The supermarket anchoring the Orchard Farms Shopping Center on Bollinger Road in San Jose has been bagging groceries for the same neighborhood for 57 years. It will be dark before the middle of November. The store at 6150 Bollinger Road is a Safeway, a chain that opened its first location in 1915 and is now 111 years old, and it is the latest in a string of closings that has been rolling through the company all year.
The San Jose Store Closes On Or Before November 13
Neither Safeway nor its parent company gave a reason for shutting the Bollinger Road location. What the company did say is that nobody there loses a job. Every worker at the store keeps employment and gets assigned to another location in the same area, which lines up with the union contracts covering those employees.
The closing date is listed as on or before November 13, 2026. As of October 22, 2026, Safeway operated 912 locations in the United States, concentrated in the western half of the country with a smaller cluster in Maryland and Virginia. That number drops by one on November 13.
Albertsons CEO Susan Morris told investors on October 13, 2026 that the company is launching a “comprehensive business review” after second quarter fiscal 2026 results. She said the quarter landed in line with the revised outlook but that the results “do not reflect the potential of the Company.” Albertsons pulled its full-year forecast, and Morris told analysts, “We’ll exit areas that are underperforming.”
Three Safeways Already Went Dark This Year
San Jose makes four Safeway closings in 2026. The Hayward, California store on West Jackson Street went first, in February. All 76 employees there were moved to nearby stores instead of being laid off, the same arrangement the union contract calls for.
The Washington, D.C. store at 1601 Maryland Ave NE, inside Hechinger Mall, closed May 16, 2026 after nearly 40 years. Its pharmacy shut earlier, on April 1. Safeway said the lease was coming to an end and that it decided to put the money into other stores it already operates.
Newport, Oregon lost its only Safeway in late July 2026. That store on North Coast Highway had been open more than 30 years, and a state notice listed 69 affected workers.
For the Bay Area, Hayward was the fourth Safeway to close in a little over a year, following shutdowns in San Francisco’s Fillmore district, Pinole and Vallejo. Most of those decisions came down to leases running out rather than the company walking away from a region.
The Kroger Merger Fell Apart And This Is The Aftermath
Safeway’s owner, Albertsons, spent years trying to sell itself to Kroger in a $24.6 billion deal. The Federal Trade Commission sued, and a federal judge in Oregon blocked the deal in December 2024. Since then the company has stopped talking about growth and started talking about trimming, closing weaker locations and pushing money toward the stores that perform and toward online ordering.
In early 2025 Albertsons said it would cut $1.5 billion in spending over three years. It has been a slow climb: selling and administrative expenses rose to 25.6% of sales in the first two quarters of fiscal 2026, up from 25.4% a year earlier.
The cutting reached the office buildings first. In January 2025 the company eliminated hundreds of corporate roles, including 225 positions in Phoenix, Arizona and 156 across two offices in Pleasanton, California.
Albertsons Runs 22 Banners And All Of Them Are Shrinking
Safeway is one piece of a much bigger operation. As of June 20, 2026, Albertsons ran 2,240 stores across 35 states and the District of Columbia under 22 names, including Vons, Jewel-Osco, ACME, Shaw’s, Tom Thumb, Randalls, United Supermarkets, Pavilions, Star Market, Haggen, Carrs, Kings Food Markets and Balducci’s Food Lovers Market.
The company employs roughly 275,000 people and serves an average of 36.5 million customers a week. It also operates 1,708 pharmacies, 1,238 in-store coffee shops, 408 fuel centers, 22 distribution centers and 19 manufacturing plants.
The closure rate is what changed. In the fiscal year that ended February 28, 2026, Albertsons recorded 35 closures, compared with 10 the year before and 8 the year before that. It opened just 9 stores in that stretch, leaving a net loss of 26 locations and a year-end count of 2,244.
The 2026 Addresses That Have Already Gone
By June 2026, at least a dozen Albertsons locations had closed or been marked for closing. More than half were in California and Texas, with the rest scattered through New Jersey, Connecticut, Nevada and Washington, D.C.
The confirmed list includes ACME at 455 NJ-23 in Sussex, New Jersey and 481 River Rd in Edgewater, New Jersey; Balducci’s at 1385 Post Rd E in Westport, Connecticut; Randalls at 5161 San Felipe St in Houston; and Vons at 2345 E Valley Pkwy in Escondido, California and 522 Orange St in Redlands, California.
