CLEARANCES BEGIN AT VENTURE STORES

Final clearance sales will start today in the nation's Venture stores, including those in Cape Girardeau's West Park Mall and at Paducah, Ky.

The Cape Girardeau Venture store will close, but few details were known Thursday about its closing. A spokesperson at West Park Mall said a date for its closing had not been mentioned, but it could happen by August. Employees have been given 60-day notices that it will close.

In one of the largest liquidation transactions in a number of years, Gordon Brothers Retail Partners and Hilco-Great American Group, nationally recognized inventory liquidation companies, have been appointed by a U.S. District Court in Delaware to serve as agents to dispose of more than $350 million of inventory in Venture's remaining 73 stores.

There is no target date to end the sales, said a Gordon Brothers spokesperson in Chicago. The sale will continue until all merchandise is gone.

Thirty-eight of the stores are in Illinois from Belleville to Chicago, and 14 in Missouri.

The two inventory liquidators jointly made a bid of $185 million for the remaining Venture inventory.

Under terms of the bid to dispose of remaining merchandise, Venture Stores Inc. is guaranteed a minimum return of 52.75 percent of the retail value of Venture merchandise.

Gordon Brothers, a retail advisory, strategic-liquidation and financial firm, and Hilco-Great American, an inventory disposition firm, have been conducting store-closing sales in 20 other Venture stores since Jan. 20, when Venture filed to reorganize under Chapter 11 of the U.S. bankruptcy code. Leases of 20 stores were sold to Kmart at that time.

Hilco spokesman Sid Lambersky said the going out of business sales would take six to 14 weeks.

"We're going to sell everything until we hit the bare walls," Lambersky said. "There will be nothing left."

Merchandise will become cheaper as time goes by, but some items will be harder to find, he said.

"Some customers might want to play roulette in hopes of getting a really cheap price," Lambersky said. "But if they find something they really want, it's been my experience that they should buy it. We don't know how long this will last."

Venture recently announced it is selling or assigning leases to most of its remaining stores to Kimco Realty Corp.

Kimco is finalizing an agreement to lease some of the stores to Kmart Corp. Kimco also has preliminary commitments from other retailers to assume some of the Venture stores.

The Cape Girardeau Venture store opened in 1984.

The Associated Press provided some information for this report.