Business Closures Week of September 12–18, 2026: 463 Events — 78 Texas Home-Care Licenses Close, Scrubs & Beyond Shuts 25 More, Conifer Files for 1,037 Jobs

Store Closure Watch logged 463 closure and distress events for the week of September 12–18, 2026 — 388 closures, 52 bankruptcies, 19 layoffs and 4 restructurings across 387 distinct businesses, up 7.4% from last week's published 431. Healthcare is the third-largest sector at 90 events, and 78 of those are Texas state licensure records: home-health, hospice and adult day-care providers whose licenses closed between late June and the end of September, the kind of closure that reaches a dataset before it reaches the news. Conifer Health Solutions filed a WARN notice covering 1,037 jobs in Dallas, the largest WARN-filed figure in the week, and Scrubs & Beyond added 25 store closings across seven states as it winds down.

Texas Home-Care Licenses Go Dark: 78 Closures Straight From State Records

This week's file holds 463 closure and distress events across 387 distinct businesses, up 7.4% from the 431 published last week. 38 records carry WARN filings and 52 are bankruptcy events. Healthcare is the third-largest sector at 90 events, and 78 of those come from one place: Texas state licensure records showing home-health, hospice and adult day-care providers that have closed.

The Big Story

The Texas Health and Human Services Commission publishes the licenses it closes in batches. This week 78 of those records entered the file, covering 69 operators, with closure dates running from late June through the end of September. Houston carries seven, San Antonio six, and Austin, Dallas and Lubbock four each; the rest are spread across smaller cities from Edinburg to Sulphur Springs.

Most are single-location agencies. The exceptions show the pattern better. Brookdale closed three Houston-area home-care branches on August 31, in Houston, Sugar Land and Webster. Circle of Care is closing agencies in all four big metros, Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, on September 30. BeyondFaith Homecare & Rehab closed in both The Woodlands and New Braunfels, and Cornerstone Caregiving in Houston and Lubbock.

These are administrative records, filed when a license ends. A closing home-care agency rarely issues a press release, and a single-office closure rarely draws a local reporter, so this is the kind of event that reaches a dataset before it reaches the news, if it reaches the news at all. Note what they are: a closed license is evidence the licensed operation ended, and the date is the state's, not ours. Where an operator closed one branch and kept others, only the closed branch is in the file.

Separately, Conifer Health Solutions filed a WARN notice covering 1,037 jobs in Dallas, the largest WARN-filed figure in the week, and a reminder that healthcare distress reaches the back office as well as the bedside.

