EuroGiant in liquidation and Dealz struggling
10:32, 05 Feb 2026Updated 14:25, 06 Feb 2026
The Dealz in the Merchant’s Quay Shopping Centre
It says something when one discount store chain, the popular Mr Price chain, offers its sympathies to a rival that’s facing the threat of going out of business.
But such is the scale of the challenges facing these popular ‘Pile it High – Sell It Cheap’ stores, a shopping mainstay for so many families in Cork, that one chain will not be celebrating the departure of another in the midst of our cost of living crisis.
As five EuroGiant stores across Cork face an uncertain future with the Irish-owned chain going into liquidation and 660 jobs at risk nationwide, another Irish-owned chain, Mr Price, has said of their rivals: “We are genuinely sorry to see EuroGiant go into liquidation today. Building a 100% Irish retail business is brutally hard. Our thoughts are with all the team who built EuroGiant and their families.”
The message, shared on social media, is a reminder that there are staff and families behind the news that the chain is in deep trouble. Scores of EuroGiant staff will be going into work these coming mornings, wondering if they will still have a job next week. But with another familiar name, Dealz, also struggling (stores have been closed in Cork and elsewhere amid drastic cost-cutting) the ‘Pound Shop’ model that had dominated Irish and UK high-streets for two decades or more appears to be faltering.
Retail experts put the crisis down to a number of factors that include:
The Cost of Living CrisisSoaring rents and other expenses around physical storesA shift by customers to online, cheap-as-chips retailers like Temu and its many imitators
Increasingly, a family in Cork that might want to order a big box of crafting materials for their kids for school projects are happy to order from China – and wait weeks for their purchases to arrive – rather than take a trip to their local discount store and do the shopping in person.
There is some hope for the future of physical discount stores in Cork – the Danish chain Normal is about to open a new store in the former Argos space in the Queen’s Old Castle.
In the US, the so-called Big Box discount retail giants that have dominated the market there, brands like Big Lots, Family Dollar and even the all-conquering Walmart, are closing stores at a rate of knots and struggling to compete online with the likes of Temu.
Texas alone has lost 40 of its 116 giant Big Box stores in the last two years. Consumer spending in the US has taken a huge hit due to the cost-of-living crisis that has only worsened under Trump’s economic policies, widely seen as disastrous for the retail sector.
The repeated attempts to slap huge tarrifs on Chinese imports – which Trump has repeatedly backed-down on at the last minute – were seen as a method of ‘protecting’ US companies that has failed miserably.
In Ireland, consumers are more and more likely to buy even the cheapest goods online, meaning a bleak future for our physical stores and high streets, unless there is a change of heart – and habit – by the public.
For the moment, EuroGiant stores will remain open and operating as normal as the liquidation process review is carried out. EuroGiant founder Charlie O’Loughlin has called it a “very hard day”.
He said: “I founded this business over 30 years ago and I never imagined it would end like this.” In a statement, a EuroGiant spokesperson said: “Rent and day-to-day operating expenses, along with increased competition in the retail sector, mean the business is no longer viable in its current form.”