David Jones Halves Its Store Network: Private Equity Owner Positions to Buy Back the Carcass It Stripped

Australia's oldest department store closes 19 of 38 stores, triggering mass layoffs. Private equity owner Anchorage Capital — which presided over years of losses — is expected to bid for the slimmed-down chain it created.

David Jones, Australia's 188-year-old department store chain, will close half its stores by year's end after receivers FTI Consulting declared an "urgent restructure" necessary. Nineteen of 38 locations are marked for closure, affecting thousands of the company's 6,000-plus workforce across every state, the ACT, and New Zealand.

The closures largely target smaller-format suburban stores — Malvern Central, Hornsby, Wollongong Central — while sparing the flagship city locations that anchor the brand's luxury identity. Secured lender Hilco Global is inserting its own staff into closing stores from Thursday to accelerate clearance sales, a move that signals the asset-stripping phase is already underway. The structural picture is bleak but not surprising. Administrator documents reveal that McGrathNicol reviewed David Jones's finances months before the company entered voluntary administration. Some small suppliers are owed money for stock shipped as far back as April — meaning the chain was accepting inventory it knew it might never pay for. CEO Erica Berchtold's framing — "our store portfolio is no longer the right shape" — is technically true but omits the question of who shaped it. That question leads directly to Anchorage Capital, the private equity firm that owns David Jones. Anchorage has long sought a smaller, lease-light version of the chain. It is now expected to bid to repurchase the restructured business — a classic PE playbook where the owner extracts value during ownership, lets the entity collapse, then buys back the surviving core at a discount, free of the obligations it accumulated. The human cost concentrates on suburban retail workers and small suppliers. Staff at 19 stores face redundancy consultations that began immediately. Small vendors who shipped goods in good faith are unsecured creditors — last in line behind Hilco and other secured lenders. The dual appointment structure (FTI as receivers protecting Hilco's interests, McGrathNicol as administrators theoretically acting for all creditors) ensures the secured lender's recovery takes priority. The broader pattern is familiar across Western retail: online competition and standalone luxury brands eroded David Jones's middle-market position, but the PE ownership model accelerated the decline by optimizing for extraction rather than reinvention. As long-time customer Lana Burgess put it plainly at the Malvern Central store slated for closure: "It got too expensive... everyone does their shopping online... the rents — these huge properties." What emerges is not a business failure in the ordinary sense but a managed demolition. The 188-year-old brand survives as a vessel for a smaller, cheaper operation. The stores, the workers, the suppliers, and the suburban communities that hosted these locations absorb the losses. The secured creditors and the PE owner position themselves to capture whatever residual value remains.