Sector Breakdown

• Restaurant & Food Service, 139 events. Meritage Hospitality Group, one of the largest Wendy's franchisees, is in Chapter 11, and its Wendy's restaurants and single Bojangles are in the file with it. A Denny's franchisee, M15, is in bankruptcy in Minnesota and Wisconsin. O'Charley's adds four records after last week's shutdown. Smokey Bones closures from April reach the file as state-level records for Indiana, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. Among independents, Grand River Brewery closed its Jackson, Michigan taproom on September 13 after closing Clawson and Marshall earlier in the year; Puckett's closed in Cullman, Alabama and Hendersonville, Tennessee on September 18; Islands Fine Burgers & Drinks closes in Santa Barbara on September 27 and Lutticken's in Menlo Park on September 30.
• Retail, 119 events. Scrubs & Beyond, which is closing every store, is the week's most frequent name at 25 records across seven states, nine of them in Michigan, from Ann Arbor and Flint to Troy, Utica and Westland. Saks Global is closing five Saks OFF 5th stores, in Phoenix, Tucson, Costa Mesa, Chicago and West Palm Beach, and its Neiman Marcus store on Main Street in downtown Dallas closes September 30, with 67 jobs on a WARN notice. Francesca's, which closed its stores in March, received court approval to liquidate what remains; a Texas WARN notice covering 202 jobs sits on the record. Neshaminy Mall in Bensalem, Pennsylvania closes October 31, and Family Dollar's Matthews, North Carolina site accounts for 373 jobs.
• Healthcare, 90 events. The Texas license records above, plus Conifer Health Solutions' 1,037-job notice in Dallas. Dartmouth Health notified 124 workers in New Hampshire that their positions had been eliminated, and Fort Wayne Medical Oncology and Hematology is closing its Bluffton, Indiana office. The 78 Texas records come from the state's own closure directories, which publish in batches covering several months of effective dates. Our early-warning measure compares each week's news-sourced records with the previous eight weeks, so a batch of state records cannot set it off; on that measure healthcare ran at 6 events against a trailing average of about 10. Once the Texas feed has run for several weeks its weekly flow will be steady enough to track as its own series.
• Industrial & Manufacturing, 40 events. Food plants led. JBS closed its Souderton, Pennsylvania beef plant on August 14, covering 1,485 jobs. Tyson Foods' Joslin, Illinois beef plant closure reaches the file at about 2,500 jobs, and its Eagle Mountain, Utah plant closes October 12 with 723. Amy's Kitchen is closing its Santa Rosa plant (260) and will lay off 51 at its Pocatello, Idaho plant on December 18. Bossong Hosiery Mills in Asheboro, North Carolina closed September 9 (122), Greif's Sweetwater paperboard mill in Austell, Georgia closes by year end (95), and Montrose Forest Products in Colorado gave notice for 90.
• Office & Services, 24 events. Regional Acceptance Corporation is closing two North Carolina sites, Winterville (156 jobs, February 2027) and Greenville (97, July 2027). GoHealth, in bankruptcy, will cut 103 of 111 jobs at its Chicago home base. Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey filed a notice covering 242.
• Logistics & Warehouse, 10 events. Republic National Distributing Co. expects to end operations at its three Ohio locations by September 29, after a second delay to its layoff schedule.
• Hospitality & Entertainment, 9 events; Grocery & Convenience, 8 events. The Fresh Market's Montvale, New Jersey store closed with 55 jobs on a WARN notice.

Notable Individual Events

• Conifer Health Solutions, Dallas. 1,037 layoffs, the largest WARN notice in the week.
• Tyson Foods, Eagle Mountain, Utah. Plant closing October 12, 723 jobs.
• Family Dollar, Matthews, North Carolina. 373 jobs, confirmed for August 12.
• Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey. 242 jobs, WARN-filed.
• Hampshire College, Massachusetts. 199 jobs, WARN-filed, by year end.
• Regional Acceptance Corporation, Winterville, North Carolina. 156 jobs, closing February 2027, WARN-filed.
• 80 Acres Farms, Hamilton, Ohio. Indoor-farming facility closed August 17, 145 jobs, WARN-filed.
• Bossong Hosiery Mills, Asheboro, North Carolina. Closed September 9, 122 jobs, WARN-filed.

Data Update

This edition was cut before publication, not corrected after it. The week was drafted at 609 records and publishes at 463. The largest group taken out was records that restated closures we had already published on September 12; they were merged back into the originals rather than counted again. Also removed: fifteen events from before 2026, among them a 2022 plant closure and four historical bankruptcy filings harvested from a single retrospective article; duplicate pairs describing one closing twice; a foreign airline that arrived with no state, where a state filter cannot catch it; and 26 Francesca's store rows that described the chain's March closing rather than anything that happened this week. A Neiman Marcus record typed as a bankruptcy was corrected to a closure, which is what its source says, and a Saks OFF 5th store filed under "Vineland, Florida" was corrected to West Palm Beach.

State license records for Texas health-care agencies enter the closure list this week as their own source type, with the state directory cited on each record.

That is why the week reads up 7.4% rather than the 41.3% the uncut draft showed. Most of the difference was our own records counted twice. The number we publish is the one left after they come out.

No sector ran far enough above its eight-week average to trip the early-warning flag this week.

Methodology

Store Closure Watch records are automatically extracted from company announcements, WARN notices, court dockets, state license records, federal filings, and news coverage, then audited with an independent verification pass and cross-referenced against state WARN filings before publication. 38 of this week's records carry WARN filings and 52 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: 8 records in this week's count came from FDIC filings we had read as bank branch closings. They were branch openings. We have relabeled them, and FDIC branch closings now come from the correct filing code. The counts above are as published.

Figures reflect the dataset as of September 20, 2026, following weekly deduplication, an independent audit pass, and quality review.