The operator of roughly 180 Eddie Bauer stores across the U.S. and Canada has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, blaming declining sales and a litany of other industry headwinds.

The bankruptcy filing marks the third time in a little over two decades for the storied-but-now-tired brand that began as a Seattle fishing shop, later outfitted the first American to climb Mount Everest and made thousands of newfangled down jackets and sleeping bags for the military during World War II.

Eddie Bauer LLC said Monday it had entered into a restructuring pact with its secured lenders as it made the filing in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey.

Most Eddie Bauer retail and outlet stores in the U.S. and Canada will remain open as the company winds down certain locations. It noted that it will conduct a court-supervised sales process, and if a sale can’t be executed, it will begin a wind-down of its U.S. and Canadian operations.

“This is not an easy decision,” said Marc Rosen, CEO of Catalyst Brands, which maintains the license to operate Eddie Bauer stores in the U.S. and Canada. “However, this restructuring is the best way to optimize value for the retail company’s stakeholders and also ensure Catalyst Brands remains profitable and with strong liquidity and cash flow.”

Eddie Bauer’s stores outside of the U.S. and Canada are operated by other licensees, are not included in the Chapter 11 filings, and will stay open, according to the release.

Authentic Brands Group continues to own the intellectual property associated with the Eddie Bauer brand and may license the brand to other operators, the company said. The operations of other brands in the Catalyst Brands portfolio are not affected by this filing and will continue in the normal course, according to the company.

Eddie Bauer’s e-commerce and wholesale operations will also not be impacted by the wind down, as they are operated by a company called Outdoor 5, LLC. That was a transition it made in January and became effective Feb. 2.

Eddie Bauer joins a growing list of U.S. retailers this year that are closing stores, as companies reorganize under bankruptcy protection or pare down their operations to focus on the most profitable businesses.

The parent company of Saks Fifth Avenue said last month that it was seeking bankruptcy protection, buffeted by rising competition and the massive debt it took on to buy its rival in the luxury sector, Neiman Marcus, just over a year ago. A few days later, the parent company said it was closing most of its Saks Off 5th stores.

Amazon said earlier this month that it was closing almost all of its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh locations within days as it narrows its focus on food delivery and its grocery chain, Whole Foods Market.

Eddie Bauer’s namesake founder — an avid outdoorsman — started the company in Seattle in 1920 as Bauer’s Sports Shop, according to the brand’s website. In 1945, after making more than 50,000 jackets for the military, it launched a mail-order catalog.

“Bauer’s Sports Shop was not just a place where people purchased clothing and gear, it was a community hub where folks gathered to share their wisdom, learn, and talk about their experiences in the outdoors,” the website says.

The company created an American goose-down insulated jacket, known as the “Skyliner,” in 1936, and it became the company’s first patented jacket. It also outfitted the first American to climb Mount Everest — James W. Whittaker — with an Eddie Bauer parka in 1963.

After Bauer retired in 1968 and sold the business to his partner, the outdoor brand shifted more toward casual apparel and was bought by General Mills Inc. in 1971 and then by Spiegel Inc. in 1988. After Spiegel filed for bankruptcy in 2003 and most of its assets were sold, the remainder of the company was reorganized in 2005 as Eddie Bauer Holdings Inc.

In June 2009, Eddie Bauer filed bankruptcy and was acquired by Golden State Capital, the following month. In 2021, it was acquired by Authentic Brands and SPARC Group LLC.

A year ago, Catalyst was formed by the merger of SPARC and JCPenney, which Simon Property Group and fellow mall landlord Brookfield bought out of bankruptcy.

Rosen noted that even prior to the inception of Catalyst Brands last year, Eddie Bauer was in a “challenged situation.”

“Over the past year, these challenges have been exacerbated by various headwinds, including increased costs of doing business due to inflation, ongoing tariff uncertainty, and other factors,” he said.

He noted that while Catalyst’s leadership was able to make improvements in product development and marketing, those changes could not be implemented fast enough to fully address the problems created over several years.

