Last week I mapped who's opening stores and who's closing them. This week, the earnings came in. The value sector isn't just signing leases on faith. The numbers back it up.
Dollar General posted 4.3% comp growth and is adding 450 stores. Burlington hit 4% comps against a guide of 0-2% and is opening 110. Five Below did +15.4% comps and is adding another 150. Dollar Tree came in at +5.0% comps with ~325 net new stores planned. Ollie's grew revenue 16.8% and is adding 75. That's over 1,000 net new value and off-price stores committed for 2026, backed by earnings that justify the expansion.
On the other side: H&M is pulling roughly 160 U.S. locations this year. Nordstrom is closing 2 full-line anchors, including its first-ever Texas store at Galleria Dallas. Grocery Outlet is shuttering 36 stores. American Mattress converted from Chapter 11 to Chapter 7 and is liquidating all 95+ locations. Zumiez is closing 20 U.S. stores despite posting strong margins.
The transfer is happening in real time. Burlington's CEO said it directly: backfilling department store vacancies is a primary site pipeline driver. The boxes going dark are feeding the brands with expansion budgets.
The Earnings Stack
The value sector's Q4 numbers, side by side:
Dollar General is the largest unit expander in U.S. retail. 20,893 stores as of January, 581 added last year, 450 more this year. They're deliberately decelerating from 581 to 450 to prioritize remodels and same-store productivity. Whether that's confidence in the existing portfolio or a sign that new-store economics are getting tighter, the shift toward remodels over net-new is deliberate.
Burlington opened 131 stores last year and is guiding for 110 this year. The number that matters: Q4 comps came in at +4% against a 0-2% guide. Burlington is explicitly targeting department store vacancies as its pipeline. The Macy's closures, the Saks liquidations, the Nordstrom exits, those all become Burlington site opportunities.
Dollar Tree is a different company post-Family Dollar. The 9,282 store count is Dollar Tree banner only. 71 Family Dollar stores were converted. ~400 new openings planned, ~75 closures, net ~325. The separation is the story: Dollar Tree is growing the banner it believes in and shedding the one it doesn't.
Macy's is the counterweight. 80+ namesake stores closed under "Bold New Chapter," 65 more planned through 2028. Q4 beat estimates at $7.6B, and comp sales went positive for the first time in several quarters. But the strategy is clear: shrink the namesake, grow Bloomingdale's and Bluemercury. No new Macy's nameplate stores. Every Macy's that closes is a 100,000+ square-foot box entering the market.
If you're tracking second-generation space in your market, the pipeline just got clearer. Value retailers have both the earnings and the expansion budgets to absorb what's coming.
New Closures This Week
H&M: ~160 U.S. stores closing in 2026. Q1 sales already fell ~1% on the closures. CEO called it "long-term repositioning." These are 10,000-25,000 square-foot boxes, primarily mall inline and open-air centers. No bankruptcy, voluntary restructuring. H&M wasn't in last week's Closure Tracker because the U.S.-specific number hadn't been confirmed. It's now at ~160.
For context: Burlington is opening 110 stores this year, targeting 15,000-25,000 square-foot boxes. H&M is closing 160 stores in the same size range. The size overlap is hard to ignore, and Burlington's management has been explicit about targeting these vacancies.
Nordstrom: 2 full-line stores closing, including Galleria Dallas, the first Nordstrom in Texas. Closes May 16. That's a 200,000+ square-foot anchor vacancy in a mall that pulls 4.4 million visits per year. I pulled the trade zone for 13350 Dallas Pkwy: 761K population, $88K median household income, $13.6 billion in retail spending. Household size runs 2.22, median age 36.1, and 16.4% of the workforce is in graduate-degree professions. Netflix House already backfilled the old Belk anchor. Macy's is still next door drawing 440,000 annual visits. This isn't a dead mall losing an anchor. This is a performing asset losing a tenant that decided the format doesn't work. The trade zone demographics are strong. What happens next depends on the landlord's anchor replacement strategy, co-tenancy clauses, and what rents they're willing to accept, but 200K SF of anchor space in this location will get attention.
Grocery Outlet: 36 stores, primarily West Coast. American Mattress: all 95+ stores, Chapter 7 liquidation, Midwest-concentrated (IL, IN, MI, FL, MO). Zumiez: 20 U.S. stores (mall inline, 2,500-3,000 SF), voluntary lease exits despite strong margins.
ALDI's Phoenix Playbook
ALDI committed to 180 new stores across 31 states. Before asking whether a market fits, I wanted to know what "fit" actually means for them. So I profiled 67 existing ALDI trade zones across 8 Sun Belt states (TX, FL, GA, NC, SC, TN, AZ, NV) using a 16-minute drive time network service area (Esri 2025 demographics via GrowthFactor) and measured which variables ALDI holds constant across its portfolio. Low coefficient of variation means high consistency. High CV means ALDI doesn't seem to care about that variable.
