camera with eight Wolf Camera and two Ritz Camera locations in the Triangle.
Beltsville, Md.-based Ritz will have about 400 stores left after the sales.
Ritz was the nation’s largest camera-store chain when it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February. A drop in consumer spending and slumping sales at Ritz's Boater’s World chain prompted the bankruptcy filing.
A Delaware bankruptcy court judge gave Ritz permission on March 19 to hire Gordon Bros. to shut down the company's 130-store Boater’s World chain. In 1987, Ritz launched Boater’s World, a boating-and-fishing supply retailer with 137 stores now operating.
Ritz doubled its Triangle presence in 2001 when it agreed to pay $84.7 million to buy Wolf Camera out of bankrutcy. Ritz began with a single store in Atlantic City in 1918. Its retail brands today include Wolf Camera, Kits Cameras, Inkley’s and The Camera Shop.
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