ALERT: 1,800 Stores Closing Permanently. These Real Estate Markets Getting Hit Worst

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]1,200 Walgreens are closing right now as we speak. 300 Papa John's, uh Wendy's, 800 stores in a single quarter. Your property value is not going to benefit from this. Detroit lost everything in 1971 and it never got back. As a matter of fact, it got hit really hard also in 2008.

[00:00:22]Detroit lost everything back then. Now, here is who's next. Here's what nobody on cable news is saying out loud. 1,800 retail closures hit the books in one quarter. Again, Walgreens, Papa John's, Wendy's, grocery outlet. The headlines call it a retail story. It's not. It's a class restructuring story disguised as a retail story and the version of middle-class American life that depends on a regular town with regular services is being dismantled in real time, quietly, zip code by zip code. If you want to know what they're actually doing, stop listening to the press release. Watch where the money goes.

[00:01:07]Watch what gets boarded up and what gets built. Watch which towns the chains are leaving and which ones they're expanding into. The map being drawn this quarter is the map of who gets to remain middle class for the next 20 years and who doesn't. By the end of this video, you're going to see the three signals that tell you which side of that line your zip code is on and you'll understand the one part nobody's talking about.

[00:01:35]That is the same wave is creating a real opportunity for someone willing to operate in what's left behind. Walgreens Boots Alliance, uh they actually filed an 8-K with the SEC. 1,200 stores are closing. It's not a rumor. That's a legal disclosure. Papa John's first quarter 2026 earnings said 300 underperforming locations are slated for closure. Wendy's followed, 5 to 6% or roughly 6,000 locations.

[00:02:10]Right? That they have? Well, another 300 of those stores are gone.

[00:02:13]Grocery Outlet Holding Corporation, I love shopping there, right? 36 closures.

[00:02:19]Add it up, it equals 1,800 retail closures in a single quarter.

[00:02:24]Weighted heavily in suburbs and lower income zip codes, not coastal cities.

[00:02:29]It's not a coincidence. That's the number nobody on television has aggregated until now. We've seen this sequence before. Between 1971 and 1985, American inner cities lost roughly 40% of their grocery stores, 30% of their pharmacies, and 50% of their bank branches. The Bookings Institution actually documented this.

[00:02:53]The Federal Reserve tracked it, and the part that matters most, they did not come back. The stores were gone, and uh pretty much desert just stayed.

[00:03:07]Nothing. The USC Schaeffer Center studied pharmacy access at the zip code level. Once a pharmacy uh desert sort of forms, right? There's there's no access to it, the health outcomes in that zip code decline measurably and permanently. Most people don't consider this uh as as an effect. You know, they like to say, you know, "Yeah, sure, there's a thousand stores closing over here, but they they built 200 over here." Well, they're still a negative of 800 stores, and uh you got to think about what's happening in those towns. As specific service businesses leave, the actual economy inside that that town or city dies. You see, that's not an economic outcome, that's a life outcome.

[00:03:55]Think about the diabetic who used to walk three blocks for insulin. Now has to drive 20 minutes when these store shifts happen. Or the senior on five medications stops filling two of them because the trip is actually too hard to make. Or the mother with a sick child waits an extra day to start the antibiotic. You see that the desert that's formed when these stores close isn't an inconvenience, it's a slow draining of the conditions that actually allow normal middle-class life to function. So again, think of it this way. Picture a town. Call it Davestown.

[00:04:31]First ring suburb, right? Population, let's say around 40,000. It's not wealthy, not destitute, right? It's just a regular American town with a regular Main Street. 18 months ago, the Walgreens on the Main Strip announced it was closing. People were annoyed. They drove to CVS two towns over. No big deal, they said. Then the Papa John's closed. Then the Wendy's. Then the small grocery store that had been there since the '80s lost its anchor foot traffic and quietly shut down.

[00:05:02]See now, Davestown didn't collapse overnight. It was hollowed out slowly, quietly, one aborted window at a time.

[00:05:11]You know, if you think about it, this is happening all over the country. So why not take advantage of it? This is the moving shifting economy. And I'm telling you right now, more stores are closing than are being built right now. We've talked about that with 7-Eleven. So why not take advantage of it? See, in these towns that seem to be desert-like, actually all over the country, they're not paying their property tax anymore.

[00:05:34]So all these tax lien auctions are starting and tax deed auctions. If you want to learn how to do it, I'm going to throw a sale link down below to the tax lien and deed master course set, right?

[00:05:45]We even provide, if you want it, monthly coaching calls at a fraction of the price of what people are doing this for all over the country. And the truth is, only nine about 2 to 3% of real estate investors understand anything about this and how you can make crazy amounts of money, like 18% in 30 days on a Florida tax lien when it gets redeemed. So, anyway, links down below to that, okay? That's the big deal. All right? Now, let's get back to this because the changing environment of these stores closing are going to have a big outcome on a lot of towns and where you think that's where your your deals are going to be, okay?

