Why America’s Biggest Retailers Are Closing Stores in 2026

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:01]There is a Walgreens on the south side of Chicago that has been in the same neighborhood longer than most of its customers have been alive. In 2025, that single store lost over $1 million. Theft alone was running Theft alone was running at four times the company average. Security measures had been tried. Lock boxes, staff adjustments, none of it worked.

[00:00:25]Last month, it closed. The nearest alternative pharmacy is 1.3 miles away.

[00:00:31]For an elderly resident without a car, that is not an inconvenience. That is a permanent change in how they access medicine. That one store is not the story.

[00:00:43]The story is that version of that story is playing out everywhere.

[00:00:50]According to Coresight Research, approximately 7,900 stores are projected to close across the United States in 2026 alone.

[00:01:00]>> [music] >> Nearly 300 chains have already made formal public announcements, and that number is still climbing as companies finalize lease decisions throughout the year. To put that in context, 8,100 locations shut down in all of 2025, which was already a 12% increase from the year before. The pace is not slowing. It is compounding. And here's the part that should give you pause. The brands going down are not fringe players or struggling niche retailers. Macy's, Kroger, Walgreens, Carter's, Saks Off 5th, Foot Locker, GameStop. Names that felt permanent. Names most of you used last month.

[00:01:44]Everyone has a quick answer for why this is happening.

[00:01:48]It is Amazon. It is e-commerce. Online shopping killed them. That explanation is not wrong, but it is dangerously incomplete. Because if e-commerce were the whole story, you would expect struggling specialty retailers while essential categories held firm.

[00:02:06]That is not what you are seeing. Grocery chains are closing. Pharmacies are closing. Budget stores built [music] specifically for people with no money to spare are pulling back.

[00:02:19]Something bigger is at work.

[00:02:21]>> [music] >> There are really two forces driving all of it. And the way they are colliding right now is what nobody is talking about clearly enough.

[00:02:31]The first force, the cost of running a physical store has become a completely different number than it was 5 years ago.

[00:02:39]Think about what it actually takes to keep a single location open. Labor, commercial rent, insurance, utilities, refrigeration if you are in food, logistics, security.

[00:02:52]Every one of those line items has moved higher over the past 4 years, and most of them have not come back down.

[00:03:00]Minimum wages have risen across multiple states. Commercial rents in high-traffic areas stayed elevated even as foot traffic declined. Insurance costs climbed. And then, in a category that never used to factor into retail math this severely, there is theft.

[00:03:18]The Walgreens situation in Chicago is not unusual. It is representative.

[00:03:24]Across the country, organized retail theft losses run into the billions annually. The visible result of that is what you already know when you walk into a pharmacy or a big box store. Shampoo locked behind Plexiglas. Pain relievers in a sealed case. Baby formula that requires a staff member with a key.

[00:03:45]Every item you have to wait to access [music] is friction.

[00:03:49]Friction costs customers.

[00:03:51]So, the stores already under financial pressure from rising operating costs are simultaneously losing revenue because the in-store experience has deteriorated to the point where people simply stop bothering. Walgreens announced plans to close approximately 1,200 locations over a 3-year window.

[00:04:12]>> [music] >> Roughly 500 had already shut by end of 2025.

[00:04:17]The chain was then acquired by private equity firm Sycamore Partners in a $10 billion deal, and the new owner scaled back the 2026 closure target. But, the core problem, the economics of the model, did not disappear with the ownership change.

[00:04:34]It just moved to the next decision cycle. Kroger tells the same story from a different angle, one of the largest grocery retailers in the country. Tens of millions of customers every week, not a struggling niche brand by any definition. And yet, Kroger is closing approximately 60 stores over an 18-month restructuring window.

[00:04:56]That comes on the heels of its proposed merger with Albertsons being blocked by federal regulators.

[00:05:03]That merger was specifically designed to build the cost structure and supply chain scale needed to compete with Walmart, Costco, and Amazon Fresh.

[00:05:13]Without it, Kroger now navigates the most competitive grocery market in recent history >> [music] >> on its current footprint, absorbing cost increases on labor, logistics, and shrinkage with no clear path to the efficiency gains it was counting on.

[00:05:30]When a company that size in a category that is essential >> [music] >> starts trimming locations, it confirms one thing clearly. The cost floor for operating physical retail has risen, and it has not come back down.

[00:05:44]The second force [music] is quieter, but it runs just as deep. The American consumer has fundamentally changed how they [music] spend.

[00:05:53]Take GameStop. At its peak, the chain operated over 6,000 [music] stores globally. By the start of 2025, the US count had already fallen to around 2,325. [music] Then 590 more closed over the course of last [music] year.

[00:06:11]In 2026, another 470 plus locations [music] are expected to shut.

[00:06:17]The reason is not complicated. The product GameStop built its entire existence around, [music] physical game discs, can now be downloaded directly to a console [music] in minutes. The category did not slow down. It just cut out the middleman entirely.

