Until this past weekend, it was hoped that Joann’s fabric stores would survive as a smaller footprint after 500 stores were closed… but all 800 of Joann’s locations will now be closing, as the final sale of assets has been completed, to a closeout company that will supervise each store’s liquidation sales.
Obviously, there is the automatic sadness at hearing the news of any chain’s closure. Whether one shops at a certain store or not, we all benefit from the presence of brick and mortar stores, especially in this unfortunate age of mass delivery.
The brick and mortar retailer provides rent to a mall. It provides both part time and full time employment to its staff. It provides an opportunity for shoppers to actually see and feel the products they are considering buying, greatly reducing the waste caused by online purchases that get returned at a high rate.
And the brick and mortar store contributes to all the other stores in the neighborhood too. Once a shopper is drawn to the mall and parks his car, he might also visit the next store, and the next. He’s more likely to go to lunch or dinner in the restaurants nearby, either in the mall itself or in its outlots. That’s the purpose of the malls where Joann’s stores were located, after all; the majority of them have been part of that great 20th century shopping district, which uses the convenience of an array of stores, all reachable from the same parking lot, to draw customers to the community.
And now, 800 such locations will be looking for a new tenant. And these are big stores; those empty stores will be hard to fill.
So yes, that’s bad enough. We assume that an economic recovery is around the corner, but Joann’s has been suffering for years; expecting them to somehow stay afloat until the boom times return is too much to hope for, so they’re shutting their doors for good.
This is rough on each of those 800 business communities, rough on their employees, rough on the towns and counties that benefited from their sales taxes.
But there is another loss with this chain’s closure, one distinct from other common retailer failures:
Joann’s is a fabric shop, a place for people who make their own clothing or other related projects. Joann’s sells sewing machines and notions, fabric and interfacing, clothing patterns and related crafts. As fewer Americans are taught – either at home or at school – to make their own clothing, quilts, window treatments and decorations, Joann’s has had ever-fewer customers to keep them in business.
So this final Joann’s bankruptcy is both a casualty of a cultural shortcoming and a contributing cause of that shortcoming’s growth. It is a vicious circle; as fewer people go to the fabric store to make their own textile products, there will be ever fewer fabric stores for people to go to.
If the schools don’t teach sewing – home economics class is largely a thing of the past – then where can our children learn this skill? Fabric stores sell sewing machines and offer classes on how to use them; there will now be 800 fewer such sources for this important skill.
Some of us want to think that we have risen above this kind of trade. “Why should we make our clothes, we can buy them now!” “We don’t have to make our own drapes or children’s costumes, or the canopies for our little daughters’ princess beds.” We are an affluent society now; we can just have other Americans make all that stuff, and we’ll buy it from them, we tell ourselves.
But we don’t, do we?
We import most of our clothing, from China mostly, or from Vietnam, Bangladesh or India, or so many other distant lands. And there’s nothing wrong with importing some things; it’s what makes our exports possible, after all. Importing things at a good price, things that we cannot make as competitively ourselves, is a legitimate process in a diverse, modern economy.
But we shouldn’t import all of it, and the once-proud American textile industry is today a shadow of its former self. For many of us, the only way to have – or to afford – American-made clothes, curtains or Halloween costumes is if we make them ourselves.
And without local fabric stores, that’s going to be a lot harder in the future.
Nobody will argue that people should make all their own clothes, of course; an important part of a prosperous economy is specialization. But making a few – at least, learning how in our youth – is an important part of our education. We gain a better understanding of our pioneer ancestors, as they moved with our nation’s western expansion, making clothing for their children in their log cabins and one-or-two-room farmhouses on the distant prairie. And when we understand their lives better, perhaps we can respect their other cultural choices better – from self defense to home schooling, from self-reliance to political independence.
Joann’s wasn’t a great store; their clientele will honestly say that Joann’s fabric stocking and pricing choices doomed them as much as foreign competition has.
But even so, the next generation will have even less of the experience that Americans used to get from shopping at the fabric store.
The middle ages are known as the dark ages for a reason. As the Roman Empire collapsed, fewer people across Europe remembered how to operate or repair the innovations that Romans had brought as the empire expanded. Suddenly, cities were without running water, or were unable to build piers, or forgot the construction methods that the Romans had tried to spread across the known world in their day.
When a burger chain closes down, there will always be someone else to sell you a burger. When a taco truck shuts down business or moves, just stick around; another will drive up to fill the void.
But the remaining fabric options are few and far between, and fabric is risky to buy online, since with fabric, the touch is as important as the look.
Despite the admitted imperfections of the chain in question, the American way of life does indeed suffer from the loss of this particular retailer.
Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
If you enjoyed this article, then please REPOST or SHARE with others; encourage them to follow AFNN. If you’d like to become a citizen contributor for AFNN, contact us at managingeditor@afnn.us Help keep us ad-free by donating here.
Substack: American Free News Network Substack
Truth Social: @AFNN_USA
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/afnnusa
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/2_-GAzcXmIRjODNh
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AfnnUsa
GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/AFNN_USA
CloutHub: @AFNN_USA