Safeway is 111 years old, and it is spending the milestone closing stores. The grocery chain, founded in Idaho in 1915, has shut at least three locations in 2026 as parent company Albertsons keeps shrinking its national store count.
Safeway runs just over 900 stores, most of them in the western states, with a smaller pocket in Maryland, Virginia, Delaware and Washington, D.C. None of them are guaranteed to stay open. The chain has been quietly picking off underperformers, and the pace has picked up sharply since a giant merger fell apart at the end of 2024.
The clearest sign of the pullback landed in Washington, D.C., where Safeway permanently closed its Hechinger Mall store at 1601 Maryland Avenue NE on May 16, 2026. That store had fed the neighborhood for more than 40 years. The company said it was reaching the end of its lease and would put the money into other existing stores instead.
The Failed Merger Behind The Closures
Albertsons and Kroger spent more than two years trying to fuse into a single grocery giant. The $24.6 billion deal, announced in 2022, would have been one of the largest supermarket mergers in U.S. history. It collapsed in December 2024 after a federal judge in Oregon granted a preliminary injunction and a King County judge in Washington blocked it for good.
The Federal Trade Commission sued to stop the deal in February 2024, arguing the combination would kill competition, push prices up, and weaken workers’ bargaining power. Once the merger died, Albertsons stopped waiting around. The company had deliberately slowed its store closings while the deal was pending. Free of it, the chain switched to what it calls “portfolio optimization,” a polite phrase for closing stores that do not earn enough.
The numbers show the turn. Albertsons closed 35 stores in fiscal 2025, according to its annual filing, more than triple the 10 it closed the year before and up from eight in fiscal 2023. The company ended February 2026 with 2,244 stores across 35 states and Washington, D.C.
The Stores That Have Already Gone Dark
Three confirmed Safeway closings anchor the 2026 list. Hayward, California, at 231 West Jackson Street, closed in February 2026. The Hechinger Mall store in D.C. closed on May 16. And Newport, Oregon, at 2220 North Coast Highway, closed on July 26.
The Hayward store was an anchor of the Jackson Triangle neighborhood. The Newport store was the only Safeway in town, and a Waremart by WinCo is taking over the space. A store on Fillmore in San Francisco has gone dark too, and the property is already being turned into housing.
Albertsons has not released a full public list, so the real count is likely higher. Most of these closings come down to expiring leases rather than the chain abandoning a market. The company has said walking away from one store does not mean it plans to leave the surrounding area.
Colorado took the worst of it in 2025. That September, Albertsons announced it would close 12 stores by early November: 10 Safeway locations in Colorado, one in Chadron, Nebraska, and one in Farmington, New Mexico. Safeway still runs more than 90 stores in Colorado.
What Happens To The People Who Work There
When the Hayward store closed in February 2026, all 76 of its workers moved to nearby Safeway locations, the company said. Albertsons’ stated policy is to place as many associates as possible in other stores when a location shuts.
That promise works better in a city than in the country. A worker in a dense area can move to another branch a few miles away. In a rural town with a single store, a transfer can mean an hour-long commute that someone on public transit or a tight budget simply cannot manage. For those workers, a closing is a layoff with extra steps.
Tension between the company and its employees is already running hot. Safeway workers in Colorado struck for three weeks in the summer of 2025, and members in New Mexico voted to authorize a walkout before settling without one. The United Food and Commercial Workers union says it came out of that fight with pay raises and better healthcare terms for its members.
Albertsons Is Way Bigger Than Safeway
Safeway is just one of 22 grocery banners Albertsons owns. The rest include Vons, Jewel-Osco, Acme, Shaw’s, Tom Thumb, Randalls, and Balducci’s, spread across 35 states and Washington, D.C. The company employed roughly 280,000 people as of late February 2026.
Seen that way, the Safeway closings are one slice of a wider trim. Across all its banners, Albertsons is closing about a dozen more stores in 2026, by Fast Company’s count, with more than half of them in California and Texas.
The banners hit in 2026 run beyond Safeway to Acme, Randalls, and Vons. It adds up to a company reshaping itself store by store rather than staging one dramatic nationwide shutdown.
It Is Not All Shrinking
Closing stores is only half of what Albertsons did in fiscal 2025. The company completed 94 remodels and opened nine new stores that year, part of about $1.84 billion in spending that also went into its website and delivery systems. The plan is to pour resources into locations with strong demand while cutting the ones dragging on the books.
The closings still cost money in the short term. Shutting stores, minus new openings, knocked $63.4 million off fiscal 2025 sales, and expenses tied to closed stores and leftover property climbed to $45.1 million from $15.9 million the year before.
The pressure has not eased. In the first quarter of fiscal 2026, Albertsons reported a 0.8% drop in identical sales, a measure of how existing stores are doing without counting fuel. That is a small dip, but it points to a business still fighting to hold ground.
The Squeeze On Old-School Grocers
Safeway is not alone in the retreat. Traditional supermarket chains are struggling to match the everyday prices at Walmart, Costco, Amazon, Aldi, and dollar stores. Walmart alone takes about a fifth of U.S. grocery spending, from 4,615 stores.
Kroger, Safeway’s would-be partner, is thinning out too. It announced in June 2025 that it would close about 60 stores over 18 months, a little over 2% of its 2,697 supermarkets. It has since agreed to buy the regional chain Giant Eagle for $1.65 billion, a deal still waiting on regulatory clearance.
Coresight Research projects retailers will close about 7,900 stores in 2026. That is down 4.5% from 2025, and roughly 5,500 new stores are forecast to open, so the whole sector is not sliding in one direction. For shoppers in the towns losing a Safeway, though, the math is simple. Fewer grocery options nearby can mean longer drives, and where the competition thins out, higher prices at whatever store is left standing.
