Dick’s Buys Carcass of GolfSmith

Dick’s Sporting Goods reportedly paid $70 million for the remnants of the bankrupt GolfSmith. Reuters reports that Dick’s will keep open at least 30 GolfSmith stores, while liquidating the rest with help from Hilco Global and Tiger Capital Group, two liquidation companies. The report says that Dick’s plans to keep about 500 of the company’s employees.

Just before bankruptcy, GolfSmith had 109 stores.

Dick’s Sporting Goods already owns Golf Galaxy, a specialty golf retailer with 82 stores. My impression of the two Golf Galaxy stores that I have visited is that they are smaller than GolfSmith — or at least they feel cozier. I have seen no indication whether Dicks’s will continue to operate GolfSmith stores, or rebrand them as Golf Galaxy. My guess is a rebranding. Maintaining two brands is likely prohibitively expensive.

For the sake of the employees and area golfers, I hope that Dick’s keeps the GolfSmith (or perhaps rebranded Golf Galaxy) stores alive in Michigan.

Photo Credit: By Mike Mozart from Funny YouTube, USA (Dick’s Sporting Goods) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons