16 grocery locations have a closing date. Twelve are head-office decisions, including four Winn-Dixie stores being converted or relocated

16 grocery locations have a closing date. Twelve are head-office decisions, including four Winn-Dixie stores being converted or relocated

Sixteen grocery locations have a closing date a source actually gives, running from this week into June 2027. Twelve of the sixteen are head-office decisions, four Winn-Dixie stores among them: three change banner at the same address, on the tracker's Aldi conversion list, and one reopens under a new store number a few miles away, in Alachua. What becomes of the High Springs site the tracker does not say. The other four are single stores ending after decades.

What is closing, and when

Twelve of these have set a closure date. The other four have a month or a period, and are shown that way rather than pinned to a date nobody published.

Half of this is not a wave of failures

The headline reading of a grocery list is that demand is collapsing. This one does not support that. Of the sixteen, four are Raley's and four are Winn-Dixie stores moving out of the banner: half the list accounted for by one chain pruning its portfolio and one chain reshuffling which sign hangs over the door. Add Kroger's two, from a program announced in 2025, plus a QuickChek and a Tops, and twelve of the sixteen are decisions made in a head office about which stores a company wants, not signs that a neighborhood stopped buying groceries.

Which leaves four independents, and those are the ones worth looking at.

The two different stories in that list

A chain reviewing its portfolio. Raley's accounts for four, counting Nob Hill Foods, which is one of its banners. The Los Gatos store closes after nearly 60 years because the parent decided not to renew the lease after reviewing the store's performance. Elko takes more than 40 jobs with it and Petaluma 48. Kroger's two dated stores, Flint Township and Owensboro, come out of a program the company has described as closing about 60 underperforming supermarkets over 18 months.

The four independents, each for its own reason. Straub's is closing its Central West End store after nearly 80 years and has not said why. Town & Country in Greensboro, family-owned for nearly 40 years, is closing after struggling with rising costs for more than a year. EBO & Co. in East Boston is closing because its owner decided not to renew the lease, citing the numbers and her own creative energy. The fourth is the Piggly Wiggly in Myrtle Beach, closing October 11, which announced the date and no reason.

Four stores is too few to call a trend, and the two that gave a reason gave different ones. It is worth noting only that our hardware brief, working from a larger set, found nineteen independent stores closing this year with retirement and no buyer given again and again. Whether grocery is following the same path is a question these four cannot answer.

And four that are neither. The Winn-Dixie stores come out of Southeastern Grocers' program of moving stores out of the banner, in many cases to Aldi, so the building usually keeps a grocer. Their dates come from a rolling tracker of that program rather than from a store announcement, which makes them softer than the rest of this list, and Hallandale Beach is given there as a reported date. High Springs is different again: the tracker has that store reopening under a new number in Alachua, a few miles away, and says nothing about what happens to the High Springs site. We count all four because that address stops trading as it does today, and we label them, because calling a conversion or a move a closure would be wrong.

Why grocery vacancies are different

A supermarket is the hardest box to re-let: large, refrigerated, built for one use, and usually the anchor whose traffic the rest of a center depends on. When a chain closes several at once, every affected landlord is competing for the same small pool of replacement grocers at the same time.

Behind the stores, the supply side moves too. Schnuck Markets is closing its Bridgeton, Missouri distribution center in March 2027, 64 jobs, which is a warehouse rather than a store and is not in the 16.

What we counted, and what we left out

Sixteen locations whose closing date or period is stated by a source, across 11 states. That is a deliberately strict test, and this is the third version of this page.

The first draft said about 100 stores, and that was wrong. Most of those rows carried an end-of-year date our own pipeline had filled in where the source gave none, so they read as upcoming when nothing had been scheduled. Grocery Outlet's 36 closures came out entirely: the company planned to complete them in its second quarter of 2026, so none is still ahead. So did the Kroger stores we had listed for Atlanta, Peoria, South Bend, Elkhart and Abingdon, which their own sources describe as already closed.

Three more came out on a second read, because the row and its source disagreed. A San Jose store's state filing gives September 20, so it has already closed. A Trussville store's article, published in late August, says "next month", which is September rather than the November on the record. A Bartlesville store is one of ten the company has put up for sale with no timeline, which is a restructuring rather than a closure.

Food manufacturing and distribution are not grocery: Tyson, Bumble Bee, Mission Foods, HelloFresh and Roskam are plants. Young's Market is a drinks distributor.

What we cannot see. Grocery chains announce programs, not dates. Sixteen is what we can date out of a much larger set of stores that companies have said they will close without saying when, which is why a count like this is always smaller than the headlines. It also means the independents are over-represented here: a single store closing tells its local paper a date, and a chain closing forty does not.

Records come from local news reporting, company announcements, state WARN notices and store-list tracking. This is a living page: as stores get dates they join the count and the changelog records it.

Updated: September 21, 2026

Changelog: September 21, 2026 — title changed. It had read "four of them are Winn-Dixie stores on the move", which was vague and, for three of the four, wrong: those stores are not moving, they change banner at the same address. The title now leads on the finding in the body. No count, date or record changed. · First published September 21, 2026 at 16 locations with a stated closing date or period across 11 states, from the 2026-09-19 edition.

Street names are from our records; house numbers are held for subscribers. The Store Closure Watch file for the week of September 19, 2026 holds 463 records. As of September 21, 2026.