Gander Mountain Begins Liquidation

Several reports surfaced this weekend that Gander Mountain was liquidating all 160 locations and going out of business and closing all the stores. While the liquidating part is true, the reports of closing all stores was grossly inaccurate. The new owner of Gander Mountain is Camping World who won the bankruptcy auction last week with a consortium that included Gordon Brothers Group LLC and Hilco Merchant Resources LLC. Camping World’s owner, Marquis Lemonis has taken to Twitter to refute the false closing reports. In fact, Lemonis has been adding rapidly to the list of original 17 stores he had already said would remain open in the initial winning bid.

Lemonis has had a busy week of negotiations to improve cost structures at nearly 70 Gander Mountain locations so that the stores have reasonable rent agreements and clear path to profitability to remain open. If the store shows profit potential with a fair minimum wage for staff of $12, then the stores are remaining open via multiple posts on his twitter account. He is being very transparent through the whole process on his social media accounts, interacting with customers, employees, media and more.

I will update what stores will continue here over the next 30 days @GanderMtn – we will follow the path to saving jobs and profitability

— Marcus Lemonis (@marcuslemonis) May 4, 2017

Meanwhile the court approved liquidators are liquidating inventory in all locations. Gander Mountain has an ad on their website announcing the liquidation sale and that seems to be at least some of the source of the confusion. The stores are not necessarily liquidating everything, and apparently there are items that are not part of the liquidation on a store by store basis as reported by several customers via Twitter this weekend.

Lemonis seemed unfazed by the liquidations, and considers it part of the process of cleaning up the inventory decisions and controls that led Gander Mountain to file bankruptcy in the first place. Per his comments the last several days on Twitter, he intends to keep the Gander Mountain name and profitable stores. He owns all Gander Mountain intellectual property, business, leases and Overton businesses.

will not move forward with a @GanderMtn store unless there is a clear path to profitability & that’s after ensuring min wage for team is 12. https://t.co/GxV5GdAPzR

— Marcus Lemonis (@marcuslemonis) May 6, 2017

While he admitted that a lot of stores would not survive this process, Lemonis offered an olive branch of sorts to the affected employees. They are guaranteed an interview if they are close to Camping World locations or online at campingworldgoodsamjobs.com.

This is not comprehensive and we apologize if we missed any reports as it was hard to piece together pictures and tweets to come up with the list from the Gander and Lemonis social accounts. Lemonis is still negotiating with several landlords at multiple store locations. Here is what we could piece together from his Twitter posts as to which Gander Mountain stores are remaining open after the liquidation process and rent renegotiations as of Saturday, May 6, 2017: