Retail closings in the U.S. are on the rise.
That’s according to Coresight Research, a research and advisory firm specializing in retail and technology, which predicts approximately 15,000 store closings and 5,800 store openings this year in the U.S.
U.S. store closures totaled 7,325 in 2024, the highest number of store closures seen since 2020 when almost 10,000 closures were tracked, Coresight said.
Store openings totaled 5,970 in 2024, the highest number of store openings since 2012 when Coresight Research began tracking this data.
Though no retail apocalypse was proclaimed, Coresights foresights cast a glass-half-empty view of the near future for retail square footage. As Coresight Research CEO Deborah Weinswig said in a statement: “Inflation and a growing preference among consumers to shop online to find the cheapest deals took a toll on brick-and-mortar retailers in 2024. Last year we saw the highest number of closures since the pandemic. Retailers that were unable to adapt supply chains and implement technology to cut costs were significantly impacted, and we continue to see a trend of consumers opting for the path of least resistance. Not only do they want the best prices, but they also have no patience for stores that are constantly disorganized, out of stock, and that deliver poor customer service. We have seen Shein and Temu capture market share as consumers choose to shop online to save time, money, and avoid frustration. Retailers need to embrace technologies like artificial intelligence to deliver a better customer experience and to optimize pricing to remain relevant and avoid ongoing closures.”
According to the Coresight report: “Major U.S. retailers have announced 29.6 percent fewer openings and 334 percent more closures when compared to the year-ago period, as of Jan. 17. Closures announced late in 2024/early in 2025 by Party City, Big Lots, Kohl’s, and Macy’s that are planned for 2025 are causing the elevated closure numbers early this year.”
This year, Party City is closing all of its 700 stores, and Big Lots is closing about 300 stores. Kohl’s has set 27 closings this year, and Macy’s will close 66 locations.
Party City is liquidating its stores.
Getty Images
While Weinswig suggested consumers are losing patience with physical stores because of a lack of service and stockouts, retailers and mall owners present a different picture, citing increases in traffic last year and during the last holiday season.
Jim von Maur, president and chief executive officer of the Davenport, Iowa-based Von Maur department store chain, told WWD two days before Christmas that during the holiday season he was seeing a lot of foot traffic. “People are going back to the stores. The malls have been busy. E-commerce continues to grow but we are seeing more people out physically, in stores. Our new store in Pittsburgh has been just phenomenal, exceeding all of our expectations.”
On the weekend before Christmas, “traffic was off the charts,” said Stephen Yalof, president and CEO of Tanger. “The weekends have been critically important to make up for the five fewer days. We’ve been hearing that the stores in our centers are doing very well. We’re definitely seeing more cars than last year so we are very optimistic about this holiday season. It’s outpacing last year as far as traffic.”
The stretch between Thanksgiving and Christmas had five fewer days last year, compared with 2023.
And David Simon, CEO of the Simon Property Group, said in a recent conference call with industry analysts and investors, “The importance of brick-and-mortar has never been higher. Don’t get me wrong, e-commerce is critically important, but all of this stuff about e-commerce, cost of customer acquisition, returns, stickiness, etc., it all continues to be a challenge. If you’ve looked at the [pure online] marketplaces, they run into problems, so they really need to be connected to a brick-and-mortar for survivability. So all of those things are pointing to a positive picture.”
Coresight indicated that it incorporates a number of different methodologies as well as qualitative analyst input to come up with its predictions on store openings and closings. “We modeled 2025 opening and closure numbers using a number of different approaches including a proprietary machine learning model, linear forecasting and analysis of year-to-date announced numbers,” Coresight indicated in its report. “For the U.S., our machine learning model identified a historical correlation between consumer spending and inflation and store openings and closures.”
