BUSINESS

Major supermarket and grocery chains are closing underperforming locations, stores that no longer make sense to operate, and shops that they can’t sell.

Chains like Kroger, Stop & Shop, The Raley’s Companies, and IGA have been downsizing since 2025 and the process will continue through 2027.

Kroger said it expected to close approximately 60 stores across its portfolio by the end of 2026, according to the company’s first-quarter fiscal 2025 earnings call. Giant Ahold Delhaize’s Stop & Shop chain confirmed in July that it will close store locations in Basking Ridge and Westfield, N.J., also in 2026.

Raley’s launched a regional downsizing plan that called for seven store closings in California and Nevada in 2026 and 2027. Raley’s said it will offer transfer opportunities to as many affected employees as possible, KSRO radio reported.

The Raley’s Companies cited local market conditions and long-term financial sustainability for the downsizing.

Independent Grocers Alliance closes five stores in four states.Jeff Greenough / Getty Images

Grocery chain closes stores

And now independent grocery chain IGA, which is the largest affiliation of independent grocers in the U.S., is closing five stores in four states for various reasons.

Chicago-based Independent Grocers Alliance‘s stores in Latta, S.C., and Eastport, Maine, revealed that they will close at the end of September after a store in Conway, S.C., closed in early September and another location in Potsdam, N.Y. closed on Aug. 31, 2026.

IGA store becomes Lucky Market

IGA grocery store Ross’ Granville Market in Granville, Ohio, which opened in 1978, closed on May 7, 2026, after being sold to Lucky’s Markets Ohio owners, the Saltzman family. The store transitioned to Lucky’s Market Granville on May 22, 2026, with all IGA workers offered employment at the new store, according to The Reporting Project.

Workers at Potsdam IGA were not as fortunate as the Granville workers, as the store’s 14 employees lost their jobs when the store closed at the end of August, according to WWNY-TV.

Potsdam IGA was owned by Todd LaVigne and Kirk LaVigne, who also own IGA stores in Brasher Falls and Chateaugay, N.Y., which remain open. The owners announced the Potsdam closing on social media but did not state a reason the closure.

IGA’s corporate office in mid-July said that its Conway IGA store, which operated since the 1960s, would close in early September. The company did not give a specific reason for closing the store, but the closure was a “difficult business decision,” an IGA Corporate spokesperson said, according to WBTW-TV.

Conway IGA employees would be offered positions at KJ’s Markets or IGA stores, the spokesperson said.

Store not generating enough sales

Latta IGA, which has been located on South Richardson Street in Latta, S.C., for almost 100 years and is the only grocery store in town, will close its store at the end of September because it was not generating enough sales, according to WFXB-TV. No arrangements for employees were mentioned.

With the closing of Latta IGA, the closest grocery store to the town’s residents will be seven miles away in Dillon, S.C.

R&M IGA in Eastport, Maine, which closes at the end of September, is also the only grocery store in town, but the next closest grocery store is an hour away from town, according to WGME-TV.

Owner closes store to retire

R&M IGA is closing because the owner is retiring and has been unable to find a buyer to take over the business. The number of employees affected was not reported.

Independent Grocers Alliance, which was founded in 1926, isn’t a conventional supermarket chain. Its affiliates are independently owned. IGA is affiliated with over 2,600 independently owned grocery stores in the U.S. and 7,500 stores globally.

Related: Another beloved Mexican restaurant chain closes more locations

A weak Dodgers offense this season, is picking up behind Mookie Betts, Kyle Tucker, Teoscar Hernandez, and Will Smith, who are trying to make up for the injured Shohei.

ATEEZ, NMIXX, RIIZE and CORTIS won the four Daesangs at the 2026 The Fact Music Awards, BTS led all acts with four. Kim Soohyun also made a controversial appearance.

Every market forecast has a political assumption buried inside it.

Someone decides how much pain a president will absorb before folding, then prices everything else around that guess.

That assumption is usually the sturdiest part of the model. Voters notice gas prices, and bond markets punish deficits.

Presidents heading into a midterm tend to move before either gets ugly.

So when commodity desks model a war, they rarely model troop movements or negotiating rooms. They model thresholds.

Oil above $100 a barrel. Gasoline close to $5 a gallon. A 10-year Treasury yield above five percent.

Hit those levels and Washington historically finds a deal in a hurry. The framework has outlasted embargoes, invasions and a half-dozen Gulf crises.

This month, all three levels broke. Nothing happened.

The exit that was supposed to arrive with the pain never showed up, and the most influential research desk in American banking has stopped pretending it can see one.

JPMorgan Chase (JPM) has walked away from its baseline forecast for the Iran war, six months after building that forecast around those exact numbers.

