Chains removed 275 stores from their own store locators in five weeks. KFC removed 41 in one week, the most we have recorded

Chains removed 275 stores from their own store locators in five weeks. KFC removed 41 in one week, the most we have recorded

Between Sept. 26 and Oct. 24, our weekly checks found 275 stores that 44 chains removed from their own online store locators, across 42 states. KFC removed 41 in a single weekly check, on Oct. 24. That is the largest one-week drop for any chain in our data. Sixteen of the 41 are in Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri, Mississippi and Kentucky. 7-Eleven and Papa John's removed 21 each, Dollar General 18 and GNC 17. For nearly all of these stores, we have no news record. Some match a closing program the chain has stated in public, and some don't. None of these records has a closing date from a source.

Who removed the most stores

These are the chains with the most removals in our five weekly checks since Sept. 20. Each store was missing from the chain's own locator in two weekly checks in a row. When we re-checked on Oct. 25, its store page no longer loaded, or it sent visitors to a city, state or locator home page that doesn't list the store. 7-Eleven publishes its stores as a data feed rather than store pages, so its stores had to be missing from that feed instead.

Next come Wendy's with 12, Carl's Jr. and Papa Murphy's with 10 each, and Arby's with 9.

Where the removals cluster. Most chains spread their removals thin, one or two stores to a state. Some are concentrated:

• KFC in five Mid-South states, 16. Memphis, TN (four stores), Millington, TN, Forrest City, AR, Mena, AR, Trumann, AR, West Helena, AR, Cassville, MO, Malden, MO, Perryville, MO, Fulton, MS, Houston, MS, Columbia, KY and Mayfield, KY.
• Carl's Jr. in California, 9. Canoga Park, CA (two stores), Glendora, CA, North Hollywood, CA, Rocklin, CA, San Diego, CA, South El Monte, CA, Wasco, CA and Whittier, CA.
• Sonic in Texas, 8. Two in San Antonio, TX, two in Wichita Falls, TX, plus Houston, TX, Longview, TX, Tatum, TX and White Oak, TX.
• GNC in Texas, 7.
• Papa John's in Texas, 5. Three in San Antonio, TX, plus Houston, TX and New Braunfels, TX.
• Wendy's in Oklahoma, 5. Four of them, in Cushing, OK and Oklahoma City, OK, turned up in the Oct. 24 check. No source we hold ties them to any operator.

By state, California has the most removals (36), followed by Texas (32), Florida (28) and North Carolina (12).

KFC: 41 in one week, and no stated reason

KFC's 41 removals all turned up in one check. Each store was listed on KFC's own locator, then missing from our Oct. 17 and Oct. 24 checks. On our Oct. 25 re-check, all 41 store pages no longer loaded. We have no news record for any of the 41 stores, so we say each was removed from KFC's store locator, not that it closed.

No program and no operator on record. We have no closing program from KFC or its parent, Yum! Brands, and no court case. No source we hold names the franchisee behind the Mid-South stores.

Two Kentucky closings in the news. A 42nd KFC, in Mount Sterling, KY, left the locator in the same check. The Mt. Sterling Advocate had already reported it closed: "News that KFC in Mt. Sterling had closed began circulating on social media yesterday," it wrote on Oct. 7. We count it as a closing, not as one of the 41. The paper said it "has inquiries in to the franchise management company regarding the closure but had not heard back." In Owensboro, KY, the city's last KFC was set to "close permanently after today," Oct. 9, "according to a store manager," The Owensboro Times reported. That store is not among the 41.

One local view, labeled as such. Jason Rainey, who runs the Mt. Sterling-Montgomery County economic development office and chamber, gave his own reading of the Mount Sterling closing: "with fuel cost continuing to rise, impacting every area of business, inflation rising, these franchise type businesses will continue to see pressure on their margins for operations." That is his opinion, not a statement from KFC or the store's operator.

