Staples, Inc.

Who owns Staples?
Sycamore Partners, a New York private equity firm, has owned Staples since September 2017, when it acquired the company for approximately $6.9 billion. Staples operates as three separately financed Sycamore entities covering US retail, Canada, and B2B delivery.

Is Staples publicly traded?
No. Staples traded on Nasdaq under ticker SPLS from 1989 to 2017. It has been private since the Sycamore buyout, and there are no announced plans to return to public markets.

How much revenue does Staples make?
As a private company Staples does not report results. Credit research and trade estimates put combined annual revenue at approximately $8 billion, down from about $8.7 billion in 2022.

How many Staples stores are there?
About 830 stores operate in the United States as of 2026, down from a peak above 2,000 worldwide. Staples Canada operates separately, including Quebec stores under the Bureau en Gros banner.

What happened to the Staples-Office Depot merger?
The FTC blocked Staples' attempted acquisition of Office Depot twice: first in 1997, then again in 2016 when a federal judge halted the $6.3 billion deal on antitrust grounds. Staples paid a breakup fee and never reattempted the combination.

Is Staples going out of business?
There is no indication of that. The company is shrinking, not liquidating: it refinanced roughly $5 billion of debt in 2024 and continues to invest in its B2B delivery business, which is regarded as its strongest asset.

Who is the CEO of Staples?
Rachel Huckle serves as CEO of Staples, while Michael Motz is CEO of Staples US Retail, reflecting the company's split operating structure under Sycamore Partners.

Thomas Stemberg came to office supplies from groceries. A Harvard MBA who had risen to president of a supermarket division, he was fired in a restructuring in 1985 and, on a holiday weekend that year, could not find a store open to sell him printer ribbon. He concluded that office products needed the same high-volume, low-price superstore treatment as food retail.

Stemberg recruited Leo Kahn, the founder of the Purity Supreme supermarket chain and a pioneering discounter, and Myra Hart, a Bain and Company consultant who researched the concept. With backing from Bessemer Venture Partners and Bain Capital, among Mitt Romney's early celebrated deals at the firm, the first Staples opened in Brighton, Massachusetts, on May 1, 1986.

Growth was immediate. Staples went public on Nasdaq in 1989 and used the capital to expand across the country, reaching $3 billion in sales by 1996 and becoming, with Office Depot and OfficeMax, part of a three-chain oligopoly that gutted independent stationers. The company added a catalog delivery operation, launched e-commerce early, and pushed into Europe in the 1990s and 2000s.

The FTC blocked a Staples-Office Depot merger in 1997. Staples tried again in February 2015, agreeing to buy Office Depot for $6.3 billion, but the FTC sued and a federal judge halted the deal in May 2016. Staples collected nothing for the effort but a changed market: online competition, led by Amazon, was eroding the category regardless of consolidation.

In June 2017, Staples agreed to a $6.9 billion buyout by Sycamore Partners at $10.25 per share, and the deal closed that September. Sycamore reorganized the company into the three-entity structure it operates today, refocused investment on the B2B delivery business, and steadily shrank the store base. The US entity refinanced about $5 billion of debt in June 2024. Rachel Huckle was named CEO of Staples, with Michael Motz running Staples US Retail.

Staples appeared for years on the Fortune 500 while public, peaking around the top 150 by revenue. The company has received recognition for corporate sustainability reporting and forestry sourcing commitments, and its founders' story is a staple of business school case studies on category innovation in retail.

The defining regulatory episodes were the two blocked Office Depot mergers, in 1997 and 2016, which shaped the competitive structure of the entire category. The 2016 court loss was particularly costly in strategic terms, arriving just as the retail model deteriorated.

As a leveraged private equity asset, Staples draws periodic criticism over debt-funded distributions and store closures. Credit agencies have flagged the capital structure at times, and rating downgrades have accompanied refinancing rounds. Labor practices have also come under scrutiny, as at most large retail chains, including historic controversies over part-time scheduling and, earlier, a 2014 dispute over a postal service pilot program that labor unions protested.

On the product side, the company has conducted routine CPSC recalls of furniture and electronics sold under its banners. Nothing rises to the level of a brand-defining safety scandal.