If you searched “Is Great Lakes going out of business?” you’re probably confused — and for good reason. You might be a student loan borrower who suddenly got redirected to a different website. Or maybe your regional flights disappeared. Or a local hardware store near you is holding a liquidation sale.
Here’s the thing: “Great Lakes” is not one company. It’s a name shared by several completely unrelated businesses. So before anyone can answer your question, we need to figure out which Great Lakes you’re actually asking about.
This article breaks down each major Great Lakes entity, what actually happened to it, and how to tell the difference between a business closing, a restructuring, and a strategic exit.
“Great Lakes” Is Not One Company
Think of it like the name “Pacific” or “Midwest.” Dozens of unrelated companies use those words in their names — airlines, banks, insurance companies, hardware stores. Great Lakes is the same situation.
The major organizations operating under the Great Lakes name include a regional airline, a student loan servicer, a hardware chain, a shopping mall, an electric cooperative, and a media organization. None of them are connected to each other.
So when headlines say “Great Lakes is shutting down” or “Great Lakes goes bankrupt,” those claims mean very different things depending on which entity is involved. Let’s go through each one.
Great Lakes Airlines Suspended Operations in 2018
This is the clearest case of a Great Lakes business that stopped operating. Great Lakes Airlines was a Wyoming-based regional carrier with more than 40 years in business. On March 26, 2018, it suspended all scheduled flight operations.
Importantly, the company stated at the time that it had not filed for bankruptcy. It suspended operations as a scheduled air carrier — which is a specific legal and operational distinction. Whether any bankruptcy proceedings followed later would require updated sourcing to confirm.
The causes were a familiar set of problems for small regional carriers: a severe pilot shortage, increasing regulatory pressure, and the simple economics of flying thin routes between small communities. Those routes rarely generate enough revenue to survive when costs rise.
The real-world impact was significant. Small towns that depended on Great Lakes Airlines for connectivity lost their air service entirely. Employees lost their jobs. And residents in those communities had no easy alternative because larger airlines don’t serve those markets profitably.
If you’re seeing headlines like “Great Lakes shuts down” in old news searches, this is almost certainly what they’re referring to.
Great Lakes Student Loans Moved to Nelnet — Not a Collapse
This one causes a lot of unnecessary panic. Great Lakes Educational Loan Services was one of the largest federal student loan servicers in the country. Millions of borrowers had their accounts managed through the Great Lakes platform.
Then the accounts started moving to Nelnet. Borrowers logged in and saw redirect messages. Naturally, many of them typed “Is Great Lakes out of business?” into Google.
But this was not a collapse. Great Lakes made a strategic decision to exit the direct loan servicing business. The company had already been working with Nelnet before the transition happened. This was a business exit — a company choosing to leave a line of work — not an insolvency event.
Here’s the practical part: if your loans moved from Great Lakes to Nelnet, your loan balance didn’t change. Your repayment terms didn’t change. Your obligations stayed exactly the same. You’re just dealing with a different servicer on a different platform now.
The confusion here is understandable. When you see a redirect notice on a financial account, your first instinct is that something went wrong. In this case, nothing went wrong for you as a borrower — the company just decided to get out of that business.
Great Lakes Ace Hardware: Store Closures Are Not Chain Failures
In April 2025, a Great Lakes Ace Hardware location announced it would close on April 15, posting notices of a liquidation sale. The store explicitly stated “no bankruptcy” — meaning this was an individual store closure, not a chain-wide collapse.
This is a common pattern in retail. A single location closes for any number of reasons: lease issues, local competition, changing foot traffic, or owner decisions. That has nothing to do with the overall health of the brand or any other Great Lakes Ace Hardware location.
When a store you shop at regularly posts closing signs, it’s easy to assume the whole company is going under. But a single store closing is rarely a sign of that. Check whether other locations in your area are still operating before drawing any conclusions.