Eddie Bauer had nearly 600 stores at its peak in 2001, according to CoStar Group Inc., a commercial real estate data firm.

In a note published earlier this month, Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail, wrote that while the Eddie Bauer name is “well known,” the brand hasn’t kept pace with rivals like Swedish outdoor brand Fjallraven and Canadian label Arc’teryx. He also cited issues with quality deteriorating, which, for an outdoor brand measured by the performance of its products, is very problematic.

“And for many younger shoppers, the brand is seen as somewhat old-fashioned and a bit irrelevant,” he said.

LOS ANGELES — The world’s biggest social media companies face several landmark trials this year that seek to hold them responsible for harms to children who use their platforms. Opening statements for the first, in Los Angeles County Superior Court, begin this week.

Instagram’s parent company Meta and Google’s YouTube will face claims that their platforms deliberately addict and harm children. TikTok and Snap, which were originally named in the lawsuit, settled for undisclosed sums.

“This was only the first case — there are hundreds of parents and school districts in the social media addiction trials that start today, and sadly, new families every day who are speaking out and bringing Big Tech to court for its deliberately harmful products,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of the nonprofit Tech Oversight Project.

At the core of the case is a 19-year-old identified only by the initials “KGM,” whose case could determine how thousands of other, similar lawsuits against social media companies will play out. She and two other plaintiffs have been selected for bellwether trials — essentially test cases for both sides to see how their arguments play out before a jury and what damages, if any, may be awarded, said Clay Calvert, a nonresident senior fellow of technology policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

It’s the first time the companies will argue their case before a jury, and the outcome could have profound effects on their businesses and how they will handle children using their platforms.

KGM claims that her use of social media from an early age addicted her to the technology and exacerbated depression and suicidal thoughts. Importantly, the lawsuit claims that this was done through deliberate design choices made by companies that sought to make their platforms more addictive to children to boost profits. This argument, if successful, could sidestep the companies’ First Amendment shield and Section 230, which protects tech companies from liability for material posted on their platforms.

“Borrowing heavily from the behavioral and neurobiological techniques used by slot machines and exploited by the cigarette industry, Defendants deliberately embedded in their products an array of design features aimed at maximizing youth engagement to drive advertising revenue,” the lawsuit says.

Executives, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, are expected to testify at the trial, which will last six to eight weeks. Experts have drawn similarities to the Big Tobacco trials that led to a 1998 settlement requiring cigarette companies to pay billions in health care costs and restrict marketing targeting minors.

“Plaintiffs are not merely the collateral damage of Defendants’ products,” the lawsuit says. “They are the direct victims of the intentional product design choices made by each Defendant. They are the intended targets of the harmful features that pushed them into self-destructive feedback loops.”

The tech companies dispute the claims that their products deliberately harm children, citing a bevy of safeguards they have added over the years and arguing that they are not liable for content posted on their sites by third parties.

“Recently, a number of lawsuits have attempted to place the blame for teen mental health struggles squarely on social media companies,” Meta said in a recent blog post. “But this oversimplifies a serious issue. Clinicians and researchers find that mental health is a deeply complex and multifaceted issue, and trends regarding teens’ well-being aren’t clear-cut or universal. Narrowing the challenges faced by teens to a single factor ignores the scientific research and the many stressors impacting young people today, like academic pressure, school safety, socio-economic challenges and substance abuse.”

A Meta spokesperson said in a recent statement that the company strongly disagrees with the allegations outlined in the lawsuit and that it’s “confident the evidence will show our longstanding commitment to supporting young people.”

José Castañeda, a Google Spokesperson, said that the allegations against YouTube are “simply not true.” In a statement, he said, “Providing young people with a safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work.”

The case will be the first in a slew of cases beginning this year that seek to hold social media companies responsible for harming children’s mental well-being.

In New Mexico, opening statements begin Monday for trial on allegations that Meta and its social media platforms have failed to protect young users from sexual exploitation, following an undercover online investigation. Attorney General Raúl Torrez in late 2023 sued Meta and Zuckerberg, who was later dropped from the suit.

