About
Evidence-first, multi-sector closure intelligence.
Store Closure Watch is a product of Four Lights Analytics LLC. We track closures across retail, restaurant, grocery, industrial, logistics, healthcare, office, and hospitality — sectors where distress often surfaces before it reaches retail vacancy data, which is only published quarterly. Every record carries its source and a confidence score, and is matched to WARN filings and court dockets where one exists.
Founder
Store Closure Watch is built by Michael Madden, founder of Four Lights Analytics LLC. Michael's background is in open-source intelligence (OSINT) and data pipeline engineering, with years of field experience in Taiwan and professional Mandarin fluency — an edge for cross-referencing sources that headline-scraping competitors miss.
He built the Store Closure Watch pipeline end to end: a system that runs more than 2,000 weekly news searches, monitors WARN notices, bankruptcy filings and chains' own store lists, extracts facility-level records automatically, and audits every record with an independent verification pass and human review before it reaches subscribers.
“Furniture sales tend to follow home sales, and so I would guess that's the backdrop for The Dump closing locations.”
Michael Madden, quoted in Bisnow, September 15, 2026
Methodology
Evidence-first
Every record carries its source: an article or filing link, or the chain store-list record it came from. If we can't attribute it, we don't publish it.
Confidence flagging
Each record is scored and flagged so you know how strong the signal is before you act.
WARN cross-reference
Facility closures and layoffs are matched against state WARN filings for corroboration and jobs-impacted counts.
Event status, incl. closure candidates
Every record carries an event status. A “Closure Candidate” is a state health-facility licensing record showing a closure that no news source has confirmed yet; it stays in the subscriber file, labeled, and is left out of public pages and counts.
Sector classification
Records are assigned to one of eight sectors and reviewed as the dataset improves; recent reviews moved food-service, civic, and education names to their correct sectors, shifting the retail/restaurant split.
Automated extraction, independent audit
Automated extraction produces the first-pass records; an independent verification pass and human review catch extraction errors before delivery.
Weekly cadence
Each brief contains the week's newly identified events — collected through Friday night, deduplicated against the full dataset over the weekend so records are never re-sent, and delivered Monday morning as CSV and Excel.
Contact
Questions, partnerships, or coverage requests: hello@storeclosurewatch.com.
Act before your competitors see it in trade publications.
Weekly verified closure data across retail, industrial, and logistics — with addresses, source links, and confidence flags. $99/month. Cancel anytime.