Retail Closures Week of August 22–28, 2026: 775 Events — Restaurant Chains Shrink Together, Two New Tyson Plant Closures, First Hospitality Alert

Store Closure Watch logged 775 closure and distress events for the week of August 22–28, 2026 — 644 closures, 87 bankruptcies, 33 layoffs, and 7 restructurings, down 39.3% from last week's expansion-driven 1,277. Restaurant chains had the week — seven more Red Lobster closures, eleven Papa Murphy's, ten Pizza Hut, Long John Silver's, and Bahama Breeze all shrinking at once — while Tyson Foods added two new plant closures (Joslin, Illinois at 2,495 jobs and Eagle Mountain, Utah at 723, both WARN-filed), and our early-warning system flagged hospitality and entertainment at more than double its trailing average, the second sector alert in two weeks.

A Normal Week Again, and a First Alert for Hospitality

This week's file holds 775 closure and distress events, down about a third from last week. The drop is expected: last week was the largest file we've published because a new enrichment method landed months of company lists and filings at once. This week is the new normal running at its regular pace — 112 records carry WARN filings, 87 are bankruptcy events, and the week's records span every sector we track.

The Big Story

Restaurant chains had the week. Seven more Red Lobster closures landed in Alabama, California and Illinois (the Peru, Illinois restaurant closes September 6), eleven Papa Murphy's records as the chain's pullback continues state by state, ten Pizza Hut closures, seven Long John Silver's records from the chain's own franchise disclosure showing 30 closures across 18 states, and six Bahama Breeze closures as Darden winds the brand down. None of it is one dramatic filing; it is five chains shrinking at once, and restaurants are the file's second-largest sector again at 207 events.

The jobs story is Tyson Foods: three plants in this week's file. Two are new this week — Joslin, Illinois (2,495 jobs) and Eagle Mountain, Utah (723) on two WARN notices — and the third is the Lexington, Nebraska beef plant, which closed in January and enters the file now with its address; its roughly 3,200 jobs come from a company announcement rather than a notice, so we don't add them to the WARN total.

The third thread is quieter and it tripped our first hospitality alert: 16 news-reported hospitality and entertainment closures against a trailing average of about 8 — double it, and the second week running a sector has flagged (grocery flagged in mid-August). The mix is what makes it interesting: four movie theaters (Apple Cinemas in Hartford, both O'Neil Cinemas locations in New Hampshire, Movies 16 in Janesville), two stage theaters (Georgia Ensemble, Jungle Theater in Minneapolis), a bowling center on Staten Island, and a fitness cluster led by Mad Fitness Group, the F45 franchisee whose bankruptcy closed studios in Germantown, Olney and White Marsh, Maryland. Discretionary-entertainment closures spreading across formats in one week is the kind of pattern the flag exists to catch early; we'll report whether it holds.

Sector Breakdown

• Retail — 208 events. Starbucks appears 19 times across 10 states; T-Mobile's Washington retail pullback under two WARN notices; four Nordstrom records including the Dallas Galleria store; and the independent layer runs from Buckeye Salvage in Canton to Rock Cave IGA in West Virginia.
• Restaurant & Food Service — 207 events. The chain pullbacks above, plus City Watch Coffee's two Pennsylvania closures and a steady independent count.
• Healthcare — 106 events. Ninety-three Florida licence-record candidates (see the Data Update below), plus HCA Florida Capital Hospital closing its NICU and KidsPeace's Bowdon residential program.
• Office & Services — 74 events. T-Mobile's Bothell office consolidation under the same WARN notices, and Bimbo Bakeries' headquarters move.
• Industrial & Manufacturing — 63 events. Stone Brewing exiting Escondido (220 jobs, WARN-filed), Bumble Bee Foods' Santa Fe Springs plant (233 jobs, WARN-filed), Foremost Farms in Marshfield, Wisconsin (68 jobs), and the Eagle Horizon Mine in West Virginia (71 jobs).
• Grocery & Convenience — 27 events. Kroger's roughly 60-store program continues to resolve to locations; O'Brien's Market and Fresh Value on the independent side. After flagging last week, grocery is back near its average.

Notable Individual Events

• Family Dollar — restructuring, 5,000 jobs. The week's largest workforce figure, tied to the chain's store-network restructuring.
• Tyson Foods — Joslin, Illinois. Plant closure, 2,495 jobs on the Illinois WARN notice (filed under Hillsdale, the plant's postal address); the state is in talks about repurposing the site.
• Stone Brewing — Escondido, California. The craft-beer pioneer exits its home production site, 220 jobs, WARN-filed.
• Bumble Bee Foods — Santa Fe Springs, California. Plant closure, 233 jobs, WARN-filed.
• Flagstone Foods — Dothan, Alabama. Layoffs of 98, WARN-filed.
• Hampshire College — Amherst, Massachusetts. Confirmed December closure; college closures continue to track alongside the retail data.

Data Update

Two changes this week. First, the file introduces a Closure Candidate status: 93 records, all Florida health-care facilities, come from state licence records that show a facility closed before any news source has confirmed it. They are labelled exactly that way — a step before a confirmed closure, not a guess — and they are why Florida leads the state table at 166 records. Job figures that come from one multi-site WARN notice are now also labelled, so a notice total is never mistaken for per-store counts.

Second, a correction. An earlier version of this post led with Buca di Beppo's 18 locations entering the file. Those records describe the chain's August 2024 closure list from its original Chapter 11, not a 2026 event; they entered the weekly file undated and have been removed from it. The file now excludes any record whose event date, or the publication date of its source article, is more than a year old — we now capture the publication date from every article we read — and this week's count and last week's comparison are both stated under that rule. The records stay in the full dataset as 2024 history. The same review also caught one invented record: an article about Tyson's Rome, Georgia plant produced a row for the Perry, Iowa plant — a facility that actually closed in June 2024. That record now carries its true 2024 date and sits in the historical dataset, not this week's file. A fuller sweep the same day found twelve more records of the same kind — closures from 2018 through 2024 mentioned in passing by current articles, and two records whose evidence described a different business entirely — and removed them the same way. This week's count is stated after all of it.

Methodology

Store Closure Watch records are automatically extracted from company announcements, WARN notices, court dockets, state licence records, federal filings, and news coverage, then audited with an independent verification pass and cross-referenced against state WARN filings before publication. 112 of this week's records carry WARN filings and 87 are bankruptcy events. Counts are closure and distress events, not unique stores — a chain program can span many records. Public roundups report chain names and city or metro areas only; street addresses, coordinates, and per-record source links are available to subscribers. Learn more about how the data pipeline works.

Figures reflect the dataset as of August 31, 2026, following weekly deduplication, an independent audit pass, and quality review.