The 4 tightest variables, the ones ALDI holds constant:
- Avg household size: median 2.6, IQR 2.4-2.8 (CV 12.2%)
- % retail trade employment: median 12.2%, IQR 11.0-13.1% (CV 14.2%)
- Median age: median 37.6, IQR 35.6-40.4 (CV 17.0%)
- % healthcare employment: median 12.7%, IQR 11.1-14.0% (CV 18.3%)
What does NOT matter: race/ethnicity, population size, and growth rate all came in above 70% CV. ALDI is not targeting a specific race or a specific scale. They're targeting a specific economic and household profile. Median household income lands at $79K with an IQR of $66-97K (CV 23.3%). Not a poverty-line play. A working-family play.
Now look at what they're actually building in Phoenix.
Gilbert Rd, Mesa (Gilbert Rd & Southern Ave): HH size 3.0, age 37.8, retail trade 11.2%, healthcare 12.2%, income $96K. 4/4 within IQR. Former 99 Cents Only building, 25,000 SF, 10-year lease. At a 30-min drive time covering a broader suburban area, all four variables land clean.
Power/Elliot, Mesa (Power Rd & Elliot Rd): HH size 3.0, age 38.0, retail trade 11.6%, healthcare 12.4%, income $100K. 4/4 within IQR. Ground-up build at Avalon Ranch, a 14-acre mixed-use development with EOS Fitness, McDonald's, and Dutch Bros. ALDI bought the 3-acre pad for $2.4M. Income at the high end of their range, still inside it.
Peoria Ave, Peoria (Peoria Ave & 67th Ave): HH size 3.0, age 36.8, retail trade 12.7%, healthcare 12.8%, income $84K. 4/4 within IQR. Former Rush Fun Park, 26,000 SF, 10-year lease. Clean fit across all four variables at 30 minutes.
Carefree Hwy, Cave Creek (51st St & Carefree Hwy): Age 50.8 (baseline is 35.6–40.4), income $157K (baseline IQR is $66–97K). 2/4 fit. This is the genuine outlier, but the lease tells a different story. ALDI signed a 20-year commitment here, double the 10-year terms at Gilbert Rd and Peoria. They also right-sized the format: 19,000 SF vs. 25,000+ at the other locations.
Why the longest lease on the weakest demographic fit? Because the corridor is about to activate. Cave Creek Gateway (ALDI's project) is one of three major retail developments within 1.5 miles on Carefree Highway. Carefree Quarter, a 120,000 SF center anchored by PetSmart, is opening in phases through mid-2026. And Vestar has a 127-acre parcel at I-17 & Carefree Highway planned for 800,000+ SF of open-air retail, with groundbreaking targeted for late 2026. Add the existing Fry's Signature (60,000 SF), Home Depot, and Sprouts already on the corridor, and by 2028 this stretch will have the co-tenancy density of a mature retail node.
The 20-year term suggests ALDI is underwriting the corridor's future, not its present. If you're evaluating sites in North Phoenix, the lease term is worth paying attention to: they appear to see a pipeline that the current demographics don't reflect.
Three of the four sites score 4/4 on demographics alone. ALDI is executing their formula precisely across the East Valley and Northwest Phoenix. Cave Creek is where the formula breaks and the real estate thesis takes over. Full breakdown in the brief below.
The Energy Wild Card
With diesel at $5.40/gal and Brent crude still above $100 after the Strait of Hormuz disruption, every retailer's supply chain math just changed. Diesel drove nearly 30% of February's PPI increase at the intermediate level. Gas prices jumped roughly $1/gal in 30 days. That's real money out of consumer budgets and into fuel tanks.
ALDI's new distribution centers in Baldwin FL (2027), Goodyear AZ (2028), and Aurora CO (2029) aren't just about growth. They're about shortening supply chains before fuel costs eat the margin advantage that makes the model work. ALDI's margin advantage comes from private label mix, smaller formats, and lean operations, but freight is the input cost that moves fastest. Shortening the supply chain protects the model.
Meanwhile, consumers are sending mixed signals. Redbook is accelerating at +6.9%, three weeks straight. But the Conference Board's Expectations Index sits at 70.9, below the 80 threshold historically tied to recession. 12-month inflation expectations hit 5.2%. People are spending and they're worried. That gap between behavior and sentiment has been open for weeks now (I flagged it in Edition 28). It hasn't closed.
What to Watch
April 3: Initial jobless claims (week ending March 28). The labor market has been the steady signal. Any crack here changes the picture.
April 10: CPI for March. The first reading that includes the full month of $4+ gas prices and the Strait of Hormuz disruption. Shelter is still running +3.0% YoY. If energy and food both accelerate, core CPI moves.
April 14: PPI for March. February's +0.7% MoM was driven by vegetables and diesel. March will show whether that was a spike or a trend.
The H&M store list hasn't been published market-by-market yet. When it drops, I'll pull the demographic profiles for those locations too, because the backfill opportunity is the other side of the same story.