Methodology
How records get into Store Closure Watch
Store Closure Watch is a weekly, sourced file of U.S. store, restaurant and facility closures, bankruptcies, WARN layoffs and liquidation or asset sales, across 8 sectors: Retail, Restaurant & Food Service, Office & Services, Industrial / Manufacturing, Grocery & Convenience, Logistics / Warehouse, Healthcare, Hospitality & Entertainment. It is built by Four Lights Analytics LLC.
Updated weekly. Last update: October 24, 2026
Where records come from
News
Each week we run more than 2,000 news searches covering the prior seven days, read the matching articles, and use automated extraction to turn each one into a record with a fixed set of fields.
State WARN notices
Layoff and closure notices that employers file with states, collected from nearly every state, including states whose sites can only be read through a browser.
Bankruptcy court filings
Court dockets are matched to the records they concern, and recent closure filings in case documents can add records of their own.
Chain store lists
We check chains' own store lists weekly. A store that drops off becomes a record only after two consecutive weekly misses, a check that its store page is gone, a map check, and a human review.
Bank branch closings
Branch-closing filings with the FDIC.
Other public records
Trucking carrier shutdowns from federal carrier registration data, state health-facility closure lists, a curated list of known closure sources, and follow-up research on flagged stories. Securities filings are matched to existing records.
How records are checked
A source on every record
Each record carries a link to the article or filing it came from or, for a store that dropped off its chain's store list, the store-list record.
Deduplicated weekly
New records are checked against the full dataset over the weekend, so the same closure is not counted or sent twice.
Reviewed before it ships
Every weekly file passes automated checks and is then read in full by a reviewer before it is delivered or published.
Kept off public pages
A Closure Candidate (a state health-facility licensing record showing a closure that no news source has confirmed yet) stays in the subscriber file, labeled, and out of public counts, as do court filings that do not yet state a closure.
Reader tips
A tip can point us to a story, but it never becomes a record on its own; a record needs an independent public source.
When it updates
The week's searches cover the prior seven days. New records are deduplicated over the weekend, and the subscriber file and the public pages update on Monday.
What it is not
Store Closure Watch tracks closures and the events around them. It is not a site-selection or foot-traffic tool.
Cite as
Source: Four Lights Analytics Store Closure Watch, storeclosurewatch.com. Each quarterly report carries its own citation line.
Questions about a record: hello@storeclosurewatch.com.
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