[00:06:34]GameStop never found a compelling replacement reason to exist, and that is what happens when the behavior a store was built around stops being a behavior.

[00:06:44]That is an extreme case, but the behavioral shift shows up in categories that look nothing like video game retail.

[00:06:52]Carter's sells baby and children's clothing. Kids always need clothes. They always outgrow them.

[00:06:59]This is supposed to be an indestructible [music] category. Carter's is closing approximately 100 stores [music] in 2026 as part of a broader plan to cut 150 locations over 3 years. The explanation is not that parents stopped caring about their children's clothing. The explanation is that resale platforms for kids' clothes have grown [music] substantially. A child outgrows a size in 3 months. Buying second-hand and reselling before the next size is even needed has become a first instinct for a growing number of families, not a last resort.

[00:07:39]Physical retail cannot compete with that math, and no loyalty discount changes it.

[00:07:45]There is also a slower headwind underneath that.

[00:07:49]US birth rates have continued declining.

[00:07:52]Fewer newborns means the core Carter's customer base is quietly shrinking year over year.

[00:07:58]Francesca's is the clearest example of what happens when a business model meets a behavioral shift it cannot survive.

[00:08:06]A boutique chain with over 400 locations in malls and lifestyle centers.

[00:08:12]Women's clothing, [music] accessories, gifts.

[00:08:16]It filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and those stores are closing.

[00:08:20]The concept was built entirely around a specific kind of shopping experience.

[00:08:25]Walking in without a plan, discovering things you were not looking for, leaving with items that were not on any list [music] you made.

[00:08:33]That behavior has largely migrated. The discovery experience Francesca sold now happens on a phone, surfaced by recommendation algorithms with more precision than any store layout ever achieved.

[00:08:48]When impulse purchasing moves online, the revenue follows it. The lease costs do not.

[00:08:55]Now consider what happens when both forces arrive at the same location at the same time. Higher operating costs, lower revenue per customer. That is where the real damage is being done.

[00:09:08]Macy's is closing approximately 150 underperforming stores by the end of 2026 under what the company calls its bold new chapter strategy.

[00:09:19]The coverage on that focuses on Macy's, but the part most coverage skips is the cascade effect. When a Macy's closes, it does not just remove itself from a mall.

[00:09:29]It removes the anchor that made the entire property viable in the first place. The restaurants, salons, and specialty shops that depended on the foot traffic flowing through that anchor feel the impact almost immediately.

[00:09:44]One department store closure can begin a slow decline that weakens an entire commercial corridor. Those effects are hard to reverse. The smaller tenants around a dead anchor rarely wait around to find out if a replacement comes.

[00:10:01]Saks Off 5th is closing approximately 57 locations in 2026, and that matters because of the assumption it shatters.

[00:10:10]The standing rule in retail has always been that luxury is recession-proof.

[00:10:16]Wealthy consumers keep spending when everyone else pulls back.

[00:10:20]That rule is not holding. Even at the premium end, shoppers have become more selective and more deliberate. The pandemic-era luxury boom, the period from 2021 to 2023 when higher-income consumers spent aggressively after years of restrictions, has run its [music] course.

[00:10:40]The foot traffic assumption that makes an expensive lease worthwhile no longer holds the way it did.

[00:10:48]Now, here is the part that matters most and gets the least attention.

[00:10:53]>> [music] >> These closures do not land evenly. They land hardest in the communities that already have the fewest alternatives.

[00:11:00]When a Kroger closes in a prosperous suburb, residents drive 6 minutes to a Whole Foods.

[00:11:06]>> [music] >> When it closes in a rural county, the nearest full-service grocery option might now be a 40-mile round trip.

[00:11:14]The same math applies to pharmacies.

[00:11:17]There are now roughly 2,000 fewer pharmacy locations across the country than there were 3 years ago.

[00:11:24]Between Rite Aid's full collapse, Walgreens contracting, and CVS trimming its footprint, what analysts are calling pharmacy deserts are expanding.

[00:11:35]Areas where consistent access to prescriptions and a licensed pharmacist is no longer guaranteed.

[00:11:42]Access to food and medicine has measurable effects on health outcomes, employment, and daily quality of life.

[00:11:50]The distance between where people live and where they can reliably get those things matters in ways that show up in data years later. And right now for a growing number of Americans, that distance is increasing.

[00:12:05]Every brand closing stores in 2026 is somewhere in that intersection. The specific reasons differ. The underlying pressure is the same. The empty storefront that used to be a Macy's, the pharmacy that now requires a 40-minute drive, the mall corridor that never recovered from losing its anchor. These are not dramatic headlines. They are quiet changes that have a way of becoming something a lot louder once enough of them accumulate in the same place. The question worth asking is not which brand closes next. The question is what happens to the communities that were built around the assumption that these stores would always be there.