Find out yesterday that Joe and crafts is closing all their locations. I’m not entirely sure of the time frame, however, here’s some of what my local Joanne’s looks like. If you need any random pieces now might be the time to do it!!
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I read that they are closing 500 stores - not all of them. The Going Out of Business sales started a week ago Saturday. I went through one of the stores near me, but found it sadder than it has been for the last year.
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Yeah we had seen the first one saying only a few stores but then my wife started looking and found a few saying they were closing all.
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There is a great investment! Buy a nationwide company and make it bankrupt on day one.
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Makes me so sad- they have always had such a great selection of yarn and fabric. First Hancock’s and AC Moore, now JoAnns. . . all that’s left is Michaels. : (
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I’m still unpacking stuff from the old house and I swear 50% of the boxes are labeled “laser stuff”. I’ve got a whole wall of racks with what I’ve unpacked already and a dozen boxes to go. If I went to get closeout deals at Joanns my wife would kill me.
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Oh dear…not good for the crafters!
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apparently the private equity firm that took them over didn’t know what they were doing as far as I can tell.
my mom is really ticked.
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Actually from what I’ve been seeing, this was the plan, they bought them out for pennies on the dollar and will make back double what they invested
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Hmmmm…
Hadn’t seen anything along those lines. Interesting.
and sad.
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Sounds like a close out sale at your place would be good too 
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That is exactly how private equity works:
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So bummed about Joanns. Most of the other fabric stores in the area are gone. I still haven’t recovered from the loss of AC Moore and now I’m just left with Michaels for crafty-stuff.
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I got some great deals about a year ago when the Dothan store was closing, if you have one nearby go eat it up.
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They were sold to a private equity firm (Leonard Green & Partners) in March 2011. (The deal had been announced a year earlier in March 2010.) They lasted fourteen years after that, which is actually a remarkably long time for that scenario. (Normally a company is stripped of resources, loaded with debt, and spun off to die a quick death.)
I agree they were not managed particularly well after that and their 2018 rebranding was rather misguided. (They shifted more of their focus to their larger format stores with more generic merchandise, rather than focusing on the smaller fabric stores that had been their niche.)
I’ll miss them. They were the only big chain with a large fabric selection and comprehensive sewing supplies.
But after two bankruptcies in the past year there wasn’t much hope of them being saved. Closing half of their stores was a short-term attempt to keep people employed for a little while longer; there wasn’t really much hope that anyone would come along and beat the liquidation company’s offer.
Now that the liquidation company Is taking over (this weekend, I think?) I’d expect to see current sales end and prices to be reset to “normal” for the start of the liquidation process.
Use any gift cards you have NOW as the liquidation firm will undoubtedly not honor them.
Expect the best merchandise to be removed from stores and sold through other channels.
Stores will be loaded up with whatever garbage the liquidation firm wants to get rid of, not necessarily things from Joann warehouses. Prices usually drop slowly and good deals don’t usually appear until the very end.
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gonna roll by there tonight on the way home from work.
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The local JoAnns near us (1 to 1.5 hours away depending on if we go to Johnson City, Sevierville, or Knoxville) have always looked junky and the associates rude. So we quit going there. We have a Hobby Lobby in Morristown that has good material selection as well as everything else we need. Nearest Michael’s is also in Johnson City or Knoxville, so we just basically stick with Hobby Lobby.
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Yeah ours is about 25 minutes away and has had kinda iffy stock, and nobody that actually knows about crafting, but sometimes will have stuff you can’t find anywhere else. We have 2 Michaels locations and a Hobby lobby not far from that area though so I’m not super concerned about it. They definitely didn’t know their stuff when it came to the glowforge display they had.
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never had a glowforge display at our local Joann’s.
I was in there last night. it looked like it had been ransacked.
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I rolled by ours and while there were way too many people, and it looked like it had been ransacked…the prices were their typical prices. Things were marked 20-60% off just like normal. No idea why folks were going hogwild!
The 
(technically Spark/
stuff) was not on sale at all, and neither were paint brushes, needles, or my thread - which were the only things I was interested in.
We’ll see what happens with liquidation I guess.
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