Texas lost two Tom Thumb stores in April 2026, one at 5809 E. Lovers Lane in Dallas that took about 70 jobs with it, and one at 2200 14th St in Plano. An Albertsons in Las Vegas closed in May.
Colorado Took The Biggest Hit Last Fall
The current round is smaller than what happened a year ago. Safeway shut stores across three states on or before November 7, 2025, and Colorado absorbed nearly all of it: Englewood, Northglenn, Denver, Aurora, Fort Collins, Loveland, two in Colorado Springs, plus La Junta and Lamar. Chadron, Nebraska lost its store. So did Farmington, New Mexico.
The company blamed lower-than-expected store performance in a statement at the time. “We continuously evaluate the performance of our stores, and occasionally, after long and careful deliberation, it becomes necessary to make the difficult decision to close certain locations,” it said, adding that it was working to place affected associates in nearby stores wherever possible.
Across all its banners in 2025, Albertsons closed at least 30 locations. Twelve of them were Safeways. The rest included a Carrs in Anchorage, an Albertsons in Southwest Portland and a United Supermarkets in Kingfisher, Oklahoma.
Kroger Is Doing The Exact Same Thing
The company that tried to buy Albertsons is pruning just as hard. At least 50 Kroger-owned supermarkets have closed since June 2025, when then-interim CEO Ronald Sargent said on an earnings call that roughly 60 underperforming stores would be shut by the end of 2026.
Those closings span 18 states and hit Fred Meyer, Fry’s, Harris Teeter, King Soopers, Mariano’s, Pick ‘n Save, Jay C Food Stores and QFC. Kroger started 2026 with 2,697 locations, down from 2,731 a year earlier.
Kroger is building at the same time. At an investor day the company said it plans to open 110 new stores by 2029, and CFO David Kennerley projected those locations will produce $7 billion in annualized sales.
This Chain Once Had More Than 3,000 Stores
Marion Barton Skaggs bought a small grocery store from his father in American Falls, Idaho in 1915 and ran it cash-and-carry, no credit, low margins, high volume. By 1921 he had 15 stores. By 1925 the family chain had passed 300 across Oregon, Montana, Idaho, Nevada and northern California.
A 1926 merger backed by Merrill Lynch combined Skaggs’ roughly 428 stores with the 322-store Safeway chain, creating a far bigger chain, headquartered in Reno until it moved to Oakland in 1929. It listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1928. By 1929 Safeway ran 2,394 stores in 20 states, Canada and Hawaii, with annual sales topping $100 million.
Some habits every American shopper takes for granted started here. During the 1930s the chain began pricing produce by the pound instead of by the piece, put sell-by dates on perishables, tried early nutritional labeling and built parking lots for customers arriving by car. The store count peaked at more than 3,200 in 1931, before the Depression shrank the chain.
The chain has been through worse than this. Kohlberg Kravis Roberts took Safeway private in a roughly $4.3 billion leveraged buyout in 1986. Within a year the company closed or sold 331 stores, announced on April 3, 1987 that it would shut its entire Dallas division and had shed more than 8,600 jobs by that August. Albertsons bought the company in January 2015.
What It Means If Your Store Is Next
Read the closings together and a profile emerges. Old stores in aging shopping centers, leases hitting their expiration date, locations that have been open 30, 40, 57 years in buildings nobody has modernized. The D.C. store ran nearly four decades. The San Jose store ran longer than that.
Workers have often been spared, though not always: 112 people lost jobs when San Francisco’s Fillmore store closed in 2025. Hayward’s 76 employees were transferred, San Jose’s crew is being reassigned, and the union contracts are doing the work there. Newport, Oregon is the exception that proves how much geography matters: with no other Safeway in town, 69 workers landed on the state layoff notice.
Albertsons has told reporters it expects to finish its 2026 fiscal year with a net positive store count, meaning more openings than closings on the books. Morris has also said the number of unprofitable stores in the portfolio is very small and that, outside the stretch when the merger was pending, the company watches its locations closely. Both things can be true. A chain can grow on paper while the specific store you have shopped at since high school turns off its lights in November.
If your Safeway sits in a strip center that has not been touched since the 1970s, check the hours before you drive over. That is where the list has been coming from.
