A big Northbrook-based wholesale company is downsizing its local operations, leading to a layoff of 49 workers.
Maurice Sporting Goods, a 93-year-old family business, is closing its Northbrook warehouse at 1825 Shermer Road. Three other nearby Maurice buildings will remain, including the one at 1910 Techny Road that serves as the headquarters, company principal Michael Olshansky said Monday.
Much of the operations will be switched to the Atlanta area, where an existing 175,000-square-foot warehouse will be replaced in October by a 300,000-square-foot building in McDonough, Ga., Olshansky said. The change to the wholesaler comes largely, he said, because many of the company’s customers’ stores are in Florida and elsewhere on the East Coast, closer to Georgia than Illinois. Another warehouse, in Reno, Nev., will remain, he said.
The company also has two distribution centers in Canada.
The old warehouse’s 26-foot ceilings will be replaced in Atlanta with 35-foot clearances, more efficient for use to move merchandise quickly and efficiently to respond to digital and big-box customers with demands for speed and price, Olshansky said.
The closure of the Northbrook warehouse has long been signaled, as the 4.9 acres it sits on has been for sale for two years.
Northbrook’s Jacobs Companies submitted preliminary plans to build 40 town houses there in the summer of 2015, but dropped them as the firm concentrated on a bigger downtown Northbrook town house project. The Hanover Company dropped a bid to build 312 apartments on the property April 27, the day after Northbrook trustees panned the project as too crowded.
Olshansky said that employees were told about a year ago that layoffs will come between Oct. 21 and Nov. 3 of this year, and many of them decided to ride out the time in Maurice’s employ. He said the company regretted the layoffs: “This is a very, very difficult thing for my partners and I to go through.
“I can’t disclose the terms of the severance because of a confidentiality agreement,” Olshansky said. “It’s something the union agreed to, signed off on, and thought was fair.”
Teamsters Local 743, which represents the workers, did not return calls seeking comment.
Olshansky said 225 employees will remain in Northbrook. In all, about 900 people work for the firm, he said.
The firm was founded by the late Maurice Olshansky in a Maxwell Street push cart, according to company lore. It moved to Northbrook in the early 1980s, Olshansky said. The firm, which claims to be the nation’s largest sporting goods wholesaler, sells merchandise such as camouflage toilet paper and shooters’ duck blinds. The company switched from retailing to wholesaling decades ago, and now manufacturers a segment of its products in China, Olshansky said.
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