Payless ShoeSource said Tuesday that it has filed for bankruptcy and will immediately close 400 stores in the US and Puerto Rico.

The discount shoe chain has filed for Chapter 11 protection on less than $1 billion in assets and $10 billion in liabilities.

Payless has been in talks with its lenders for months over a restructuring plan that at one point included closing as many as 1,000 stores, or a quarter of the company’s locations.

Additional store closures are likely. The company said it planned to “work to aggressively manage the remaining” stores through additional closures — beyond the initial 400 — or modified lease terms.

Payless has 4,400 stores in 30 countries and employs nearly 22,000 people.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/payless-filed-bankruptcy-194306328.html

J.C. Penney isn’t the only big retailer having trouble in the age of Amazon. Here are several other retailers continuing attempts to rightsize their store fleet amid the shift to digital shopping or other external pressures.

https://www.thestreet.com/video/14049100/12-troubled-retailers-besides-j-c-penny-that-are-shuttering-stores.html?puc=yahoov&cm_ven=YAHOOV&yptr=yahoo

(Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc plans mass layoffs at its money-losing parenting products subsidiary Quidsi as part of a business restructuring, the company said in a document filed with the state of New Jersey on Wednesday. The e-commerce giant plans to terminate 263 employees in New Jersey this summer, according to a notice filed with the state’s Department of Labor and Workforce Development.

Quidsi operates Diapers.com and other websites.

“We have worked extremely hard for the past seven years to get Quidsi to be profitable, and unfortunately we have not been able to do so,” an Amazon spokeswoman said in a statement. “Quidsi has great brand expertise and they will continue to offer selection on Amazon.com; the software development team will focus on building technology for AmazonFresh.”

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/amazon-moving-staff-quidsi-parenting-products-unit-losses-185805436–sector.html

Deal-of-the-day company Groupon Inc. will lay off the remaining 95 LivingSocial Inc. employees on its staff following the October acquisition of the Washington, D.C.-based company.

Chicago-based Groupon (NASDAQ: GRPN) will also permanently shutter the LivingSocial office in D.C., according to the Washington Business Journal. The employees, who represent the last LivingSocial workers still on staff at Groupon, will exit the company throughout the remainder of the year.

http://www.bizjournals.com/chicago/news/2017/03/09/groupon-to-lay-off-remaining-livingsocial-staffers.html

By Sruthi Ramakrishnan

(Reuters) – Department store operator J.C. Penney Co Inc (JCP.N) reported a bigger-than-expected drop in same-store sales for the holiday quarter citing weak demand and competition from online retailers, sending shares down to more than a year low.

The company on Friday also said it would shutter 130-140 underperforming stores over the next few months to focus on more profitable ones.

Penney’s results underscored the brick-and-mortar retail industry’s struggles to overcome a drop in traffic in malls and a shift toward online shopping.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/j-c-penney-shut-130-121435689.html

President Donald Trump is preparing a “security budget” that will ramp up spending for the Pentagon while slashing funding for most other federal agencies.

Trump plans to increase defense spending by $54 billion per year, which would be a 10% increase. He’d cut funding for most other agencies by $54 billion to keep his overall budget from adding to the national debt. “Most federal programs will see a reduction,” an official with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) told reporters on Monday.

Trump has made no secret of his desire to scale back regulatory agencies, especially the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). But such agencies tend to have modest budgets compared with the cost of military troops and hardware. The EPA’s entire budget is around $8 billion, for instance. That’s only two-thirds the cost of a single Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, which comes with a price tag of about $13 billion.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-plans-to-cut-funding-for-most-government-agencies-160756646.html

Dailyjobcuts.com is a source for daily job news.  The site reports daily corporate layoffs throughout the nation.

Link to site

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More than 8,000 employees at New Jersey A&P grocery stores will be released from their jobs on Nov. 26 – Thanksgiving Day – this year, according to WARN notices filed by the company last week.

The Bergen County-based supermarket chain announced earlier this year it would be filing for bankruptcy.  Many store locations were purchased by other companies, including ACME Markets, Inc., Ahold’s Stop & Shop Supermarket Co., and Key Food Stores Co-operative Inc.

Source: Patch.com

Boeing to lay off workers in El Segundo satellite division.  Aerospace giant Boeing Co. said Tuesday that it plans to lay off as many as several hundred employees at its Southern California-based satellite division. Boeing said the cuts were needed after a customer could not get financing through the Export-Import Bank and canceled an order for a pricey satellite. At the same time, recent rocket failures have delayed the start of work on other satellite orders, the company said, and the division has suffered as the Pentagon continues to reduce spending

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