Great Lakes Mall’s Owner Filed for Bankruptcy — The Mall Stayed Open
This one requires a careful reading of how corporate structures work. Washington Prime Group, a Columbus-based real estate investment trust (REIT) that owns roughly 100 U.S. shopping centers — including Great Lakes Mall — filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
The reason was straightforward: COVID-19 created severe financial challenges for mall operators, and Washington Prime Group used Chapter 11 as a path to restructure its debt and keep operating.
Here’s the critical distinction: Chapter 11 is a reorganization, not a shutdown. The bankruptcy was filed at the holding company level. The mall itself continued operating during and after the restructuring process. Tenants stayed open. Shoppers kept coming in.
If you were a retailer leasing space in Great Lakes Mall, the bankruptcy news probably worried you about your lease. That’s a legitimate concern. But Chapter 11 is specifically designed to keep businesses running while they work through financial problems — it’s very different from a Chapter 7 liquidation, where assets get sold off and everything closes.
Reading the word “bankruptcy” and assuming a location is immediately shutting down is one of the most common misreads in business news. The legal process and the day-to-day operation are separate things.
Great Lakes Businesses That Are Still Operating Normally
Not every Great Lakes organization has faced closures or restructuring. Several are running without any reported problems.
- Great Lakes Energy Electric Cooperative is an active member-owned utility providing power and communications services to its communities.
- Great Lakes Now is a media and outreach organization covering environmental issues around the Great Lakes region, with ongoing coverage and active programming.
If you deal with either of these organizations and were worried after reading general “Great Lakes” headlines, there’s no current indication of problems with either one.
How to Tell What’s Actually Happening to Any Business
Whether you’re a customer, an employee, or a local business owner, here’s a simple process for figuring out if a company you rely on is actually in trouble.
- Go directly to the official website. If a company has suspended operations or closed, the site will usually say so — or it will be gone entirely.
- Look for press releases or official statements. Real business events generate formal communications, not just social media rumors.
- Check regulatory filings. For airlines, the Department of Transportation tracks operating certificates. For loan servicers, the Department of Education publishes servicer information. For public companies, SEC filings are public record.
- Read the actual news, not just the headline. “Great Lakes owner files bankruptcy” and “Great Lakes goes out of business” are two very different statements. Headlines are often imprecise.
- Identify which Great Lakes you mean. A quick search with the specific company type — “Great Lakes Airlines,” “Great Lakes student loans,” “Great Lakes Mall” — will give you much more useful results than a generic search.
For more practical business analysis like this, Open Business Mag covers company news, industry shifts, and what they actually mean for real people.
Shutdown, Suspension, and Chapter 11 — Know the Difference
These three terms get used interchangeably, but they mean very different things for customers and employees.
Suspension of operations means a business stops its main activity without necessarily filing any legal paperwork. Great Lakes Airlines did this. It’s not the same as bankruptcy, but it’s also not temporary in practice if the company never restarts.
Exiting a line of business means a company chooses to stop offering a specific product or service while continuing to exist in other ways. Great Lakes Educational Loan Services did this when it transferred its loan portfolio to Nelnet.
Chapter 11 bankruptcy is a court-supervised reorganization. The company keeps operating while it works out a plan to deal with its debts. Washington Prime Group, which owns Great Lakes Mall, used this process. It is not immediate closure.
Knowing which situation applies changes everything about how you should respond as a customer, tenant, or employee.
The Bottom Line
There is no single “Great Lakes company” going out of business. Several organizations that share the name have gone through major changes — an airline that suspended flights, a loan servicer that chose to exit its market, a hardware store that closed one location, and a mall whose owner restructured through bankruptcy. Others, like the electric cooperative and media organization, are still active.
If you’re trying to figure out what happened to a specific Great Lakes company that affects you directly, start by identifying exactly which one you mean. Then look for official statements rather than relying on search results alone. The name is shared widely enough that generic searches will almost always create confusion.
In business, “going out of business” is a specific outcome. It’s worth taking the extra five minutes to confirm which outcome actually happened before acting on it.
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