Essendant is shutting down: eight sites and 1,278 jobs, nearly all on October 3

Essendant is shutting down: eight sites and 1,278 jobs, nearly all on October 3

Essendant, the wholesale office-products distributor Staples owns, is closing eight sites on or about October 3, its Illinois headquarters among them. 1,278 jobs, every figure on a state WARN notice, all filed within a day of each other in early August. The company has operated for more than a century.

What is happening

This is a closure of a wholesaler distribution network. Essendant filed a WARN notice for its own headquarters in Lincolnshire, Illinois, covering 510 jobs, and told the state it expects to shut down. The rest of the notices, filed August 3 and 4, cover distribution centers across the country, and almost every one carries the same effective date: on or within 14 days after October 3.

Perris is the tail of an earlier closure: Essendant filed a WARN notice there in September 2025 covering 146 jobs, who were laid off at the end of that year, and the August notice covers the 4 who remained. Only the 4 belong to this year's total.

Why it matters beyond the job count

The people most exposed are not on the notices. Essendant is a wholesaler, not a retailer. Its customers are independent office-products dealers, the small firms that supply offices, schools and city departments in towns too small for a national account team. Those dealers do not own warehouses. They rely on a distributor to hold inventory and ship it, often next day, and on October 3 one of the two national wholesalers disappears. Every dealer that bought through Essendant has until October 3 to find another supplier, and the contracts they serve, school districts and municipalities among them, sit behind that.

The reason is on the filing. On its Illinois notice the company gave the reason as Financial, which the state records. That is the company's own answer for why it is going, and it is worth more than years of industry commentary about distribution consolidating. Staples, which is owned by the private-equity firm Sycamore Partners, acquired the business in 2019. What is ending is the wholesale layer; the retail brand continues.

What we cannot see. We track closures at addresses, so we can count the warehouses and we cannot count the dealers. Nobody publishes a list of who bought from Essendant, which means the part of this with the widest reach is also the part nobody can size. If a dealer association or a buying group has that number, it is the story.

For the markets involved, each site is a large warehouse coming back to a landlord at the same time, which is a different problem from a single tenant leaving. Suwanee loses 192 jobs, Irving 136, Carol Stream 134, and greater Philadelphia 150, all on the same date.

Where this sits in the wider picture

This is not the only distribution network contracting this year, though it is the only one where the parent filed for its own headquarters. Our building-supply brief counts 11 distributors, mills and plants closing this year, and the Do it Best network bought out of True Value's bankruptcy is closing distribution centers in Oregon, Arizona and New York. What is unusual about Essendant is that the headquarters is on the same notice as the warehouses.

What we counted, and what we left out

Eight distinct sites. Our records name several of them twice, because different outlets use the metro name and the suburb: Suwanee is reported as Atlanta, Irving as Dallas, and Phoenixville and Oaks are the same building on Green Tree Road, also reported as Philadelphia and as Upper Providence Township. Each is counted once here.

We count no separate Los Angeles site, though some coverage lists one. Two things point the same way: California's WARN report carries exactly two Essendant notices, in Riverside County (Perris) and Sacramento County, with none in Los Angeles County; and the six non-Illinois sites named in the Chicago Tribune's account reconcile with the six we hold only if Los Angeles is Perris under its metro name, which is the same naming we found for Atlanta, Dallas and Philadelphia. That is our reading of the records rather than something a source states. Irving is 136 on the Texas notice; a lower figure in one restatement does not hold.

Records come from state WARN notices and the reporting on them. This is a living page.

Updated: September 21, 2026 (first published)

Changelog: first published at 8 sites in 6 states, 1,278 jobs, every figure verified on a state WARN notice, from the 2026-09-19 edition.

Street names are from our records; house numbers are held for subscribers. The Store Closure Watch file for the week of September 19, 2026 holds 463 records. As of September 21, 2026.