At the Monroeville (Pa.) outpost of discount sporting goods store Going Going Gone, customers in search of sneakers are in luck. Footwear spans a long line of shelves — and then stretches along the warehouse's backside like a Great Wall of shoes.
Customers who want, say, tennis balls, might fare worse. Or maybe not. It depends. In mid-July, a tennis enthusiast would have been disappointed by Going Going Gone's distinctly non-yellow ball selection.
That's the nature of "off-price" retailers, the term for stores that sell inventory that proved hard to move elsewhere and is now offered at bargain prices. Driving along William Penn Highway in Monroeville is like getting a tour of them: There's Marshalls, HomeGoods, Ollie's Bargain Outlet and Macy's Backstage.
Most recently, there's Pittsburgh's homegrown off-price retailer, Going Going Gone, an offshoot of Findlay-based Dick's Sporting Goods that launched in 2021 — just around the corner from its better-known counterpart in the Monroeville Mall. (
Going Going Gone pares Dick's down to its essentials. Gone are the in-store putting greens and fleet of high-tech treadmills. In their stead are racks of marked-down apparel, bright-red stickers on their price tags denoting new, reduced prices. Certain racks sport signs reading "$5 or less."
The atmosphere is also simpler than that in a Dick's store — the walls are a plain warehouse gray — but as inflation eats into customers' wallets, more shoppers seem willing to trade in store vibes for deals. Off-price retail has proven surprisingly resilient in a sector otherwise threatened by the rise of Amazon and pandemic-accelerated drops in in-person shopping experiences.
"The business is red hot," said Mark Cohen, director of retail studies at Columbia Business School, who quoted the late outlet-mall operator Stanley Tanger: "'When times are good, people love a bargain. When times are bad, people need a bargain.'"
A resilient model
As Brian Madden, general manager of value concepts for Dick's Sporting Goods, walked through the aisles of Going Going Gone's Ross store recently, he pointed out both what was and what wasn't on offer. That's a yes to golf shirts, which were in season, but maybe a no for actual clubs. And there's a reason for that.
"Softlines," he explained, the industry term for goods like clothing and bedding that are usually soft — in Dick's case, athletic apparel — are more likely to be seasonal, as styles change with trends and the weather. Whereas "hardlines" — goods that traditionally are, you guessed it, harder — can sit longer on shelves.
A swimsuit, for instance, might get moved off a showroom floor to make way for jackets in the fall. But a basketball can sit on a shelf all year long. That's why Going Going Gone has an emphasis on clothing and shoes — it's where that swimsuit might end up when Dick's needs to move it out of the way.
Off-price retailers aren't only repositories for formerly regular-price goods. Models vary depending on the outlet. Macy's Backstage, for instance, is usually housed within its department store parent Macy's locales, despite operating under a separate team.
"Macy's Backstage has its own buying team with merchandise ordered in smaller quantities and more often, creating a rotating assortment," said Macy's spokesperson Stephanie Jimenez. The Backstage concept has proven popular — more than 300 Macy's stores offer Backstage, Ms. Jimenez said. That includes stores in Ross, Monroeville and in South Hills Village mall.
Mr. Cohen said Macy's Backstage underscores the risks that traditional retailers take when launching their own off-price offshoots. "If you go to Macy's, you'll see lots of people shopping in Backstage and not many shopping in Macy's," he said.
He sees similar risks with Nordstrom, whose off-price brand Nordstrom Rack has begun to nibble away at the mother chain's bottom line. Nordstrom's original vision for Rack was that younger, more budget-conscious shoppers would level up to the main store as they became more affluent.
Mr. Cohen does not see that happening. At Nordstrom Rack, he said, "I see a lot of well-heeled people bargain-hunting."
The rise of off-price retail coincides with the decline in popularity of traditional department stores. Between 2016 and last year, about 40% of department stores across the country closed, the Washington Post reported. And that dovetails with the decline in regional malls — the report found more than 800 mall-based department stores were expected to be shuttered by 2025.
"The department store was the place where you went to buy things you couldn't get anywhere else," Mr. Cohen said. Now Amazon is that place. The massive online retailer's impact is so widely felt and discussed that retailers now have their own term, "the Amazon effect," just to refer to it.
Still, off-price stores offer something traditional department stores don't: the thrill of the hunt.
The pleasures of bargain-hunting
The first off-price store was opened in 1909 by Boston businessman William Filene, who sold excess merchandise from his flagship department store Filene's at a below-ground outlet he called Filene's Basement. It proved so popular that soon other retailers were selling off their excess product to Filene's Basement as well.
In the boomtime years after World War II, Alfred Marshall copied Filene's idea, joining forces with a team of other businesspeople to launch the first of many Marshalls stores. The 1970s saw the founding of both TJ Maxx and Burlington, and the 1980s, Ross stores. They all capitalized on one thing: The customer's love of a deal.
Some of the store concepts required more hunting than others, some tossing clothing in bins, others on messy racks.
"Our athlete is someone that doesn't mind the thrill of the hunt, but we made it a little bit easier for him," said Mr. Madden, who pointed out that, though exact inventories are unpredictable, apparel at Going Going Gone is sorted by gender, size and even color, making for a more visually pleasing shopping experience than one taking place primarily in bins.
Dick's began thinking about discount retail in 2018. That's around the time it began conceptualizing and launching several new brands, including the outdoors-focused Public Lands and the experiential House of Sport.
"We started to kind of step back and say, where's the whitespace in retail, where we think we can improve upon what's out there?" said Mr. Madden.
The company began experimenting with discount stores with a brand it dubbed Dick's Warehouse Sale. After a few successful pop-ups — including one in Bethel Park — Mr. Madden and the team at Dick's decided to move ahead with Going Going Gone, a permanent discount location.
Mr. Madden sees Going Going Gone as a compliment to Dick's, one that, he hopes, keeps the customer shopping within "the Dick's ecosystem" for longer. (Customers can use the same points they've accrued via Dick's loyalty program, the Dick's Scorecard, at Going Going Gone as well.)
Even though it was conceived earlier, Going Going Gone launched in the midst of the pandemic, when people were staying home. And though shoppers have largely returned to stores, consumer spending habits have yet to rebound to pre-pandemic levels. Going Going Gone occasionally attracts customers who never shopped at Dick's at all.
Mr. Madden declined to comment on how inflation has impacted Going Going Gone's sales. But Mr. Cohen said he believes inflation is a time when consumers particularly appreciate a deal. "Price is a universal motivator of the retail business," he said.
The past year has been mostly good to Dick's — 2021 earnings results beat expectations, and the company appears to have escaped the pandemic slump, with net sales of $2.7 billion in the first quarter of 2022 up 41% compared to the first quarter of 2019. (However, in its first-quarter earnings report, Dick's adjusted its outlook for the year to be more "cautious" given inflation and ongoing supply chain issues.)
And while Mr. Madden stayed mum on when and where the chain is looking to expand, hiring booths at the front of both stores point to things going well. They read, in bold block letters, "JOIN OUR TEAM."
