Other shoe drops: Nike no longer sells to Fred Meyer, Dillard’s

Idahoans won’t be buying their Nikes at Fred Meyer or Dillard’s anymore.

Nike has been opening its own retail locations and moving away from some of its largest wholesale distribution networks. As a result, it will no longer sell wholesale sneakers to nine wholesale channels, including Dillard’s and Fred Meyer.

According to the trade periodical Footwear News, Nike is shutting down nine large wholesale accounts, including the two that do business in Idaho, Fred Meyer and Dillard’s. Fred Meyer, which is part of the giant grocery retailer, Kroger, has locations in Idaho Falls, Pocatello, Burley, Twin Falls and the Treasure Valley. Dillard’s has two department stores in Idaho, in Boise and in Idaho Falls.

The other retailers cut off by Nike are Belk, Zappos, Boscov’s, Bob’s Stores, EBLens, V.I.M. and City Blue. With the exception of the entirely-online retailer Zappos, these other chains have all of their brick-and-mortar locations east of the Mississippi.

In a strategy change that started in 2017, Nike has been opening its own retail stores and cutting back on which stores it will allow to distribute its products. At the beginning of 2017, Nike had over 30,000 wholesale accounts. Now it has around 40, according to Bloomberg. The few retail chains that Nike still favors will profit from the loss of Nike from Dillard’s and Fred Meyers, like the Famous Footwear stores in Ammon, Twin Falls, and the Treasure Valley and the Dick’s Sporting Goods in Twin Falls, Pocatello and the Treasure Valley.

Nike’s distribution channel contraction is not limited to just retail chains. The footwear firm dropped jaws in e-commerce last November when it shut down its direct sales pilot program with Amazon after less than two years in favor of its own Nike Direct internet sales channel, which ironically contracts with Amazon’s cloud-computing unit, Amazon Web Services. According to the Wall Street Journal, the shoe firm aims to sell at least a third of its products in the short term directly through e-commerce at nike.com.