Business Closures Week of September 5–11, 2026: 431 Events — O'Charley's Shuts Its Company-Owned Restaurants, a Domino's Franchisee Closes 13, Scrubs & Beyond Winds Down

Store Closure Watch logged 431 closure and distress events for the week of September 5–11, 2026 — 331 closures, 40 bankruptcies, 42 layoffs, 16 restructurings, 1 conversion and 1 relocation across 322 distinct businesses, down 33.1% from last week's published 644. Restaurants led again at 184 events, and one chain drove it: O'Charley's closed its company-owned restaurants on Wednesday, September 9, and 44 of its locations are in this week's file. Behind it, a Domino's franchisee shut 13 stores across northeast Ohio in one stroke, Bravo Brio's two brands kept closing, and Scrubs & Beyond began closing all of its stores. About two-thirds of the drop is a consolidation pass on our side; see the Data Update.

One Chain, One Day: O'Charley's Closes Everything Company-Owned

This week's file holds 431 closure and distress events across 322 businesses, down 33.1% from the 644 published last week. 40 records carry WARN filings and 40 are bankruptcy events. About two-thirds of the decline is housekeeping rather than fewer events: before publication we removed or merged roughly 150 rows that restated older closure lists, duplicated each other, or carried one business's name over another's evidence (see the Data Update below).

The Big Story

O'Charley's shut its company-owned restaurants on Wednesday, September 9, and 44 of its locations are in this week's file. Employees at several Tennessee restaurants confirmed the closings the same day, and signs went up on doors by Wednesday evening. How many restaurants closed is not settled: the chain's own location list carried 44 addresses, Nation's Restaurant News counted 47 restaurants in all, and Restaurant Dive put the company-owned closures at 49. A handful of franchised restaurants stay open, including one in Niles, Ohio through September 27 and one in Chester, Virginia with no closing date. Our brief lists the 33 restaurants a local outlet named as closed and holds the rest as announced: O'Charley's closures: 33 confirmed by local reporting.

The rest of the restaurant sector, 184 events in all, was franchise and chain attrition. A Domino's franchisee closed 13 stores across northeast Ohio at once, from Akron and Barberton to Mansfield and Wadsworth; Domino's called it an isolated franchisee matter and said it is working on a plan to reopen them. Bravo Brio's two brands kept shrinking: Bravo Italian Kitchen closed Des Moines on September 4 and the Dayton Mall on September 8, and a September roundup added Brio Italian Grille's earlier-year closings in Cherry Hill and Marlton, New Jersey and Orlando to the file. Marmalade Cafe, the Southern California chain, filed for Chapter 11 on September 2, a month after closing its Calabasas Commons restaurant. Chuck E. Cheese has let six leases expire this year; four of those closures, from Abilene to Omaha, entered the file this week.

