Heilig Meyers closing stores

By Staff
From wire reports
April 13, 2001
Heilig-Meyers Co. will close its remaining 375 Heilig-Meyers furniture stores and liquidate its inventory, a company spokesman said.
Heilig-Meyers' Meridian store is one of nine Mississippi locations that will be closed later this year. The company's other Mississippi stores are located in Corinth, Hattiesburg, Laurel, Greenville, Pascagoula, Gulfport, Horn Lake and Picayune.
A company spokeswoman said Thursday the stores will begin having going-out-of-business sales by the end of the month and should be closed by late summer.
Company officials said closing the Heilig-Meyers stores will help them pay off creditors and allow the company to focus on its RoomStore operations, which will be the centerpiece of the company's revised business model.
The Richmond-based company said it is in talks with various interested parties'' to sell its three Homemakers stores.
The company's 54 RoomStores are concentrated in metropolitan markets in Texas, Maryland and Washington, D.C., and generate annual revenue of about $300 million, company officials said.
Since it filed for voluntary Chapter 11 last August, Heilig-Meyers has converted 16 of its stores into RoomStores.