Who's Closing Stores in 2026, and Who Gets the Empty Boxes

GrowthFactor's closure tracker logged 2,633 US store closures in its weekly files from April 9 to October 22, 2026, once you count each closure program once. Some of those programs started closing stores earlier in the year. Less than half came out of bankruptcy court. About 1,100 of those stores are already dark or have a closing date. The other 1,500 belong to five large programs that will hand back space lease by lease well into 2027.

If you lease, broker or buy second-generation space, the practical question to ask of any closure list is which boxes come back, when they open up, and who wants them. The answer starts with whether the chain is in court, because that decides how the space returns to the market. We sorted the year's closures by the box they leave behind, then ran four vacant locations through GrowthFactor to see what the data says should move in next.

Bankruptcy is less than half of it

Companies in an open Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 case account for 1,231 of the 2,633 stores, across 20 programs (one of them, Bravo Brio, filed in August 2025). The other 1,402 come from 38 programs at companies outside bankruptcy court: 7-Eleven, Pizza Hut, Journeys, Foot Locker, Grocery Outlet's 36-store exit, Macy's, O'Charley's, Red Lobster and Chip City among them. Take 7-Eleven out and bankruptcy takes the lead, 1,231 to 757.

The tenant's legal standing dictates the mechanics of how the box returns to the market. A bankrupt tenant sells its leases through the court, usually at an auction on a deadline of weeks, and the winning bidder steps into the existing lease terms. A healthy chain that closes an underperforming store mostly lets the lease run out or negotiates an early surrender, and the landlord re-lets the space on new terms. If you want a bankrupt chain's box, you watch the court docket. If you want a healthy chain's box, you call the landlord.

The tracker also holds 14 bankruptcy filings that came with no closures, including Sleep Number, The Picklr, Hardee's franchisee Superior Star, Dave's Hot Chicken franchisee TIG Reaper and Checkers franchisee C.S. Holdings of Tampa. Wendy's franchisee Meritage Hospitality Group filed the same way: the company initially said it meant to keep all 314 restaurants open, and three weeks later had 41 scheduled to close. A bankruptcy filing with no closure list is an active watch list.

Which formats are closing

Apparel, footwear and accessory chains closed 878 stores across 8 programs, the highest count of any format. Convenience followed at 646, quick-service restaurants and coffee accounted for 559, and specialty and hobby retailers closed 170. Sit-down restaurants closed fewer stores at 155, but across 12 programs, making it the most fragmented format on the tracker. Home, furniture and gift stores closed 95, and grocery closed 44 across 6 programs.

The apparel total is concentrated in the mall. Francesca's is handing back roughly 457 stores lease by lease, Journeys is shedding 150-plus locations through lease expirations, Eddie Bauer closed all 150 US stores on April 30, and Dick's Sporting Goods recorded 88 net closures in a single quarter across its Foot Locker banners. Most of those footprints are standard inline units, and the mall gets them back directly.

Convenience is driven by one company. 7-Eleven's parent company, Seven & i Holdings, said it will cut 645 US stores in the fiscal year through February 2027 while opening 205, and some of the closed sites become wholesale fuel stops instead of retail opportunities. That single program represents a quarter of the year's total store count.

Restaurants are where the count spreads across the most programs. Quick-service and sit-down operators together vacated 714 locations across 21 programs. Pizza Hut's roughly 250 planned US closures lead the sector, followed by ARC Burger's 77 closed Hardee's stores, Salad and Go shuttering 70 drive-thrus in one day, O'Charley's closing 49 company restaurants over two nights in September, Meritage slating 41 Wendy's locations to close, and Red Lobster operating 36 fewer locations than at the end of 2025, with another closing November 1. Many of these are freestanding pads with their own parking and, for the quick-service ones, a drive-thru lane: the second-generation space expanding chains ask brokers for by name.

Department stores look small at 76 locations, but most are anchors. Macy's closed 14 full-line department stores in the initial wave of its Bold New Chapter plan. Nordstrom, JCPenney and Neiman Marcus each closed one or two anchors or flagships, releasing the largest physical blocks of space in the dataset. Saks OFF 5TH also wound down 57 off-price stores between 15,000 and 40,000 square feet.