Why oil forecasts run on political pain thresholds

The war began Feb. 28, and commodity strategists needed a framework almost immediately.

JPMorgan’s was economic rather than military. The bank assumed a specific set of breaking points would force President Donald Trump into an agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz sometime in June, according to CNBC.

Those breaking points were crude above $100, pump prices near $5 and the 10-year yield topping five percent.

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An interim deal did arrive in June. It fell apart within weeks, and the fighting has escalated since.

A U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports remains in force, and the two sides have not been back at a table in any serious way.

The Strait is why the math matters. More than ten million barrels per day of Gulf output sat shut in during August, according to the International Energy Agency, which now expects total world supply to fall 5.7 million barrels per day this year.

That would be the steepest full-year contraction since the pandemic. “Inventories have so far played a crucial role in balancing the market,” the agency said.

What JPMorgan told clients about the oil endgame

“We simply don’t know how to model the endgame,” said Natasha Kaneva, the bank’s head of global commodities strategy, in a Sept. 17 note reported by CNBC.

It was the first time since the conflict began that the desk had no baseline view at all.

Related: OPEC+ has lost control of the oil market

The bank still runs the arithmetic. It puts fair value for Brent crude near $90 while the benchmark trades around $105, after nearly touching $110 earlier in the week.

Brent averaged $91 a barrel in August, $7 above the July average, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Every one million barrels per day of lost supply adds roughly $4 to the futures price, by JPMorgan’s own estimate. The gap implies traders are pricing in four million barrels per day of additional losses on top of what is already gone.

What is missing is the part that used to come next. Kaneva said six months of crossed redlines have left the exit less clear, not more.

The reason crude sits at $105 instead of $140 is that demand is falling almost as fast as supply. World consumption is on track to drop 2.5 million barrels per day this year, the International Energy Agency said in its September report.

Record fuel prices are doing what record fuel prices always do, which is convince people and factories to buy less.

Here is where those redlines actually stand:

Crude: Brent traded near $105 a barrel this week after approaching $110, according to CNBC.

Gasoline: the national average hit $4.4386 a gallon on Sept. 17, more than $1 above the price a year ago, according to AAA. 

Bonds: the 10-year Treasury yield pushed above five percent for the first time since 2023, reported Bloomberg. 

Diesel: the national average set a record $6.31 a gallon, according to AAA data.

JPMorgan tells its clients it no longer has a baseline view of the Iran conflict.CHUNYIP WONG / Getty Images

What crossed redlines cost you at the pump and the bank

I ran the pump math against the roughly 470 gallons a typical American driver buys in a year. At AAA’s current national average, that works out to about $500 more than the same driver paid last September, before a single grocery or airfare markup.

Diesel does the quieter damage. At $6.31 a gallon it prices every truckload of food, furniture and packages crossing the country, which is a large part of why the consumer price index is running 3.4% above year-ago levels.

The bond side lands on the same household. The Federal Reserve raised rates on Sept. 16 for the first time in three years, to a 3.75% to 4% range, with Chair Kevin Warsh pointing at elevated inflation as the reason.

Mortgage quotes, auto loans and credit card balances are all influenced by that interest rate, which is how a war 7,000 miles away reaches a kitchen table in Ohio.

If you drive for a living, the squeeze already shows up in your monthly numbers. If you don’t, it reaches you through freight, delivery fees and the shelf price of almost everything trucked.

The administration is not backing off. Washington is waging “the greatest economic isolation campaign in the history of the world” against Iran, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the House Financial Services Committee, according to Spectrum News.

Why the next oil move belongs to Trump, not the model

What struck me most in my analysis of the redline scoreboard is that the price model never failed. Brent behaved exactly as the barrel math said it would.

The political assumption is the piece that broke, and that is a much harder thing to rebuild. A bank can revise a supply curve overnight. It cannot revise a president.

Trump told Axios on Thursday, Sept. 17, that he is nearing a choice on whether to “go in and annihilate them” or wind the war down. He meets leaders from six Gulf countries Tuesday, Sept. 22, at the United Nations General Assembly.

For investors, the practical read is that crude no longer trades on a resolution timeline, because there is no longer one to trade. Any position built on the war ending by winter is now a wager on one man’s decision, and the biggest bank in the country has told clients in writing that it cannot handicap that.

The cushion is inventories. Stockpiles have drawn 555 million barrels since the war began, well short of the 1.6 billion JPMorgan originally modeled, which is the only reason $105 crude has not become $140 crude.

The International Energy Agency’s own base case now pushes a Gulf recovery into 2027, with production rebounding eight million barrels per day next year. That is a forecast about barrels, though, and the barrels were never the hard part.

Watch that buffer. The next redline will be the one nobody thought to write down.