Prosecutors have said that New Mexico is not seeking to hold Meta accountable for its content but rather its role in pushing out that content through complex algorithms that proliferate material that can be harmful, saying they uncovered internal documents in which Meta employees estimate that about 100,000 children every day are subjected to sexual harassment on the company’s platforms.

Meta denies the civil charges while accusing Torrez of cherry-picking select documents and making “sensationalist” arguments. The company says it has consulted with parents and law enforcement to introduce built-in protections to social media accounts, along with settings and tools for parents.

A federal bellwether trial beginning in June in Oakland, California, will be the first to represent school districts that have sued social media platforms over harms to children.

In addition, more than 40 state attorneys general have filed lawsuits against Meta, claiming it is harming young people and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by deliberately designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms. The majority of cases filed their lawsuits in federal court, but some sued in their respective states.

TikTok also faces similar lawsuits in more than a dozen states.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said Wednesday that it is investigating Nike for allegedly discriminating against white workers.

The agency that polices discrimination in the workplace filed an action in federal court in Missouri to compel the publicly traded athletic shoe and apparel giant to produce information in response to a subpoena the agency served on the company last fall, according to court filings reviewed by NBC News.

The EEOC said it was investigating allegations that the company’s mentorship and training programs and its personnel decisions gave nonwhite employees preferential treatment that amounts, according to the agency, to discrimination against white workers.

Nike is the world’s largest sportswear and apparel company, with nearly 80,000 employees and revenues of around $51.4 billion in 2024.

The allegations were not made by workers at Nike who believed they had been the targets of unfair treatment, however, as is typically the case in EEOC investigations.

Instead, the court filings show that this case stems from a commissioner’s charge brought by then-commissioner Andrea Lucas herself in May 2024, and based on publicly available information such as Nike’s own annual “Impact Reports” and information on its public website.

The EEOC’s request that a judge enforce the subpoena is the latest instance of the Trump administration using a federal agency that is typically charged with preventing and responding to discrimination against nonwhite Americans, and deploying it instead to protect what it says are the underrepresented interests of white people.

Nike has objected in court to many of the EEOC’s demands to documents over the last several months, arguing that they are vague, overly broad, and seek information dating back to well before the period in question.

“This feels like a surprising and unusual escalation,” a Nike spokesperson said. “We have had extensive, good-faith participation in an EEOC inquiry into our personnel practices, programs, and decisions and have had ongoing efforts to provide information and engage constructively with the agency.”

The spokesperson added that Nike has shared “thousands of pages of information and detailed written responses” in connection with the agency’s inquiry and said the company is in the “process of providing additional information.” Nike will respond to the agency’s petition, the spokesperson said.

Lucas was appointed chair of the EEOC by President Donald Trump in November 2025 after serving as a commissioner since 2020, when the president nominated Lucas to the agency.

The agency said it filed the subpoena enforcement action after “first attempting to obtain voluntary compliance with its investigative requests.”

For at least two decades, former Amazon executive Dave Clark ended his work week the same way: a standing Friday date night with his wife, Leigh Anne.

Over dinner, the Clarks would talk through the “peak and pit” of their weeks. The ritual often revolved around Amazon, where Clark played a central role in building the logistics infrastructure that helped launch the e-commerce era.

During those years, Leigh Anne was a sounding board for her husband. In the process, she had a front-row seat to Amazon’s growth from what she called “a baby to a behemoth.”

By the time Clark left Amazon in 2022, he was CEO of the Worldwide Consumer division and one of billionaire founder Jeff Bezos’ top lieutenants.

But these days, Fridays for the Clarks look very different.

Their dinner date has morphed into afternoon cocktails — a bourbon with Diet Coke for her and a Manhattan for him. And the conversation isn’t focused on Amazon anymore. It’s about Auger, the supply-chain startup they run together.

In their first joint interview from Auger’s Seattle office, the Clarks described how their marriage and complementary skill sets are shaping the company.

“We’ve been together for so long that we kind of just read each other’s minds,” Leigh Anne said. Working together, she said, “felt like a natural fit.”

