Jaime Torres Valadez / El Paso newspaper
Friday March 12, 2021 | 6:00
The Walt Disney Company, the entertainment giant, announced the closure of at least 60 stores in several cities around the country, including one of two in El Paso, Texas, executives reported.
The one in Cielo Vista Mall, was the first to settle in this city. It was visited by thousands of buyers, both local and from Northern Mexico. Now only the store of ‘The Outlet Shoppes in El Paso’ in the northwest remains.
“Now is the time to say goodbye,” reads a sign posted at the entrance to the store emphasizing that you can make purchases from the online store: official.shopdisney.com.
“I feel sad to see how many beloved and recognized stores in the city are disappearing,” said Evangelina Ruiz, after hearing of the closure. The place is offering a 30 percent discount on the occasion of its retirement on its purchases, in addition to the gift of a $ 10 coupon to those who visit and purchase their items in the brick-and-mortar store.
While there will still be a branch in the city, consumers showed melancholy, as did the workers who will be completing their work cycle this month.
Dozens of stores, including seven in the state of Texas, are scheduled to close on March 23 of this year or earlier, the company said.
The Walt Disney Company recently announced that it is drastically reducing the size of its store chain in North America by about 35 percent. And it will in other parts of the world too.
For several years now, and even more so with the coronavirus pandemic, shoppers have been choosing to buy their goods online, which has motivated the company to put more emphasis on e-commerce in the near future.
“We have been coming here for years to buy so many toys from the magical world of Disney, first for our children, then for our grandchildren and now for our great-grandchildren we will have to go to another,” said another customer regretfully. while waiting in line to enter.
Like her, consumers bought her toys, Disney character cuddly monkeys, creative crafts, puzzles, costumes, and even DVDs of their favorite movies to have fun at home.
The store has been well attended since the announcement of the closure, but order and controlled capacity have been given the upper hand by the staff enforcing the security protocol to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
In Texas, a total of seven locations will be closed: three in San Antonio; two in Houston, one in Laredo and one in El Paso.
The remaining stores to close in the country are in Arizona (3); Baltimore (2), Colorado (1), California (9), Chicago (2), Indianapolis (2), Kansas (1), Miami (2), New York (2), Oregon (1), New Jersey (1 ), Missouri (1), Pittsburgh (2) and Tennessee (1).
Stephanie Young, Disney’s manager, told the media that the company moved to the Internet during the pandemic, noting that the group recently had more than 300 “Disney Stores” with flagship locations around the world, including in Times Square in New York.
While Disney initially did not provide information on how many jobs would be lost as a result of the closures, the Mickey Mouse Group had already announced that it would lay off about 32,000 employees in the first half of fiscal year 2021.
Disney theme parks and cruise ships, in particular, are severely affected by the pandemic. Before the crisis, Disney had more than 100,000 employees in this division, it was said.
Newspaper data shows that at its peak in 1999, there were nearly 800 Disney stores around the world. In more than two decades, the chain wants to significantly reduce its presence in the classic retail sector and focus on expanding its digital trading platform.