Related: Bessent sent bank insiders a message about Iran

Every technology that changes how people get around has to win two arguments. The first is whether the machine works. The second, which takes much longer, is what happens to the people who used to do the job.

Waymo has largely won the first argument. Alphabet’s (GOOGL) autonomous driving unit has served more than 20 million fully autonomous rides and covered more than 300 million fully autonomous kilometers, with a 94% reduction in injury-causing crashes compared with human drivers in the US cities where it operates with nobody behind the wheel, according to Waymo.

For most of that run, this was an American story. Phoenix, then San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin and Atlanta, then a fast wave of Sun Belt cities.

The map changed quickly after that. London arrived in October 2025, Tokyo moved from supervised testing toward a commercial target of 2027, and Munich landed in August as the company’s first European Union market, according to CNBC.

This week brought a fourth country, and it is the most instructive of the group. Waymo said Friday, Sept. 18, that it plans to launch a fully autonomous, all-electric ride-hailing service in Singapore in 2028, working with the city-state’s Ministry of Transport and Land Transport Authority (LTA).

That is a two-year runway in a country roughly the size of New York City. It is also the first time a government welcoming Waymo has attached a labor condition to the invitation in writing.

Alphabet unit Waymo targets 2028 for Singapore robotaxis.The San Diego Union-Tribune / Getty Images

Why Singapore is a harder robotaxi market than it looks

On paper, Singapore is the easy version of this problem. Dense, wealthy, English-speaking, obsessively mapped and governed by a transport ministry that plans in decades rather than quarters.

I lined up Waymo’s four international announcements by date, and the pattern is not really about technology. Each new market has handed the company a different political problem to solve, and Singapore’s is the one American cities have spent five years avoiding.

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The country is not waiting on Waymo, either. Grab (GRAB) and WeRide (WRD) opened Singapore’s first public autonomous passenger service in the Punggol residential district on April 1, after a trial phase that carried more than 1,000 riders and logged over 30,000 kilometers of autonomous driving, according to Grab. Rival operator ComfortDelGro runs vehicles built on Pony.ai technology through its Zig app.

Those partnerships were announced last September, which means Singaporeans had been riding driverless vehicles for months before Waymo booked its slot, as Fortune reported.

What Waymo promised Singapore and when riders can book it

The rollout plan is deliberately unhurried. An initial fleet of all-electric Jaguar I-PACE vehicles arrives in the coming months, trained specialists drive them manually through 2027 to build high-definition maps and adapt the system to local road geometry and monsoon weather, and commercial rides through the Waymo app follow in 2028, subject to approvals the company does not yet hold.

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Singapore “has built one of the safest, most efficient, and most forward-thinking transportation ecosystems in the world,” said Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana. Transport Minister Jeffrey Siow said the vehicles will be deployed first in the west of the country, starting with the Labrador and HarbourFront area, according to Mothership.

Tokyo shows how fast the framing hardens once a market is locked in. The Japanese service is meant to run with nobody at the wheel from launch, and “from day one, this will be an unmanned service for the public,” Mawakana told reporters there, reported Reuters.

Here is how the four international markets stack up:

United Kingdom: London announced in October 2025 as Waymo’s first market outside the US, with Jaguar I-PACE vehicles testing on public roads, according to Fortune.

Japan: Tokyo targeted for 2027 with taxi operator Nihon Kotsu and the GO app, starting small before scaling to roughly 100 vehicles, reported Reuters.

Germany: Munich targeted for late 2027, the company’s third international market and first in the EU, according to CNBC.

Singapore: commercial service targeted for 2028 through the Waymo app, in partnership with the Ministry of Transport and LTA, according to Waymo.

What Singapore said about taxi and private hire drivers

Read the statement closely and you find the sentence that makes this announcement different from the other three. The government said it will not allow autonomous vehicle deployment to “run ahead of our ability to retrain and support affected drivers,” building on a manpower transition package announced in July, according to the LTA.

My analysis of that line is that it functions as a throttle, not a slogan. Singapore is telling one of the best-funded private companies in the world that fleet growth is tied to a retraining timetable the state controls, and it put that in the same release that welcomed the company in.

The scale is modest for now. Siow said driverless vehicles will add capacity to the taxi and private hire fleet and fill gaps, including trips human drivers avoid and hours when public transport has stopped running.

The incumbents already work that way. Grab’s Punggol service created new roles for its driver-partners, including safety operator and remote operator positions. Both Grab and ComfortDelGro have set up academies to move drivers into fleet and remote monitoring work.

For anyone driving for a living in Atlanta or Austin or Phoenix, that is the part worth watching. No US city has offered its drivers a written promise about pace. Singapore just did, and that language tends to get copied once one government proves it can be enforced without scaring the technology away.

