Disney Will Close 30 Percent of Its Stores in North America: Live Updates

After 33 years as a shopping mall mainstay, Mickey Mouse is mostly calling it a day.

The Walt Disney Company said on Wednesday that it would dramatically downsize its chain of Disney Stores, which have struggled amid the pandemic and a broader consumer shift to online shopping. At least 60 locations in North America — 30 percent of the Disney Store footprint in the region — will close this year.

The company described the closures as the “beginning” of its downsizing effort. A significant number of overseas stores are also expected to close. According to its 2020 annual report, Disney has about 60 stores in Europe.

The Disney Store chain was founded in 1987 and once numbered more than 1,000 locations worldwide. For a time in the early 1990s, during a boom for shopping malls, Disney even experimented with an adjacent spinoff chain of Mickey’s Kitchen restaurants, where items included Dumbo burgers, Pinocchio pizzas and fries shaped like Donald Duck.

Disney redesigned many Disney Store locations in 2017 in an attempt to boost business, incorporating live video feeds from its theme parks and shifting the merchandise mix away from toys and toward fashion-conscious young adults. Results were mixed. In 2019, as shopping malls continued to struggle, Disney expanded its merchandising presence at Target stores, a move that analysts viewed as the beginning of the end for the stand-alone Disney Store business.

ShopDisney, the company’s online store, will expand over the next year and become more integrated with Disney’s theme park apps and social media platforms, according to Stephanie Young, president of Disney Consumer Products, Games and Publishing.

A day after Gov. Greg Abbott said he would lift Texas’s mask requirement and allow businesses to fully reopen, several companies said they would continue to require face coverings in the state. But industry groups are worried that businesses will not be able to enforce such policies once Texas and other states no longer require masks.

Target and Macy’s said they would continue to require customers and employees to wear masks in their Texas outlets. And Kroger, the grocery chain, said it would require everyone in its stores nationwide to wear masks until its frontline workers are vaccinated against the coronavirus.

The responsibility for mask enforcement will likely fall on the shoulders of frontline workers, who have been repeatedly harassed by customers who refuse to adhere to the policies.

“We support governors reopening their economies and giving beleaguered restaurants and other small businesses the opportunity to rebuild and rehire workers,” said Jason Brewer, the executive vice president of communications for the Retail Industry Leaders Association. “But going backward on safety measures will unfairly put retail employees back in the role of enforcing guidelines still recommended by the C.D.C. and other public health advocates.”

Texas officials had done little to enforce their own mask policies, largely relying on businesses and social stigma to uphold the rules. The role individuals and businesses play will now become even more important, some industry executives said.

“As we have seen throughout the pandemic, states and municipalities have mandated mask policies, yet have failed to provide any enforcement mechanisms,” Bill Thorne, an executive at the National Retail Federation, said in a statement.

Small business owners in Texas posted mixed reactions to the Mr. Abbott’s announcement on LinkedIn.

“We are so thankful that our local restaurants and other businesses that survive on retail/walk-in consumers are going to be able to get back to it,” wrote Jerry Drew, the chief executive of Network Thermostat, an electronics manufacturer in Grapevine, near Dallas. “Happy Days!”

Others were not so enthusiastic.

“I think the governor’s decision is a bad one,” wrote Gary Murray Sr., the owner of a fencing club in Round Rock, a suburb of Austin. “It is premature, reckless and I truly believe that he is being pressured by outside sources with no regard for health and safety.”

Philanthropic giving in response to the Covid-19 pandemic topped $20 billion last year, orders of magnitude more than past disasters, man-made or natural, according to a report released Wednesday by the groups Candid and the Center for Disaster Philanthropy.

The total includes global giving by foundations, corporations, public charities and wealthy individuals.

“It’s far and away more than we have ever seen for disasters,” said Grace Sato, director of research at Candid. “It’s an overused term to say unprecedented, but I would say funding for Covid-19 has been unprecedented in terms of giving.”

By comparison, Candid found only $1 billion in gifts responding to the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and just $362 million for the Ebola crisis in West Africa less than a decade ago.

Demands on frontline charities have grown even as they face immense financial pressure. The Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins University estimated that nearly 1 million jobs had been lost in the nonprofit sector in the United States from the start of the pandemic through January 2021, a 7.7 percent decline from February 2020.

The needs created by lockdowns, shortages of medical equipment and millions of deaths were unusual, but many of the names leading the way in giving last year are familiar. Among foundations, the two biggest givers were the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which pledged $1.33 billion in response to the crisis, and the Rockefeller Foundation, which pledged more than $1.1 billion.

Corporations were responsible for 44 percent of total giving, with Google’s philanthropic arm pledging $1.16 billion.

Ms. Sato said the report did not capture smaller individual gifts to frontline charities, work by mutual-aid societies or crowdsourced fund raisers. It did include significant gifts announced by major donors, including MacKenzie Scott, a relative newcomer to mega-philanthropy.

Ms. Scott, a novelist and the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, gave away nearly $6 billion last year. The report counted $4 billion of that as responding to the pandemic, totaling nearly three-quarters of Covid-19 related giving by high-net-worth individuals.

While the more than $20 billion in donations was an enormous amount of giving compared with past crises, that figure is dwarfed by the trillions of dollars in government stimulus packages.

“Compared to government spending, it’s a drop in the bucket,” Ms. Sato said.

The Federal Reserve’s latest report on economic conditions across its 12 regional banking districts included new sections from the Minneapolis branch on minority- and women-owned businesses and on the experiences of workers.

The report, known as the Beige Book, generally focuses on economic life through the eyes of businesses. Neel Kashkari, the president of the Minneapolis Fed, has pushed for greater attention to racial disparities and inequality in general. He was among a group of central bank officials who initiated the Fed’s Racism and the Economy conference series.

The additions to the Minneapolis branch’s anecdotal survey of businesses in February detailed what had been pulling workers into or keeping them out of jobs and highlighted concerns that might have gone overlooked in a more general survey of businesses.

“Contacts noted hesitancy among immigrant business owners to apply for assistance out of concern for jeopardizing the immigration status of themselves or family members,” the minority-led business section noted. “Financial instability was high among these firms.”

Laid-off workers in the service sector were slower to move to other fields — like manufacturing — than expected. The worker section was drawn from conversations with organizations such as labor unions, nonprofit groups and work force development agencies.

“A job service contact suggested that some of the inertia may be due to employers providing false hope that workers will be called back to their previous jobs,” the report noted. It also said that “family care responsibilities, remote learning in many school districts, fears of infection” had increased the cost of working for prospective workers.

The Beige Book is published eight times a year. It described “modest” economic growth in the country as a whole, with mixed pricing power for businesses.

The Alamo Drafthouse theater chain, which operates some 40 locations across the country and is known for its curated screenings, elevated food and drink options and over-the-top fan interactions, announced Wednesday that it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

As part of the process, the company will sell its assets to its senior lender group, including Altamont Capital Partners, affiliates of Fortress Investment Group and the company’s founder, Tim League.

The company said the move would provide the company with the financing needed to weather the…