The fate of the Mattress Firm store in the Fairplain Plaza of Benton Harbor may well depend on how the parent company proceeds with a potential bankruptcy filing according to a recent report from Reuters news service.
Reuters says that the largest mattress retailer in the nation “is considering a potential bankruptcy filing as it seeks to get out of costly store leases and shut some of its 3,000 locations that are losing money.” That report was based on people familiar with the matter according to Reuters.
The company does not routinely share sales information from individual stores, and there is no way to determine who profitable the Fairplain Plaza store is, or whether the lease rate for their large storefront down the strip from Kohl’s and next door to Michael’s is one that the parent company would consider to be too high to continue to operate under.
Reuters notes that Mattress Firm’s South African parent corporation, Steinhoff International Holdings, “has been working on a deal to restructure the debt of some subsidiaries with its creditors, following an accounting scandal,” and adds that those same creditors “agreed last month to hold off on their debt claims for three years.”
As reported here on Moody on the Market two years ago, Steinhoff acquired Mattress firm in August of 2016 for $64 per share in cash. That translated to a $3.8-billion transaction at that time. You can see more of that story by click the link below. In the meantime, we’ll keep tabs on the marketplace to determine the future of Mattress Firm in Michigan’s Great Southwest. Here’s the link to the merger story from 2016:
https://www.moodyonthemarket.com/fairplain-mattress-firm-parent-changing-hands/
