Is off-price Burlington the retail we need as the economy wavers?

Off-price retailers tend to do well when the economy doesn’t.

That’s good news for Burlington Stores, the nationwide off-price retailer founded in South Jersey. Burlington opened 100 new locations in 2024 and plans to continue that pace of expansion this year and beyond.

“It’s a dynamic time right now, and off-price is a good place to be in retail because consumers want the best value,” Chris Miller, a senior vice president of marketing and strategy, said earlier this month at the Burlington corporate campus in Burlington Township.

At around 20,000 square feet, new stores in places like Clifton Heights, Delaware County, will be about one-third the size of a typical Burlington location of a decade ago. The company has been steadily downsizing the square footage of its new stores since 2017.

The company is expanding into underserved markets, including urban downtowns. A Burlington store opened last year on Broad Street in the heart of Newark, N.J.

Meanwhile, the layouts and other features of some existing stores, like the one anchoring the eastern end of the Fashion District in Center City, are being “refreshed,” according to company officials.

“We don’t have an e-commerce presence. We’re strictly bricks and mortar,” said Miller, 51, who joined Burlington in2017. He previously served in marketing and brand development capacities at the Fresh Market and Target chains.

With net sales of $10.6 billion in 2024, the Fortune 500 firm has 1,108 stores in 46 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, including 39 in the Philadelphia region.

“Our primary focus has always been on our physical stores,” Miller said. “With e-commerce, when you fully account for the cost of merchandising, processing, shipping, and accepting returns, it’s very difficult to manage … the price points in the businesses that we compete in.”

About 4,700 people work at the corporate campus and warehouses in Burlington County, and another 2,100 are employed in the Philly area stores.

He noted that Burlington’s peers, including Ross and TJ Maxx, are significantly larger, with 1,847 and 1,327 stores, respectively.

But size isn’t everything. Miller said Burlington “has evolved … to offer brands people recognize at prices that really amaze them.”

Burlington’s smaller-format approach continues to center the treasure-seeking, bargain-hunting shopping experience strongly identified with off-price retailing.

The compact stores and shorter aisles, along with the refreshes, aim to provide shoppers with clearer, faster routes to their preferred brands.

“We love that our customers love the experience of coming in to the store and looking for treasure,” said Lyndsay Parker, 35, a local district manager who joined Burlington as a seasonal, part-time sales associate in 2012.

“They need to see the merchandise, touch it, and try it on,” she said. “And they’re very value-conscious. They don’t want to break the bank.”

Pete Fader, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School, said a deep knowledge of its customers seems to be guiding the company’s approach.

“The experiential treasure hunt aspect is real, and the smaller stores may be a good move,” he said. “Experiential shopping is like looking for a needle in a haystack, and offering smaller haystacks could be more appealing to more people.”

Philly-area store managers “are really good at getting to know the community,“ Parker said. ”They know the brands and the trends and the need to pull that merchandise forward.”

The anticipation of discovering high-quality items at lower-than-prevailing prices was born in the major department store “bargain basements” of the late 19th century. Wholesalers like Burlington’s predecessor firm, which was established in 1924 to sell women’s clothing direct to the public, later found success as well.

But off-price really took off during the inflationary 1970s and ’80s, when enormous “warehouse stores” and ”factory outlets” beckoned Philly-area bargain hunters to board buses for Reading, Pa., which began calling itself the Outlet Capital of the World.

What is now Burlington Stores was very much a part of that boom; the first Burlington Coat Factory opened on Route 130 in Burlington Township in 1972, and dozens more quickly followed.

By 1993, the opening of a 130,000-square-foot Burlington store at the outlet-focused Franklin Mills (now Philadelphia Mills) Mall in far Northeast Philly featured “20,000 coats,” according to a story in The Inquirer.

The original Burlington Coat Factory store on Route 130 closed in 2008. The company went public in 2016 and in the last decade shed the “coat factory” portion of its name.

“Certainly we still carry coats,” Miller said. “But we’re leaning more into styles and trends.”

The company also is continuing its community partnerships locally as well as across the country.

Among the company’s national partners is the nonprofit Adopt a Classroom, through which Burlington recently made a $20,000 donation for purchase of school supplies at Fountain Woods Elementary School in Burlington Township.

The company also has had a long-standing relationship with the Burlington Township Food Pantry.

After the nonprofit lost its lease in 2017, it was given space, rent-free, in a Burlington warehouse near the corporate campus.

And in 2022, Burlington donated and helped renovate the building as the pantry’s permanent home.

“When we rebranded Burlington Coat Factory, we made a conscious decision to make the B in [the new Burlington logo] a heart,” said Miller. “The heart conveys our culture, how we treat our customers and our associates, and how we want to give back.”