Ritz Camera Closing 300 Stores and Liquidating Inventory

Ritz Camera today announced closings of over 300 stores across the country in its efforts to stay afloat in these hard economy times. This announcements comes a few months after the company announced it would be filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The large camera company has over 800 stores in the U.S. which will leave over half still in operation. Liquidation of inventory in the 400 closing stores will being to take place on April 4th giving consumers more than $50 million in discounted inventory to purchase.

The family-owned company was founded as a portrait studio in 1918 by Benjamin Ritz, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. In 1936, Benjamin and his brother Edward opened the first Ritz film-processing lab in Washington, DC. Ritz Camera is currently headed by Edward's son, David Ritz.

In 1999, David Ritz and others founded Ritz Interactive, Inc., an Irvine, California-based e-commerce company formed to bring the "brick and mortar" Ritz brands to the World Wide Web. Ritz Interactive and Ritz Camera Centers remain separate companies.