SpaceX on Monday acquired xAI, the artificial intelligence startup that also owns the X social media platform, in a deal combining two companies owned by Elon Musk.

Musk in a news release said that the combination would aim to pursue AI data centers in outer space.

The deal comes on the verge of SpaceX’s highly anticipated initial public offering, which is expected to occur later this year.

The deal creates ‘the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform,’ Musk said in a statement.

The combined company will become the world’s most valuable private company, worth more than $1.2 trillion, Bloomberg News reported. NBC News has not been able to verify the valuation, and the companies did not respond to requests for comment.

Musk went on to say that space would be a crucial avenue for building advanced artificial intelligence.

‘In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale,’ Musk wrote. ‘The only logical solution therefore is to transport these resource-intensive efforts to a location with vast power and space.’

Musk also offered an ambitious timeline for starting to develop AI from space. He’s failed to meet many of the previous goals he set for his companies.

“My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space,” he wrote in Monday’s news release.

SpaceX already conducts rocket tests using reusable parts, provides cellular phone and data services to T-Mobile customers, and is working with NASA to return humans to the moon in the near future.

Meanwhile, xAI, Musk’s bid to get in on the AI boom, has reportedly soared to a more than $200 billion valuation. Along the way, the company and its AI bot, Grok, have drawn criticism. Recently, the company limited its image generation technology after users said it was creating sexualized deepfakes. A number of state attorneys general and the European Union are investigating the company.

Musk’s companies have often been intertwined, but Monday’s deal brings them even closer together. Another one of Musk’s companies, Tesla, has invested in xAI and uses some of its technology.

Musk merged his social media site X with xAI in early 2025, but the tie-up between xAI and SpaceX marks the largest combination to date of Musk’s vast business projects.

Founded in 2002, SpaceX has helped catapult Musk to the ranking of richest person in the world, with a net worth of more than $670 billion. The company has quickly become a critical supplier of satellite-based internet around the world, with more than 9,000 satellites orbiting Earth, used by both consumers and governments. SpaceX also holds multiple NASA contracts.

Amazon said Wednesday it was slashing another 16,000 jobs across the company in an ongoing bid to restructure the sprawling trillion-dollar firm.

‘The reductions we are making today will impact approximately 16,000 roles across Amazon, and we’re again working hard to support everyone whose role is impacted,’ Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, said in a memo to employees.

‘That starts with offering most US-based employees 90 days to look for a new role internally,’ she said. Amazon will ‘continue hiring and investing in strategic areas and functions that are critical to our future.’

Galetti said the cuts would ‘strengthen our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.’

In October, Amazon cut 14,000 jobs primarily at the corporate level. At the time, Galetti cited artificial intelligence as being the “most transformative technology we’ve seen since the internet.”

Amazon has 1.55 million employees worldwide, the company said in a filing last year.

It said Tuesday that it would close some of its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh physical stores, planning to convert some into Whole Foods Market stores.

While AI was not explicitly cited in Wednesday’s note to Amazon workers, the cuts come as workers nationwide brace for the impact of artificial intelligence in a sluggish labor market.

Companies have started citing ‘efficiency’ as they pursue the implementation of AI.

On Monday, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said that his firm’s headcount would be ‘more constrained in 2026’ as the company sees ‘opportunities for efficiency and we try to deploy those.’

On Tuesday, Pinterest said it would cut 15% of its workforce as it pivoted ‘resources to AI-focused roles and teams that drive AI adoption and execution.’

Last year, Microsoft said it was eliminating 9,000 jobs to improve efficiency. Target also cut 1,800 corporate jobs to reduce ‘complexity.’ Instagram and Facebook owner Meta Platforms also reduced its workforce by around 600 jobs as it shifted toward artificial intelligence.

At the same time, hiring nationwide is slowing and inflation remains elevated.

After three months of contraction last year, the U.S. economy added only 56,000 jobs in November and just 50,000 in December. Meanwhile, inflation remains at 2.7%, well above the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%.