[00:06:24]So, the businesses that stayed, right, during this time where the anchor stores are closing, the little Wendy's stores are closing and stuff like that, they're actually struggling at the same time, like the diner that relied on Walgreens foot traffic. The dry cleaner, the nail salon, when that anchor store leaves in a strip mall, it actually takes out the ecosystem, the middle-class infrastructure of that town, the routine commerce that makes it feel like a place where a family could build a life. Well, that infrastructure is the thing being removed. Remember, every time a store closes, there's less jobs, there's less amenities, there's less desire to be there, right? But, they do come back, right? But, you see, this is not by accident. It's actually by design. Now, here's the mechanism bef- because the actual why determines whether it ever reverses. Most people assume that a store closes because sales are bad.

[00:07:17]That's actually only half the story. The other half is private equity and capital allocation math. When a leveraged buyout firm acquires a retail chain, the retail estate on the balance sheet often becomes more valuable than the operating business itself. The store doesn't close because it failed, it closes because the land is worth more empty than operating.

[00:07:40]That's why these closures are actually permanent. The economic incentive to reopen doesn't exist once the capital has been redeployed. The retail chain isn't running a retail business in those zip codes, it's running a real estate liquidation. And we've been seeing this a lot in the last 5 to 10 years as private equity has pretty much bought up businesses all over the country and they immediately go in and start gutting parts. So, it's not always that the consumer is not buying there, they want to take that money and and push it into bigger cities or put more of that capital into the already existing locations that are doing better and they want to maximize that. You see, the capital is leaving the towns that supported the post-war middle class and redeploying it into denser, wealthier markets where the math for that business still works. The towns being abandoned are not getting their stores back. So, that's signal one, right? Pharmacy access. If your zip code has fewer than two pharmacies within a 5-mi radius, you're already in a vulnerable tier, okay? Losing one more puts you in the desert. Now, signal two, anchor retail density.

[00:08:50]When a Walgreens store closes, the foot traffic that sustained the surrounding small businesses actually disappear over time with it. Watch for the secondary closures within 6 to 12 months. That's number two. Now, signal three is bank branch presence. If your local bank branch is already gone, the retail desert isn't coming.

[00:09:14]Um, it's it's already actually forming. The bank leaves when the deposits don't justify the operating cost. And as more and more businesses close in your area, that's more and more people without a job depositing money, doesn't make sense, so they start to close up, too.

[00:09:30]That's the same math that that Walgreens 8,000 stores closing describes, okay?

[00:09:35]Three signals. Only you only need to start paying attention because >> [sighs and gasps] >> you're already in that pattern if you see this. But, here's the part of the story that uh the 1971 version didn't really tell. The towns being abandoned by these uh chain stores aren't empty.

[00:09:55]The people are still there. The demand didn't leave when the chain did. The chain left because corporate math doesn't work at the scale of a struggling suburb. So, local math works fine. The independent pharmacy can operate profitably at a scale that Walgreens can't. So, you're probably already starting to think, I need to find these towns and start small businesses. Yes. You see the buildings being vacated are commercial real estate. Some of them at distressed pri- uh pricing. The chains being uh that are actually pulling out is the first time in two generations that the math has shifted back. That's not optimism.

[00:10:32]That's not a happy ending. The convenience of having every service within a 5-mi radius, that's the part that disappears within the desert. Five years from now, there are two kinds of zip codes in this country. The ones that kept their essential services and the ones that became deserts. The map is being drawn out right now this quarter.

[00:10:53]Mike is standing in the parking lot of a closed Walgreens on his street. The sign's still up. The lights are off.

[00:10:59]There's a number on the door for a commercial real estate broker, and he's not staring at a closure. He's looking at the question every empty storefront in America forces a town to answer. Does someone reopen this or does it stay dark? In America right now, one independent pharmacy closes every single day.

[00:11:21]48 million Americans already live in a pharmacy desert. Texas loses one pharmacy a week. Nick Bryce runs the only pharmacy in uh what is it? Herber uh Herber Overgard, Arizona. And this is what he says.

[00:11:37]Sometimes I worry that I'm not even going to be able to get payroll.

[00:11:44]Think about that. He's the difference between his town having medication access and not having it. The independent operator who steps into the empty storefront isn't running a hopeful business, they're running a desperate one. The math punishes the relationship.

[00:12:00]29% of all retail pharmacies closed between 2010 and 2021.

[00:12:06]And the independent operators in working-class neighborhoods went down the hardest. They're going down right now at a rate of one a day. And here's the part that determines which side of the line your town ends up on.

[00:12:18]The only thing keeping that independent open that pharmacy is the locals actually showing up. Not occasionally, but consistency consistently, sorry.

[00:12:29]Uh filing their prescriptions there, even when their insurance steers them to a chain 20 miles away. That could be an issue, too. Buying their groceries there, even when Dollar General is cheaper.

[00:12:42]Eating at the local diner, even when delivery from the next town over may be faster or cheaper.

[00:12:49]That's the brutal arithmetic that's plaguing these towns right now. The households getting squeezed by inflation are the ones who have to make the slightly more expensive, slightly less convenient store choice for the local operator to survive. If the locals don't show up, the local operator joins the chain in closing. And then the desert that was forming becomes the desert that exists.

[00:13:16]The pharmacy doesn't reopen because there's no operator left. The towns that survive don't survive actually on capital allocation math, they survive it on a community deciding collectively and painfully to spend the slightly more expensive dollar at the slightly less convenient business. There is no other mechanism. The chains are not coming back to some of these towns.

[00:13:41]It's a big deal.

[00:13:43]All right, let's dive in to the next video.