LONDON (AP) — American clothing retailer Gap has announced that it will close all of its 81 stores in the U.K. and Ireland by the end of 2021. It will shift its business to exclusively online. The announcement late Wednesday comes following a strategic review that sought more cost-effective solutions for its presence in Europe. The retailer, emblematic of the quintessential American “T-shirt-and-jeans” look, is the latest casualty of the pandemic in the U.K. Last year, the U.K. experienced one of the world’s deepest recessions. Not all retailers in the U.K. are suffering like Gap. Rival Primark, for example, hailed “several new sales records” on Thursday,
