The City of Philadelphia Orders Five Below Store in Center City to Shut Down for Rodent Issues

It's one of Philadelphia's busiest retail stores, but now been ordered to CLOSE... during the busy holiday season.

Reports from multiple outlets (including The Philly Voice and The Philadelphia Inquirer) confirmed that the Philadelphia Health Department ordered Five Below to close earlier this week.

The news comes as the store has apparently failed four consecutive health inspections this year.

The health department's findings in their most recent inspection came earlier this month.

In an inspection on December 2, officials discovered dead mice in the basement and mouse droppings in the area where chips and popcorn were stored, reports say.

In fact, at least 22 bags of food had "holes gnawed in them," they say.

The store was initially closed for 48 hours. A re-inspection on December 5th continued to find mouse droppings and gnawed holes in the bags of food, The Inquirer reports.

The store has been ordered closed until it gets approval via a re-inspection from the Department of Public Health.

As of Friday (December 13), 94.5 PST wasn't able to locate any new filings from the Health Department indicating that the store had been re-inspected, and when walking by this afternoon, the usually busy retailer appeared to still be closed.

We've reached out to Five Below for comment on the issues, but as of publish time we have NOT heard back from the company about the store.

Five Below, which was founded in 2002, is headquartered in Philadelphia. As of today, it's estimated that they own and operate more than 1,700 stores nationwide.