After closing three of its five remaining Twin Cities stores in August, ApplianceSmart has closed one more and will close its last Minnesota location next month.
The firm's Maplewood store closed last week, and the final store in Champlin store is expected to close in late March, an employee said. It may close earlier if inventories run low.
After the last Minnesota store closes, only one location in Columbus, Ohio, is left. The company closed stores in Apple Valley, St. Paul and Rochester last year as well as locations in Georgia and Texas. At its height the company had more than 20 stores in Minnesota, Georgia, Ohio and Texas, including nine in the Twin Cities.
Entrepreneur Jack Cameron started the parent business, Appliance Recycling Centers of America, in the Twin Cities in 1976.
ApplianceSmart stores began to open in 1998. They featured new, closeout, open box, and scratch-and-dent models.
Live Ventures Inc., a Las Vegas-based company that owns several home products brands, purchased ApplianceSmart in April 2018 for $6.5 million. It put the firm into a bankruptcy restructuring last year.
"We believe that the worst of ApplianceSmart is now behind us," Virland Johnson, chief financial officer of Live Ventures, told investors earlier this month.
