Columbus, Ohio — While its core customers remain financially strained by inflation and other factors, Top 50 retailer Big Lots posted another loss in the first quarter of fiscal 2024.
However, those losses were less than they were a year ago, and officials believe their five-pronged Project Springboard initiative will bear fruit later this year.
“While near-term conditions have been challenging, we’re not slowing down on making progress to transform our business,” said Bruce Thorn, president and CEO. “The current financial performance does not yet reflect the stronger business model that we’ve created through our five key actions, but we expect the fruits of those efforts to become more apparent in the back half of the year.”
For the quarter ended May 4, Big Lots’ net sales totaled $1.009 billion, a 10.2% decline compared with the $1.124 billion it generated in the same quarter a year ago. Comparable store sales were off the 2023 mark by 9.9%.
“While we made substantial progress on improving our business operations in Q1, we missed our sales goals due largely to a continued pullback in consumer spending by our core customers, particularly in high ticket discretionary items,” Thorn said. “We remain focused on managing through the current economic cycle by controlling the controllables.”
The company is taking “aggressive actions” to drive positive comp sales growth in the latter part of the year and into 2025, he said, and to maintain year-over-year gross margin rate improvements — “all driven by progress on our five key actions.”
The discounter’s net loss for the period was $205 million, or $6.99 per diluted share, compared with a loss of $206.1 million, or $7.10 per diluted share, in the first quarter of 2023.
The result for 2024’s first quarter includes a net after-tax loss of $72.7 million, or $2.48 per diluted share, associated with impairment charges, fees related to Project Springboard and distribution center closure costs.
Thorn said Big Lots is working to drive more traffic by achieving 75% bargain penetration with 50% extreme bargain penetration by year-end. He said Big Lots is on track to raise $185 million worth of cumulative bottom-line benefits through Project Springboard efforts.
“As a reminder, our five key actions are to own bargains, to communicate unmistakable value, to increase store relevance, to win customers for life with our omnichannel efforts and to drive productivity,” Thorn said. “We still have a lot of work ahead of us but remain confident that the five key actions are putting us on the right path to turn around our business.”
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