Where the boxes are

The tracker's store-level records hold 951 distinct addresses across 49 states and Washington, D.C. California leads with 94 addresses, followed by Arizona at 76 (heavily weighted toward Salad and Go drive-thrus), New York at 74, Texas at 69 and Florida at 64. The live tracker maps every address with its close date and source, letting you filter directly to your target territory.

How we counted

The tracker publishes one file a week, and a major restructuring unfolds across several reporting cycles. West Marine appears across seven weeks, while Wendy's franchisee Meritage Hospitality Group appears in four. Adding up every row in the 26 weekly files produces 3,720 stores, which counts West Marine's 200-store fleet three separate times before an official closure schedule was filed in court.

To clean the data, we set aside three non-storefront records: a fulfillment center, a TV shopping network and an institutional pharmacy. We folded the remaining entries into 74 closure programs, 58 of which have a store count, and kept each program's latest count of stores actually closing while omitting non-closure metrics like fleet size, leases sold or filings without closures. Counts reported as "60+" or "~250" count at the stated floor in the roll-up. Announcements without specific unit totals, such as KnitWell or Starbucks noting closures of roughly 1% of its more than 18,000 North American coffeehouses, remain in our index as active programs without adding stores to the aggregate sum. One script rebuilds every roll-up number in this report from the raw weekly tracker files, and it stops for a person to classify each new update before any total changes.

Who gets the box: four closed stores, run through GrowthFactor

When an operator walks away, public filings never show who belongs in the dark space next. We ran four vacant addresses through GrowthFactor to see what the site data suggests. For each address, we pulled the 40 nearest businesses to understand the micro co-tenancy, pulled demographics for a 10-minute drive-time trade zone, and gathered vehicle traffic counts along the corridors serving the property.

Evaluating second-generation retail requires matching road traffic at the entrance to household purchasing power across the broader trade zone. Traffic counts are daily vehicle estimates for the busiest road segments within roughly a third of a mile of each parcel. Population and household income describe the 10-minute drive-time trade zone around the point, not the parcel boundary itself.

A mall anchor in Raleigh

Macy's closed 14 department store anchors this spring, including its building at Triangle Town Center on Sumner Boulevard in northeast Raleigh. The 10-minute drive-time trade zone holds 106,502 residents with a median household income of $86,174 and $1.35 billion in annual retail goods spending. Sumner Boulevard in front of the store carries between 7,200 and 7,400 vehicles a day, while Old Wake Forest Road, about a third of a mile out, carries 10,400 to 12,500. This is mall-ring traffic rather than highway frontage, meaning the backfill tenant must serve as an intentional destination.

The co-tenancy shows what that destination cannot be. Of the 40 closest businesses, most are salons, personal care providers, quick-service counters and mobile phone stores, alongside an operating Dick's Sporting Goods roughly 200 meters from the old Macy's. That existing store eliminates the most common anchor conversion of the past two years. Dick's House of Sport is taking over a former JCPenney at CoolSprings Galleria in Franklin, Tennessee, covering more than 100,000 square feet for an early 2028 opening per the landlord's announcement, and Dick's plans to take the former JCPenney at Springfield Town Center in Virginia, another closure on our tracker. Because Raleigh already has Dick's in place, this building fits an off-price anchor or entertainment concept far better than sporting goods or small-shop service suites. An entertainment venue like Round1, which took a former Sears at Haywood Mall in Greenville, South Carolina, is the kind of use that fits the zone's income and traffic.

A discount grocery box in Columbia, Maryland

Grocery Outlet closed 36 stores this year, including 24 along the East Coast, in a managed corporate exit without Chapter 11. One of those was at 5410 Lynx Lane in Columbia, in a neighborhood center where the 40 closest businesses are almost entirely wellness studios, counselors, chiropractors and salons. There is no other grocer or general merchandise merchant in that immediate cluster.

The trade zone demographics tell a very different story from the tenant's discount format. The 10-minute drive-time trade zone holds 58,901 people with a median household income of $130,491, which is 51% higher than the Raleigh zone, a median home value of $565,915, and a population where 34% of adults hold a graduate or professional degree. The trade zone spends $173.8 million annually on groceries, with Twin Rivers Road carrying 7,417 to 11,213 vehicles daily.

