Hi all,
Just thought I could end some of this speculation going on about WWW. The following is not official information from WWW....just the story as I know it. I am the Assistant Manager of one of the stores. Here is what happened...
The parent company of WWW was formerly Trendlines. Most everyone knows this. Since woodworking was mainly a winter type business, Trendlines wanted to branch out into something that could generate sales in the summertime. For this reason, Trendlines bought the Golf Day company. In addititon, Trendlines also owned the Post Tool chain of tool stores. As most folks know, both Golf Day and Post Tools went under. WWW did not.
As a result, the WWW stores chain ended up shouldering the burden of paying back the money from the bankruptcy caused by those 2 other chains. WWW itself was doing just fine prior to that debacle. At some point, the Trendlines name was gone and the corporation became simply, Woodworkers Warehouse. The Trendlines name was gone.
Over the past few years, WWW has repaid many millions of dollars of the amount owed and had only 2 million to go. This year, the company would have turned a small profit actually until the latest debacle struck.
You see, without naming same, a certain bank was providing the financing for store operations. This bank was recently bought out and taken over by another, bigger bank. WWW had a committment from the smaller bank for continued financing, but the takeover bank would not honor that agreement. So now, WWW was courting several other financial institutions for the needed financing. However, it took too long and WWW ended up in default because of the lack of financing. This meant they had to file for chapter 11, reorganization.
In court it was decided that WWW had to put the inventory up for auction to repay creditors. Great American was the high bidder and they now own all the inventory in all 94 WWW stores.
There is now a going out of business sale going on at all 94 WWW stores. Everything in the stores is now being sold at 10% off. The current sale flyer's ending date is the 10th of December. Prices in this flyer are being honored. And if an item is on sale, the 10% will be taken off the sale price. There will be no further rain checks, special orders, store-to store transfers, or anything like that.
All WWW stores will remain open until all the inventory in that store is sold. Stuff that doesn't sell right away will probably be further reduced in the near future. Estimates range anywhere from 6 - 8 weeks for the completion of this process. But if there's something you want to obtain, ya better get it while the getting is good. It now becomes a crap shoot. You'll have to decide whether or not to buy it now at
10% off or wait till your item gets reduced even further. The catch is...the item you want may be gone if you wait too long. Not a sales pitch...just a fact of these going out of business sales.Cash or major credit card only. No checks.
WWW does not owe Delta 20 million dollars as someone else said. But without solid financing in place, and the default because of that lack of financing, WWW was forced into this action.
And finally, I am pretty sad about this. I really enjoyed my job at WWW. While I obviously cannot speak for any of the other stores, ours was a pretty damn good one. Those of us who work there were all woodworkers and we had a wealth of knowledge. We had just started woodworking classes back in August which I was teaching and this was going very well. In fact, we were very close to finishing a pretty well-equipped woodworking shop right in the store for teaching the classes. I realize that some folks have had problems with other WWW stores with unknowledgable staff, no stock, etc. But ours was very well run and we bent over backwards to get what the customer wanted.
Now there will be 600 or so people out of work,...me included. :o(
Terry