Foot Locker ditching NYC for St. Petersburg, Florida to cut high costs: ‘Efficiencies’

Foot Locker announced Wednesday the sneaker retailer will move its headquarters from New York City to Florida to escape the Empire State’s high costs.

“To better support our strategic progress, to increase team member collaboration, as well as ongoing expense discipline, we made the decision to relocate our headquarters to St. Petersburg, Fla.,” CEO Mary Dillon said in a statement.

The company said it would maintain only a limited presence in the city moving forward.

Its sister brand, Champs, was previously headquartered in St. Petersburg.

The move is expected to be completed by late 2025.

The city has been “a center of gravity for Foot Locker for a long time,” Dillon told Bloomberg. “There are cost efficiencies over time by doing this, but we’re going to continue to have a presence in New York to keep connections to basketball and sneaker culture.”

St. Petersburg – a city of 250,000 near Tampa – has not been a hotspot for big companies. 

Miami, for example, is home to billionaires like Ken Griffin and his hedge fund Citadel.

But in 2021, Cathie Wood’s Ark Investment Management moved from the Big Apple to St. Pete.

She also purchased naming rights for the ARK Innovation Center – a 45,000 square-foot entrepreneurial facility– in a $2 million deal, according to St. Pete Rising, a local urban development news site.

Foot Locker has a market capitalization of $2.8 billion. Its shares are down 4.3% so far this year.