Customers come and go from the Kohl’s store at Uptown Janesville, 2500 Milton Ave., Janesville, on Monday afternoon. The Kohl’s reopened after being closed for a full month after a suspected arson that left the 90,000-square-foot department store shuttered with smoke and fire damage to parts of the store and inventory inside it.
Customers come and go from the Kohl’s store at Uptown Janesville, 2500 Milton Ave., Janesville, on Monday afternoon. The Kohl’s reopened after being closed for a full month after a suspected arson that left the 90,000-square-foot department store shuttered with smoke and fire damage to parts of the store and inventory inside it.
There are lingering inventory gaps on the floor of the 90,000-square-foot department store, but Janesville’s Kohl’s store has reopened after an April 1 fire left the store temporary shuttered with a solid month of cleanup and inventory replacement.
On Monday, the Kohl’s at Uptown Janesville, the city’s main indoor shopping mall, had a banner hung above the front entrance off Milton Avenue announcing “We’re Open.”
It was the first full day of the store being reopened to customers after police said three youths were arrested the first weekend of April on suspicion they’d purposely set fire to the bedding area at the rear of the department store.
Kohl’s is one of the two remaining anchor retail stores at the mall, and mall officials said the closure of the major department store had raked out an unknown amount of foot traffic for the mall.
The damage and closure came at a time when owners have been trying to woo a public-private ice arena to the mall’s defunct, former Sears space. The mall has continued to lose retail stores coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Customers came and went from the Kohl’s main entry Monday afternoon, and the parking outside the store at the mall’s south end remained half-full for the first time in weeks as shopping in person returned to the department store.
In recent weeks, Kohl’s has worked to remove and replace store inventory, carpeting and displays that fire and police officials said got wrecked after sprinklers doused flames from the suspected arson April 1, spreading water and smoke throughout the store.
Officials said inventory got smoked up and soaked during a fire response, rendering it unsellable and ruined. Inventory loss was one of the major issues that spelled closure of the retail store for the whole month of April; meanwhile, a Rock County criminal court case on the arrest of an 11-year-old in the Kohl’s fire has begun to stretch out.
A judge on April 20 OK’d a competency evaluation for the 11-year-old. It was the third hearing for the child, who was arrested along with a 15-year-old boy and a 17-year-old girl after police tied the children to the fire during detectives’ review of store security footage at the Kohl’s.
The 11-year-old is scheduled to appear again in court again in early June.
On Monday, the Sephora cosmetics and fragrances section at Kohl’s remained cordoned off and closed to customers.
Elsewhere in the store, it appeared as though staffers were still working to restock the store’s athletic shoes section. Many other areas of the sales floor had been restocked with new, seasonal items, such as swimming suits and spring and summer fashion apparel.
A store manager said “supply chain issues” have tempered the pace at which the nation’s largest department store chain has replaced inventory as Kohl’s continues to reboot the Janesville store.
The manager said she wasn’t sure when the Janesville store’s Sephora section would reopen. She declined to give other details, instead deferring to Kohl’s corporate media relations office at the company’s Menomonee Falls headquarters.
On Monday afternoon, two spokespeople at the Kohl’s corporate headquarters did not immediately respond to inquiries by The 69.
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