JOANN Fabric and Craft Stores will close eight of its more than 800 U.S. stores in the coming months.
Anyone who loves do-it-yourself projects and crafts has probably visited a JOANN Fabric and Craft Stores location.
The company has been around for nearly eight decades and has locations in nearly every state in the United States.
The headlines of some articles published online in late November 2022 indicated that JOANN was closing its physical stores, and online searches showed people wondering in recent weeks whether the company was going out of business.
VERIFY reader Kathy also asked if the popular craft retailer was closing most of its stores.
question
Is JOANN Fabric going out of business or closing most of its stores?
source
Answer
No, JOANN Fabric is not going out of business or closing most of its stores.
what we found
JOANN has “no plans to close its physical stores,” despite “unsubstantiated reports” that the company is doing so, JOANN communications manager Shauntina Lilly told VERIFY in an email.
A manager at the JOANN store in Spokane, Washington also confirmed that the store is not going out of business and has no plans to close.
Lilly added that the company expects to close eight of its more than 800 stores across the country in the next three months, and that some team members working at those closed stores may receive severance pay.
“In keeping with standard brick-and-mortar business processes, JOANN is occasionally closing stores while investing in and opening entirely new stores to best serve the needs of our customers,” Lily wrote in an email.
JOANN has a page on its website for future store openings, but no locations are listed yet.
Search JOANN’s press release archive, Facebook page and twitter account Nor did it return any results about the company closing all of its stores.
In late November, JOANN Fabric responded to rumors of mass store closures via its official Twitter account.
“Any store closures we plan are part of our normal business review process,” the company said. wrote in a tweet in November. 28“We’re absolutely not going to go out of business or close down stores on a large scale.”
VERIFY found news reports about two of the eight stores slated to close in the coming months.
The JOANN store at the Meadowbrook Mall in Bridgeport, West Virginia, is scheduled to close on January 12. After more than 30 years in business, Feb. 22, 2023, according to local television news station WDTV. No reason for the closure was provided.
Another store in Marion, Ohio, will also close in mid-January, the Marion Star newspaper reported in late November.