TJ Maxx and Kohl’s are the places to go to find everything from makeup, to clothes, home decor, and back-to-school gear.
The stores are well loved by shoppers for a number of reasons, including the low prices both stores have on a huge variety of products.
Both stores are doing well right now, with TJ Maxx’s parent company reporting on Tuesday that comparable sales were up 9% at TJ Maxx and Marshalls in the most recent fiscal quarter, and Kohl’s reporting a comparable sales increase of 2.5%.
TJ Maxx and Kohl’s are both able to avoid the troubles faced by stores in malls. In large part, this is because most TJ Maxx and Kohl’s stores are in suburban strip malls rather than shopping malls. This makes them less likely to be affected by the declining foot traffic that has hurt malls and the retailers that depend on them.
There are a few obvious differences between the stores, most notably that TJ Maxx is an off-price retailer, while Kohl’s is a traditional department store. However, after recently visiting both, we found that the stores were similar in many ways — the styles and quality of the products were nearly identical, and neither was laid out in a particularly great way.
But one store was better than the other for a key reason: