Disney Shutters Lower Hudson Valley Store

WEST NYACK, NY — The Disney store in the Palisades Center mall has closed permanently as the company continues to shift its retail focus to e-commerce.

In March, The Walt Disney Company announced it would be closing 20 percent of its stores in North America over the spring. In the first rounds of closures were two in New York: Riverhead and Staten Island. In late April, company officials announced another seven closures, and the store in Rockland County was on that list.

"This is one of the oddest closures in the batch," Nicholas Moreau of diskingdom.com wrote in an article April 24. "Clarkstown, New York is less than an hour’s drive outside of New York City. Palisades Centre is a four-storey mall with 225 stores, 16 full service restaurants, a bowling alley, ice rink, the world’s tallest ropes course, and a comedy club. The Disney Store had reopened from a pandemic shut down by July 2020. But then in January this year, it closed 'temporarily' again. Did the state or county impose retail restrictions? Nope. The rest of the mall stayed open as usual. Now, its closure is permanent."

In the company's statement in March, Stephanie Young, president of Consumer Products Games and Publishing, said "While consumer behavior has shifted toward online shopping, the global pandemic has changed what consumers expect from a retailer. Over the past few years, we’ve been focused on meeting consumers where they are already spending their time, such as the expansion of Disney store shop-in-shops around the world. We now plan to create a more flexible, interconnected ecommerce experience that gives consumers easy access to unique, high-quality products across all our franchises."

According to the shopDisney store locator, one Disney store is left in the Hudson Valley, an outlet store at Woodbury Common. The next nearest store is at the Danbury Fair mall in Connecticut.