An earlier count, not ours. In July, Chain Store Age reported a study by Local Falcon that counted 312 KFC closures across the U.S. in the year to early July 2026. It found that "Kansas, Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee each lost more than a tenth of their KFC restaurants," and it listed Memphis among the cities with "four closures each." That study ended before our window began, and its method is not ours, so we don't add its count to ours or compare the two.

What the chains themselves have said

A removal tells you that a store left the chain's own map. It does not tell you why. For some of these chains, the company has said in public that it is closing stores. For others, we have nothing on record.

7-Eleven: a stated 645-store program. The Times Union reported in April that "7-Eleven, the massive convenience store chain based in Japan, is aiming to close 645 locations in North America this year as its parent company looks to hold an initial public offering in 2027." Our file holds 26 news records citing that 645 figure. The company has not published a list. The 21 stores removed from its locator are the closest thing to one we can see, and they may or may not be part of that program.

Papa John's: about 300 restaurants, about 200 of them this year. The Providence Journal reported that "Papa Johns will close about 300 'underperforming' restaurants nationwide over the next few years," and that "About 200 of the locations will be shuttered by the end of 2026, Ravi Thanawala, Papa Johns' CFO and North America president, said during the company's Quarter 4 earnings call on Feb. 26." A Papa Johns spokesperson said the company did not have a list of locations.

Wells Fargo: no national count, but a stated reason. We have no 2026 closing total from Wells Fargo. When it announced its branch closing in Madras, OR, Central Oregon Daily reported that "Wells Fargo says it is 'refurbishing its entire network' based on customer demand and changes to the retail landscape." Banks also file branch closings with their regulators, so these 14 should show up in those filings over time. Our bank branch brief tracks them.

Dollar General: its last stated program is finished. Mashed reported in July that "As part of its 2025 optimization review, Dollar General shuttered 96 stores, wrapping up the closures in late January 2026." We have no 2026 closing program from Dollar General on record. All 18 removals turned up in the same weekly check, Oct. 17. We tested whether this was a website change rather than store closures. The chain's store directory still answers, but each of the 18 store pages no longer loads. That rules out a site-wide change of web addresses. Whether a new program is behind the removals, the company has not said.

Carl's Jr.: no stated program, and one stated cause in the state. We have no closing program from Carl's Jr. on record. Nine of its ten removals are in California. A large California Carl's Jr. franchisee that filed for bankruptcy in April blamed the state's $20 fast-food minimum wage (see our franchisee bankruptcy brief). We have not tied any of these ten stores to that operator, so read this as context for the state, not as the reason for these stores.

Sonic: no stated program. We have no closing program from Sonic on record. Our Sonic news records from this year cover single closings in New York, Wisconsin, Kansas, Florida, Massachusetts and Texarkana, TX. None covers the eight Texas stores in this count. TheStreet reported on Oct. 23 that "56 Sonic locations closed in 2025, according to data from Franchise Investor Data (FID)." That is a count for last year, not a program.

How Starbucks fits in, and why it is not in this count

Starbucks shows the other way the file can carry a signal before a list comes out. Starbucks is not among the 275, because we do not check its locator yet.

From the Aug. 22 edition through Sept. 19, our Watchlist carried Starbucks as "Rumored / at risk." That flag rested on what the company had already said in public about closing stores. Then, in late September, WBOC reported that "Starbucks announced this week that it plans to close approximately 250 coffeehouses across North America after reviewing the performance of its stores." Our Starbucks brief has the full list.

That is not a forecast. The file carried what Starbucks had already said about itself, before the list of stores came out. Locator checks are one way to see a chain's own signal. The chain's statements are another. Neither predicts which store goes next.