Sector Breakdown

• Restaurant & Food Service, 184 events. O'Charley's, the Ohio Domino's stores and the Bravo Brio closures above, plus the usual run of independents: Heritage House Coffee & Tea in Tuscaloosa, Tres Leches Café in Phoenix, Lula & Sadie's in Durham (closing September 20) and The Love Loaf, which is moving rather than closing.
• Retail, 99 events. Scrubs & Beyond, the medical-apparel retailer, says it is closing all of its stores; six with addresses are in the file so far, five of them in Minnesota. The Dump, Haynes Furniture's outlet brand, is winding down all six stores outside Virginia: Atlanta, Tempe, Houston, Irving, Lombard and Deerfield. Earl May Garden Centers is closing six of its 27 stores: three in Iowa on successive October Mondays (Newton, Marshalltown, Ottumwa), St. Joseph, Missouri, Shawnee, Kansas, and Columbus, Nebraska on December 15. IKEA's small-format San Marcos, Texas store closes November 1.
• Industrial & Manufacturing, 32 events. Lincoln Industries will close its Pine Island, Minnesota plant in two phases, most of about 55 jobs by October 29 and the rest by April 1, 2027. Rugged Liner, the pickup-accessory maker, is closing two Shiawassee County, Michigan facilities by March 2027 (90 jobs). Marc's is closing its Parma, Ohio distribution center (55, November 10) and Delta Peanut is closing in Jonesboro, Arkansas (120, layoffs from October 10).
• Office & Services, 34 events. Arsenal Biosciences is cutting 99 in South San Francisco and Hayward, TScan Therapeutics 96 in Waltham by November 2, Sanofi 229 in Massachusetts by October 9, and Minnesota insurer UCare 102 as it winds down.
• Logistics & Warehouse, 15 events. Essendant's August notices reach the file: Dallas (136) and Philadelphia close on October 3, with Los Angeles alongside them. Kenco Logistic Services will close its Allen Township, Pennsylvania warehouse on April 1, 2027 (52). FreshRealm, in Chapter 11 since April 27, set layoffs in Texas (161) and California (228) for July; the notices entered the file this week.
• Healthcare, 12 events. Wellstar Health System laid off 761 in Georgia in late July. Trinity Health will permanently lay off 557 at its Livonia, Michigan headquarters on October 25, WARN-filed. Eurofins Diatherix will close its Huntsville, Alabama lab on October 31 (55). Stanford Health Care cut 95 and MU Health Care 74 in reorganizations, and Henry Ford's River District Hospital in St. Clair County ended inpatient and emergency care on September 1. Healthcare ran at 13 news-sourced events against a trailing average of about 9, below the flag threshold after last week's alert.
• Hospitality & Entertainment, 7 events. The Westin Hilton Head Island Resort & Spa closes for a five-month renovation on November 2, with 219 temporary layoffs on a WARN notice and staff to be recalled. Clementon Park & Splash World, the South Jersey amusement park, has closed, and Alamo Drafthouse closed its North Naples, Florida cinema on September 9.

Notable Individual Events

• Wellstar Health System, Georgia. 761 layoffs in late July after what the system called a comprehensive review.
• Trinity Health, Livonia, Michigan. 557 permanent layoffs at headquarters, October 25, WARN-filed.
• Sanofi, Massachusetts. 229 layoffs from the former Blueprint Medicines operation by October 9, WARN-filed.
• Delta Peanut, Jonesboro, Arkansas. Permanent closure, 120 jobs, layoffs from October 10, WARN-filed.
• Essendant, Dallas. Facility closure, 136 jobs, October 3, WARN-filed.
• UCare, Minnesota. 102 layoffs on October 1 as the insurer winds down, WARN-filed.
• Rugged Liner, Owosso, Michigan. Two facilities closing by March 19, 2027, 90 jobs, WARN-filed.

Data Update

This week's count is a third below last week's, and about two-thirds of that gap is us, not the market. Before publication we ran a consolidation pass over the week's records and removed or merged roughly 150 rows in four classes: about 70 that restated older closure lists under new record numbers (every store on Macy's January closure list minted again, statewide rows from a 2025 Macy's list and a Long John Silver's franchise disclosure, Saks OFF 5th, Painted Tree, Smokey Bones, Salad and Go); 21 that described events from 2025 or earlier; 23 that carried one business's name over another business's evidence; and 21 that duplicated another row in the same file or a record already published last week. A rule now stops list pages from re-minting rows the file already has, and a state-typed WARN gate (below) replaces the news-only path.

One more change starts with next week's file. A WARN notice that a state types as a closure now enters the closure list on its own evidence, with the press status recorded on the record; until now a notice needed a news story before it counted. Ten such notices, each read against the state record, are staged for next week. Four of the closures among them, Meyn Americas in Ball Ground, Georgia, PJ Trailer in Mount Orab, Ohio, and Fulton Troika and MAT Holdings in the Chicago area, had no press coverage when we checked.

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. 40 of this week's records carry WARN filings and 40 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.

Correction, October 13, 2026: one record in this week's count came from an FDIC filing we had read as a bank branch closing. It was a branch opening. We have relabeled it, and FDIC branch closings now come from the correct filing code. The counts above are as published.

Figures reflect the dataset as of September 14, 2026, following weekly deduplication, an independent audit pass, and quality review.