69 New Jersey Saks OFF 5TH Workers Lose Their Jobs Tomorrow — and the Real Story Is Where the Footprint Goes from Here

Tomorrow morning, 69 workers across three Saks OFF 5TH stores in New Jersey — Bridgewater, Shrewsbury, and Elizabeth — will report for their last shifts. By close of business, all three locations will have entered the final phase of going-out-of-business inventory liquidation, and most of the workforce will be off payroll. The same date is hitting variations of the same scene at dozens of other OFF 5TH locations around the country: WARN notices filed in late February and March across more than a dozen states have set May 4 as the workforce-cutoff deadline, even as stores remain open through the end of May to clear final inventory.

This is the operational result of the disclosure statement that Saks Global got approved Thursday, the $500 million in exit financing the company secured from a creditor group last month, and the strategic decision in February — confirmed when closing sales began January 31 at 57 OFF 5TH locations and all five Last Call stores — to abandon the off-price segment entirely as part of Chapter 11.

The math: 14 years, $1.6 billion, retreat to 12 stores

Saks OFF 5TH launched in 2002 with eight outlet stores. By 2018, the chain peaked at 130 locations. Add the five Last Call stores Saks Global inherited from the Neiman Marcus Group merger in late 2024, and the off-price footprint at the merger's close was 116 stores. The reorganization plan retains 12 OFF 5TH locations — and those 12 are explicitly being kept open only to liquidate leftover Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, and Bergdorf Goodman inventory; Saks Global has confirmed it will no longer buy merchandise specifically for OFF 5TH.

That's a 90% footprint reduction in the off-price channel inside one bankruptcy proceeding.

The retreat is a real signal. Off-price as a category is supposed to be the strongest segment in retail right now — TJX (TJ Maxx, Marshalls, HomeGoods) has been one of the best-performing public retail stocks for three years, Burlington's been turning around store productivity, and Ross Stores continues to expand. The category dynamics are tailwinded by the K-shaped consumer story: when middle-income shoppers trade down on discretionary categories, off-price wins. Saks couldn't make off-price work even with that tailwind.

Retail Dive's reporting on the Saks Global retreat underscores the corporate reasoning: OFF 5TH never developed the buying expertise or vendor relationships that TJX and Ross built over 40 years. Saks treated off-price as a clearance channel for full-price merchandise, while TJX treated it as a dedicated buying organization with its own vendor network and merchandise assortment. The strategic gap was visible by 2018; the bankruptcy just made the cost of carrying it untenable.

What's actually happening at the 45 closing stores tomorrow

For the 600+ workers losing their positions in the May 4 wave, the picture varies by location. Saks Global filed WARN Act notices in March across affected states, and Strauss Borrelli PLLC has opened a class-action investigation into whether Saks complied with the federal 60-day notice requirement and equivalent state laws. (The federal WARN Act requires 60 days' written notice to affected workers in qualified mass-layoff situations; bankruptcy doesn't automatically waive the requirement, though the unforeseeable-business-circumstances exception is sometimes asserted.) Workers who can document a notice violation are entitled to back pay and benefits for the notice-period gap.

Inventory at the 45 closing OFF 5TH locations is in the final 70%–90% off bracket. Newsweek's running list of May closures tracks the closing-sale dates store by store; most locations remain physically open through end of May and a handful into early June. The store leases — which were a major component of the bankruptcy filing's list of cited reasons for the Chapter 11 — are being rejected through the bankruptcy court, freeing landlords (largely Simon Property Group, Brookfield, and Macerich) to re-lease the space.

The re-lease question matters more for the category than the workforce question. OFF 5TH's footprint was concentrated in outlet centers and lifestyle centers — high-traffic, mid-rent, suburban-affluent locations. The same boxes are exactly what Sephora, Five Below, Aldi, and the off-price competitors are looking for in their own 2026 expansion plans. Whether those landlords secure quick re-leases at comparable rents is a quiet barometer of how healthy the broader category is. Watch Simon Property Group's Q2 commentary in early August for the data.

The bigger Saks Global question

The off-price retreat narrows Saks Global to its core: Saks Fifth Avenue (39 stores), Neiman Marcus (33 stores), and Bergdorf Goodman (2 stores). That's the focus of the post-bankruptcy plan: full-price luxury, full-margin assortment, full-experience flagships. The plan is sound — luxury is one of the few discretionary categories actually growing in the K-shaped consumer environment — but it's also smaller. The combined enterprise after off-price wind-down is roughly 74 stores with maybe $7 billion in revenue, down from a pre-bankruptcy 191 stores and $10 billion in pre-merger combined revenue.

Saks Global has a summer 2026 exit target and a plan that the bankruptcy court has approved for creditor vote. The next test is whether the leaner, full-price-only luxury entity can execute against LVMH-owned competitors, online luxury (Mytheresa, Net-a-Porter), and the Apple-style flagship-experience playbook that high-end specialty retailers are running. Tomorrow's 600 OFF 5TH layoffs are the painful operational moment in a much larger strategic pivot. The question is whether the new Saks Global can grow into the smaller box. The real answer comes in 2027.