If the Journeys near you closed sometime in the last few years and you assumed it was just your mall struggling, the company’s own numbers say otherwise. Its parent, Genesco, just told investors it closed another 25 stores this summer — and the reason has less to do with any one mall than with where shoppers like you have actually been walking.
What Genesco’s own filing says
According to Genesco’s second-quarter fiscal 2027 results, the company closed 25 stores this quarter, 17 of them Journeys locations, against just 3 openings — a net loss of 22 stores in three months. The affected brands sit across Genesco’s whole portfolio: Journeys, Journeys Kidz, Little Burgundy and Schuh.
The company’s total store count dropped from 1,253 a year earlier to 1,186 now, a 5% year-over-year decline. That’s not a rounding error in a footnote — it’s a company visibly shrinking its physical footprint on purpose, one quarter at a time.
Why “closing stores” and “losing sales” aren’t the same story
CEO Mimi Vaughn described the closures as one of “3 shorter-term headwinds tied to strategic actions we’re taking to improve our business” — company language for a deliberate trim, not a company in freefall. This wasn’t a one-quarter blip, either: the quarter before this one closed 30 stores on its own, meaning Genesco has been trimming its footprint quarter after quarter this year, not reacting to one bad season.
What makes that distinction matter to you: a store closing near you doesn’t automatically mean the brand is disappearing. Sometimes it means the opposite — a company deciding that specific location wasn’t worth keeping open while it invests harder somewhere else.
Where the investment is actually going
That “somewhere else” is real, and it’s the part of this story that doesn’t show up in a headline about closures. By the start of this year, Genesco had already opened 105 remodeled “4.0” format stores — larger footprints, updated fixtures, more experiential layouts — and the company says those locations are outperforming on both customer retention and attracting new, younger shoppers. Journeys is also specifically relocating away from traditional enclosed malls toward open-air shopping centers, the kind of outdoor retail strip that’s been pulling foot traffic away from indoor malls for years now.
If you’ve noticed your own mall trips have quietly turned into trips to an open-air center instead, without ever deciding that on purpose, you’re the exact shift Genesco is chasing with this strategy. The stores aren’t vanishing; a lot of them are relocating to wherever you already started going.
What this means next time you’re looking for a pair
If your nearest Journeys just closed, it’s worth a quick search before you assume the brand is gone from your area entirely — there’s a real chance the nearest one moved to an open-air center rather than disappearing. The 4.0 remodel is also worth knowing about if you do find one nearby: it’s the version of the store the company is actually betting on, not the older mall format getting phased out.
A retailer trimming its store count isn’t automatically a retailer in trouble, and it isn’t automatically good news either — it’s a company reading the same shift in your own shopping habits that you’ve probably already made without giving it a name. Genesco just put a number on it: 25 stores closed, 22 net, and a bet on open-air locations that either pays off or it doesn’t, the way every retail strategy eventually gets its own answer.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Womens Overview editors prior to publication.