If you’re talking about a retail chain, I think one of the best sign of trouble is news about big layoffs and significant store closings. To shrink in order to survive is not good. When you’re in the store, besides the obvious physical condition of the store, check out the morale and attitude of the employees. When a company is going down the employees know it and are less caring about customers.
When they’re offering to sell you the store furnishings.
The smoke.
One of the biggest trouble signs that I know of is poor maintenance. This ranges from routine cleaning to major repairs to the infrastructure. A store or chain will first try to cut back on the janitorial services. It might skip every other deep cleaning, for instance. Or a light fixture will burn out and never get replaced. Sometimes this is because the store is just generally going downhill, and will find a new clientele at a lower economic level, but sometimes it’s just a case of not having ANY excess money that can be spent on repairs.
Very little or no new stock is also a good indicator. It could be that the buyer went crazy at the trade show, and spent the whole year’s budget on the spring fashions (leaving nothing for fall and winter fashions). I worked in a dress shop which was owned by a husband and wife team. The husband stayed home and did most of the administration, while the wife traveled to the trade shows and did the buying, and also she would travel to the stores (there were about a dozen stores in half a dozen states). The problem was, the wife had bipolar disorder, and when she was in the manic stage, she’d get wildly optimistic about the clothes she was buying. She thought that everyone would want to buy the clothes that she, personally, loved…when in fact she had a rather odd figure shape and the clothes that she loved were very overpriced. So we (the sales staff) were stuck trying to sell last spring’s rejects in the fall and winter. We had no new sweaters or coats to sell that year, because she’d used up all of the budget on the spring stuff.
As a customer, I’ve also seen this in stores that I shop in. It’s a vicious cycle, because when customers come in a few times and see that there’s no new stock, they don’t bother to come in again for a while. So even when there’s new stock, the customers are out of the habit of stopping in.
Oh, and at that clothing store, we were instructed NOT to cash our paychecks at the bank. We had to start saving money in the till, so we could cash our checks through it. While on the one hand we didn’t want to have a paycheck bounce, on the other hand it might take a while to build up enough cash in the drawer for everyone to cash her paycheck.
I used to prefer shopping at K-Mart over Wal-Mart. Several years ago I noticed the same thing at K-Mart - lots of bare shelves, hardly any employees around, that kind of stuff. Then all of a sudden, they started renovating the store, had everything crammed into about a third of the space while they tore out and expanded and rebuilt, and after about a year the store looked great and was fully stocked and I enjoyed shopping there again.
They closed the store about a year later. 
I always wondered why they didn’t just close it down before sinking a bunch of money into overhauling the store. No wonder K-Mart is in financial trouble.
I was in this McDonald’s recently and figured it might be on the downslide.
Took awhile to get my burger and fries.
Great driving Jackmannii. Typical woman driver.
Warning sign that a store might be folding- when the store is in the US in 2010 :mad:
The K-Mart here has been holding on by the skin of its teeth for decades now. There seems to be enough stock, but it’s always empty, and silent as a tomb; the dressing rooms are eerily deserted and the doors are open for any and all to go in and shoplift/get murdered; the sales people, if you can ever find any, I swear barely speak English. And this K-Mart is in a nearly empty strip mall, with a Big Lots, a nail palace to get gaudy claws glued on to your own nails, and a fly-by-night gym moved in. Add potholes in the parking lot that can swallow your car, all this is…not good. Yet K-Mart prevails, bless their tenacious hearts.
The KMarts down here in FL have not been faring well at all. In the last year, 2 KMarts within a 10-15 mile radius of each other have closed. There’s one left that is local to me, and it SEEMS to be doing OK, but that’s what I thought about the other two. A few months later, they fell like dominoes. 
Too bad. I actually LIKE KMart.
I went by a little local bridal/formal wear/tailor shop this morning. For the last week or so they’ve had a big sign in the front windown announcing a PROM SALE! (in March?) Today they had a young woman dressed in a prom gown out front waving at cars.
I work with a woman who has a high school age daughter, and prom is apparently in full force. Many schools have them in late April or early May.
Back in the days of independent local department store chains, when the upper floors were closed in multi-story stores, it was usually an indicator that the chain would fold within a year or two.
In the case of a couple of neighborhood gas stations / convenience stores, they would be out of certain grades of gasoline on a regular basis. Like diet pepsi? Sorry, it hasn’t been delivered yet (went on for several weeks with other pepsi products running out as well). So sorry, we couldn’t get your brand of cigarettes…try WeirdBrand 100s, same thing…thank you, come again.
Basically, they were on a cash basis with their suppliers. As someone pointed out earlier, this creates the vicious circle where customers don’t come in for one thing because they can’t get the other things on their list, creating a further decline in business.
For me, an early sign of a store in trouble is when they suddenly start stocking candy in the check out. Menard’s does it, as does Best Buy (now). I’ve always thought that was the Kiss of Death.
Later signs are empty shelves, merchandise on the floor (like blouses etc), stuff not picked up, bits of items stuck in odd places or shelved in the wrong area, boxed merchandise open or ripped etc, except that most Wal-Marts, Burlington Coat Factories and K-Marts I’ve been in always look like this…
Yeah, even Walmart does that now, and I’ve not really heard that they were in trouble.
ETA: Well, there is this one article that is enlightening
Boy how times have changed. Years ago K-mart was the Wal Mart of the area and their introduction caused the demise of a series of regional and metro chain stores. Now the hunter has become the hunted and I just saw signs advertising the closing of our local K-mart.
It’s been in decline for years looking like a dirty disheveled version of Odd-Lots. It’s now about to become another empty shell to be subdivided into smaller stores just like the stores it replaced. I guess I’m getting old because I remember the construction of some of the stores K-mart put out of business.
I worked for Movie Gallery for about ten years, and the stink of death was on it the whole time. I can’t point to a particular event; rather, every day the messages downloaded from corporate included a new cash grab that was often so complicated the employees couldn’t even understand how it was supposed to work. I wore a button toward the end that said “Ask me about Power Play.” If anyone did, I would hand them a brochure and tell them that if they could figure out how to use it I would try to figure out how to sell it to them.
Then they closed every other store in the district and cut ours down to one third of its original size, which was a much clearer indicator of trouble. Now the place is a Domino’s and a Subway. Good riddance.
About a month or so ago, a Turkey Hill Minit Market (sic) near me closed down with absolutely no warning, not even to its employees. They showed up for their shift to locked doors. Turkey Hill itself isn’t suffering; they’ve still got locations all over the place. They just closed this one. It was pretty strange.
If candy is a sign of a closing store, then Menards has been closing for at least 20 years. Though, they have started stocking actual groceries now, and that’s kind of weird.