Grocery Outlet closed eight Maryland stores in this program, making this exit a regional pullback rather than a reflection of this intersection. A deep-discount format in a $130,000 trade zone with no grocer next door reads like a mismatch the next grocer can correct. A specialty or natural grocer matches the neighborhood's spending and the empty grocery slot. Traditional discount grocers are expanding quickly as well, including Aldi with plans for more than 180 US openings in 2026, nearly 80 of them Winn-Dixie and Harveys conversions, so expect them to look, but the income profile points upmarket.

A casual-dining pad in Franklin, Tennessee

O'Charley's closed all 49 company-owned restaurants on September 9 and 10 without a prior public announcement. The Franklin location at 1202 Murfreesboro Road is the strongest commercial pad among the four sites. Murfreesboro Road carries 30,067 to 50,059 vehicles a day on the segments in front of it. The 10-minute drive-time trade zone holds 72,292 people with a median household income of $137,834, spending $205.2 million each year on dining out. The pad sits in a Kroger-anchored shopping center alongside Zaxby's, Taco Bell, Subway, Arby's and a local Mexican grill, with HomeGoods and At Home operating nearby.

Casual-dining properties are historically difficult to backfill without structural changes. Northmarq transaction data reported by Restaurant Dive shows the share of casual-dining properties that sold fell from 72% in 2021 to 37% in 2024. A standard Red Lobster footprint runs roughly 7,600 square feet on 1.68 acres, which is more interior space than most modern restaurant prototypes want. As CBRE's restaurant practice leader explained to the same publication, "in a lot of cases, it's easier just to knock down the building and have a developer split it up." At 50,000 vehicles a day and $137,834 in median income, this pad justifies the capital required to redevelop the parcel. The site points to an expanding sit-down brand targeting affluent Nashville suburbs, or a redevelopment that replaces the single building with two high-volume drive-thru pads.

A drive-thru pad in Phoenix

Salad and Go shut down all 70 of its remaining drive-thrus on August 5, the day after filing for Chapter 11. Its closed location at 2301 North 44th Street in Phoenix is a drive-thru-only footprint along a corridor carrying 23,577 to 24,602 vehicles daily, with 1,403 vehicles passing during the 7 to 8 a.m. commuting hour on the busiest segment. The 10-minute drive-time trade zone contains 168,023 residents and expands to 224,473 people during the workday, bringing roughly 56,000 net commuters into the area. None of the 40 closest businesses is a dedicated coffee shop or beverage drive-thru.

Heavy morning commuter volume paired with a substantial daytime workforce and an absence of drive-thru beverage competitors makes this site a strong candidate for drive-thru coffee. The bankruptcy auction arrived at the same conclusion across the broader chain. 7 Brew paid $123,452,384.02 for 63 Salad and Go leases in an acquisition approved September 29, working out to about $2 million per lease, with Dutch Bros serving as the backup bidder. Swig, Dutch Bros and 7 Brew then split the remaining Arizona leases in a second auction round. We haven't matched this address to its buyer, but our TWIR breakdown of that second auction lists every winning bid.

Getting to the box first

The store closures that turn into solid re-tenanting opportunities appear in public filings well before they show up on commercial listing databases. A WARN notice gives 60 days' warning before a location closes. Bankruptcy lease-rejection motions name exact street addresses and the date the tenant surrenders the space. An SEC Form 8-K tells you a public retailer is closing stores, sometimes without saying which. The closure tracker hub compiles these filings and the week's closure news by address every week so teams can act while competitors are still reading headlines.

Acquisition teams that secure these boxes evaluate the portfolio before the auction deadline. When Party City entered bankruptcy, GrowthFactor's team analyzed roughly 700 of its locations for Books-A-Million in 72 hours, so Books-A-Million could pass on 15 sites that didn't meet its criteria and move quickly to secure five prime locations in high-traffic shopping centers. Burlington took 45 Joann leases out of that bankruptcy auction. Desirable second-generation space moves quickly: Cushman & Wakefield placed US retail vacancy at 6.0% in the second quarter, comfortably below the 7.4% historical baseline.

The companion dataset to closures is active retail expansion, which we detail in the chains opening the most stores in 2026. Laying a verified closure schedule next to an active tenant expansion list provides the blueprint for where real estate teams can pick up viable space.

GrowthFactor runs this analysis on any address. Look one up to review immediate co-tenancy, drive-time demographics and street-level traffic counts in about 10 seconds, or screen an entire portfolio of dark stores against your existing footprint. Book a demo to evaluate the closure inventory across your target markets.