A MAJOR outdoor clothing retailer is set to close one of its Scottish branches – leaving shoppers gutted.
Bosses at Trespass revealed in July last year that a number of stores across the UK would shut for good in the near future.
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And now a shop in a busy Glasgow shopping centre is set to close its doors in the coming months.
Signs have appeared inside the store at Silverburn Shopping Centre indicating that it will shut “soon”.
The retailer sells ski wear, waterproof jackets, fleeces, festival accessories, walking boots and camping gear.
And bosses have placed signs in its window indicating that a closing down sale has started.
The black and yellow signage reads: “Closing down. Everything must go.”
It comes after Trespass, which runs around 170 UK branches, confirmed last summer it would pull down the shutters on half a dozen branches.
Stores shut in Chesterfield and Workington while others in Canterbury and Solihull were also earmarked for closure.
In recent weeks, Trespass has closed its store in St Johns Precinct, Liverpool, after signs were placed in the window.
There have also been a number of major changes at Silverburn Shipping Centre over recent months.
A raft of new retailers has taken space at the shopping mall, with the new additions reinforcing its position as Scotland’s leading retail and leisure destination.
Prominent brands that have recently opened at Silverburn include AllSaints and Polestar.
And Mango opened its doors over the summer which further strengthened the fashion offer.
Kingpin Bowling is also set to join the line-up later this year, bolstering Silverburn’s leisure offer.
We also told how Cinnabon opened a new branch in Silverburn on Friday.
David Pierotti, General Manager at Silverburn, added: “We have been working hard to secure brilliant brands that we know people want to see and we’re so pleased that Cinnabon is the latest to join our lineup.
“It will complement our existing stores and restaurants, whilst giving people yet another new reason to visit us.
“We know that it will prove a massive hit with guests and look forward to the opening.”
Why are retailers closing shops?
EMPTY shops have become an eyesore on many high streets across the UK and are often symbolic of a town centre’s decline.
The Sun’s business editor Ashley Armstrong explains why so many retailers are shutting their doors.
In many cases, retailers are shutting stores because they are no longer the money-makers they once were because of the rise of online shopping.
Falling store sales and rising staff costs have made it even more expensive for shops to stay open. In some cases, retailers are shutting a store and reopening a new shop at the other end of a high street to reflect how a town has changed.
The problem is that when a big shop closes, footfall falls across the local high street, which puts more shops at risk of closing.
Retail parks are increasingly popular with shoppers, who want to be able to get easy, free parking at a time when local councils have hiked parking charges in towns.
Many retailers including Next and Marks & Spencer have been shutting stores on the high street and taking bigger stores in better-performing retail parks instead.
Boss Stuart Machin recently said that when it relocated a tired store in Chesterfield to a new big store in a retail park half a mile away, its sales in the area rose by 103 per cent.
In some cases, stores have been shut when a retailer goes bust, as in the case of Wilko, Debenhams Topshop, Dorothy Perkins and Paperchase to name a few.
What’s increasingly common is when a chain goes bust a rival retailer or private equity firm snaps up the intellectual property rights so they can own the brand and sell it online.
They may go on to open a handful of stores if there is customer demand, but there are rarely ever as many stores or in the same places.