A repeating pattern, not a measured trend

These figures cover five weekly checks, Sept. 26 to Oct. 24. That is long enough to see who is removing stores right now, and where. It is not long enough to say whether any chain is removing stores faster or slower than usual. For most of these chains we have no earlier baseline on this method, so we can't call it a trend. KFC's 41 came in a single check, and one week is not a trend either. What we can say is that between them, the two chains with stated closing programs turned up in every one of the five checks. Papa John's had removals in the Sept. 26, Oct. 3, Oct. 10 and Oct. 24 checks, and 7-Eleven in the Oct. 10, Oct. 17 and Oct. 24 checks. Several chains with no stated program turned up too, KFC most of all.

What the count can show:

• Which chains are taking stores off their own maps this month, and in which states.
• Stores for which we have no news record, including at chains that have said nothing at all.

What it can't show:

• A closing date. A store can close weeks before or after it leaves a locator.
• A reason. A removal is not the same as an announcement.
• That every removal is a closure. Stores move, rebrand and get new web addresses. We filter those out where we can see them, and this page will correct any we miss.

What we counted, and what we left out

What counts. Every week we save a copy of each tracked chain's full store list, as the chain publishes it in its own locator. A store enters this count when it was listed, then missing from two weekly checks in a row. A single missing week does not count, because one incomplete check on our side can look like closures. We also drop a missing store when the chain's current list shows the same store under a new web address, a renamed page or the same street address.

The Oct. 25 re-check. For this update, we re-checked every store page on Oct. 25, including the 190 stores on the first version of this page. A store stays in the count only if its page no longer loads (212 stores), or now sends visitors to a city, state or locator home page that doesn't list it (42 stores, including all ten Carl's Jr.). The other 21 are 7-Eleven stores. 7-Eleven publishes its list as a data feed rather than store pages, so those stores count on the two weekly misses from that feed.

How we count chains. We count each chain by the locator the store left. Foot Locker and Champs Sports run separate locators, so they are counted as two chains, though both belong to Foot Locker, Inc.

The dates. The dates on our records are the week our check confirmed the removal. They are not closing dates, and we don't print them as such. Of the 275, 19 were confirmed on Sept. 26, 42 on Oct. 3, 72 on Oct. 10, 48 on Oct. 17 and 94 on Oct. 24.

What we left out.

• Twenty-two stores that were missing from two weekly checks but whose page still loads, or which came back in the chain's list. Fourteen were left out of the first version of this page. Eight more, counted on Oct. 19, were back in the chain's list or had a page listing the store again on our Oct. 25 re-check, so we took them out.
• Four Papa John's records that duplicated stores already in the count.
• A Sonic in San Antonio, TX, counted on Oct. 19. TheStreet has since reported that the store "is boarded up, with a sign pointing customers to Castle Hills." We read that as a move, not a closing, so we took it out.
• Thirteen Crumbl stores, held from this count until each is checked store by store. Crumbl has moved stores to new web addresses before. Our Crumbl brief covers its stores one by one.
• A KFC in Mount Sterling, KY that left the locator and was also reported closed by local news. We count it as a closing, not a removal.
• Starbucks, whose locator we do not track yet.

Changes week to week. Some chains are new to our checks, and a chain can only show a removal after two checks of its full list. Some week-to-week movement is therefore which chains we watch, not what the chains are doing.

This is a living page. When we refresh this page, we re-check the store pages the same way, and the changelog records each change.

Updated: October 26, 2026

Changelog: October 19, 2026: first published at 190 stores removed from their own store locators by 45 chains across 40 states, from four weekly checks (Sept. 26 to Oct. 17), from the 2026-10-17 edition. October 26, 2026: refreshed to 275 stores, 44 chains and 42 states from five weekly checks (Sept. 26 to Oct. 24), from the 2026-10-24 edition. Added KFC's 41 removals in the Oct. 24 check. Took out eight stores from the first version that were listed again on our Oct. 25 re-check, and a Sonic in San Antonio, TX that moved. Outback is now counted as one chain.

Street names are from our records; house numbers are held for subscribers. The Store Closure Watch file for the week of October 24, 2026 holds 351 records. As of October 26, 2026.