Carter’s, the largest branded marketer of children’s apparel in the country, plans to close roughly 150 stores over three years, with about 100 of those shutdowns concentrated in its 2025 and 2026 fiscal periods. The maker of the OshKosh B’gosh label and its namesake baby lines announced the retreat in late October 2025 alongside a plan to eliminate hundreds of corporate jobs, pointing to higher tariff costs and the expense of staying competitive on price. For grandparents who keep nursery drawers stocked and buy first-day-of-school outfits, the closings raise a quieter money question about loyalty points, gift cards, and where the deals land once a nearby store is gone.
The scope of Carter’s retreat
The retailer framed the closures as part of a broader cost-cutting effort rather than a sudden collapse. Carter’s said it would close low-margin stores as their leases expire, a gradual wind-down that spreads the pain across several years instead of triggering the kind of fire-sale liquidation that follows a bankruptcy. That distinction matters for shoppers, because a store closing at lease-end keeps operating normally until the final day rather than dumping inventory under a court-supervised timeline.
The total climbed from an earlier target. Carter’s had previously flagged about 100 closures before raising the figure to roughly 150 stores over three years, with the balance beyond the first 100 shutting by 2028 as leases run out. The company paired the store cuts with a reduction of about 300 corporate positions, or close to 15 percent of its office-based staff, underscoring that the retrenchment reaches well beyond the sales floor.
The cuts land against a large physical base. As the country’s biggest seller of baby and children’s clothing, Carter’s operates hundreds of stores across the United States and Canada under its own name and the OshKosh B’gosh banner, selling everything from newborn layettes to school-age basics, so a reduction of 150 locations reshapes the map without emptying it. The company has also leaned on wholesale partners and its own websites, which means the store closings shift where its clothing is bought more than whether it can be found at all.
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Where gift cards, loyalty points, and prices land
Because Carter’s is trimming stores rather than shutting the company, the money customers have parked with the brand stays intact. Gift cards and balances in the Rewarding Moments loyalty program remain honored across the chain and on the company’s websites, so a closed local store does not erase points or a gift card the way a full liquidation can. The shopping simply moves online or to the next surviving location, and the digital storefronts for both Carter’s and OshKosh B’gosh continue to operate.
What changes is convenience and, in some markets, price. A grandparent used to browsing a nearby outlet loses the ability to size a toddler in person, handle returns at a counter, and catch the in-store clearance racks that often run deeper than online promotions. The sensible step is to spend down reward points and gift-card balances before a local store’s final day if that store is the one being used, and to note that outlet-mall closings can remove the cheapest source of the brand in a region entirely.
Tariffs and the math behind the closings
Carter’s tied the decision squarely to costs. The company sources much of its clothing overseas, which leaves it exposed to the higher import tariffs that have reshaped retail pricing, and it said it is absorbing added expense to invest in product and hold the line on what families pay. Closing low-margin stores is one lever the company is pulling to protect profitability while those pressures persist, alongside the office layoffs and a narrowing of its product range.
For the household, the pass-through is the real story. When a maker of everyday basics like baby clothes faces steeper input costs, the pressure eventually reaches the price tag or the number of places to buy the goods, and Carter’s is signaling both. Fewer stores and thinner margins tend to mean less aggressive in-person discounting, which lands hardest on fixed-income shoppers who buy for grandchildren and rely on the clearance rack to stretch the budget.
The three-year timeline means the closings will keep arriving in waves as leases expire rather than all at once, so the practical task for customers is to track their own local store rather than the national count. A store still open today may appear on a later list, and the only reliable signal is the closing notice posted at that specific location.
What remains unresolved is whether shedding 150 stores and hundreds of jobs is enough to steady a business squeezed between tariffs and cautious shoppers, or merely the first round of a longer contraction. For families who dress small children on a budget, the answer will show up not in an earnings report but in whether the nearby store, and the discounts that came with it, are still there next season.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed against primary sources by The Money Overview editorial team.
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