What a fourth country means for Alphabet investors

None of this shows up in Alphabet’s results yet. Other Bets, the segment that houses Waymo, generated $450 million in revenue and an operating loss of $1.2 billion in the first quarter of 2026, according to The Motley Fool, and the company does not break out Waymo separately.

Capital is not the constraint. Waymo raised $16 billion at a $126 billion valuation earlier this year, according to TechCrunch, which buys a lot of patience in markets where approvals take years.

The prize is still theoretical and very large. The global robotaxi market could be worth more than $400 billion by 2035, with the US portion at roughly $48 billion, according to Goldman Sachs estimates cited by The Motley Fool.

What Singapore adds is not revenue in 2028. It is a template. Waymo now has four national regulators grading its safety case at once, and the one with the strictest labor language also has the cleanest roads and the most patient government.

If the retraining condition turns out to be workable, expect London, Munich and Tokyo to reach for the same language, and expect the robotaxi bull case to start pricing labor politics alongside lidar.

Related: Waymo is bringing robotaxis to the country that invented cars

For India, the key question is are energy savings from buying Russian oil worth the costs of tariffs and trade losses threatened by the U.S.

Bank of America’s industrials team just returned from a data center conference in Washington, and the Sept. 17 note it published gives AI infrastructure stock investors a lot to work with. 

Demand from hyperscalers such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta is holding up, order books of data center infrastructure sellers remain strong, and the biggest cooling and power vendors are still winning orders.

What has become harder is turning approved orders into completed facilities because of permit delays and community pushback.

Analyst Andrew Obin and his team reiterated Buy ratings on the industrial suppliers most exposed to AI capital spending. For anyone holding shares in the sector or considering it, the reason for their read could bring insights to what the group can deliver from here.

BofA reiterates Buy ratings across the data center supply chain

The note reiterated Buy ratings on a specific group: Eaton (ETN), GE Vernova (GEV), Vertiv (VRT), Trane Technologies (TT), Johnson Controls (JCI), Forgent Power Solutions (FPS), and INNIO (INIO). These are the companies that supply the electrical gear, thermal systems, and generation equipment used inside and around new hyperscale AI sites.

Obin’s team wrote that the event confirmed three points its analysts have argued all year. “Demand is still strong, speed to market is the key determinant, and ‘token economics’ remain advantageous,” they said in a BofA Global Research report shared with me.

The analysts also pushed back on quality concerns that had followed Vertiv earlier in the year. “Our sense is that Vertiv is not experiencing quality issues different than the broader industry,” they wrote in the same BofA Global Research report, adding that industry participants pointed to Vertiv’s “premier reputation.” 

That commentary directly answers a debate that has followed the stock since its second-quarter revenue miss in late July, when shares fell 17% in a single session.

Bank of America’s industrials analyst team said local opposition and permitting delays have become the biggest risk factor for the AI data center buildout.James Leynse / Getty Images

Permitting delays and community pushback are the new risk

In the same BofA Global Research report, the analysts noted that local opposition to data centers has “become an increased risk factor over the last 6-9 months,” and developers are now responding with public commitments they would not have made a year ago.

Loudoun County, Virginia, which hosts more data centers than anywhere else in the world, advanced a proposed 12-month pause on new applications on Sept. 15, Fox 5 reported. Similar reviews or delays are moving through other counties in Virginia and cities in Georgia, and GE Vernova’s CEO warned about the same trend at the Bernstein conference in May.

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The BofA note explained how CoreWeave is trying to defuse that pushback. “We use less water than a swimming pool, we signed the Ratepayer Pledge so your electricity bill is not going up, and our fans are 40 decibels,” a CoreWeave representative said. 

The Ratepayer Protection Pledge, which the White House announced on March 4, asks signatories to fully fund their own power supply and grid upgrades so household bills do not absorb the buildout costs.

Why Vertiv, Eaton, and GE Vernova sit at the center of the AI buildout

Vertiv makes the power distribution units, uninterruptible power supplies, and liquid cooling systems that keep AI servers running and prevent them from overheating. Eaton produces the switchgear and transformers that connect the grid to server racks. GE Vernova supplies the gas turbines and grid equipment that generate and move the electricity.

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The demand for infrastructure is showing up in these companies’ reports.

Vertiv guided full-year 2026 sales to a range of $13.5 billion to $14.0 billion. GE Vernova posted second-quarter revenue of $11.1 billion and a record $176 billion backlog, with Electrification bookings driven directly by data center orders, according to its SEC filing. Eaton has booked roughly $5 billion in year-to-date data center orders in its Electrical Americas segment.

Andrew Obin has covered multi-industry names at BofA for more than a decade, and his team’s ratings on this group have stayed steady through the buildout. That consistency matters when opinions on AI capital spending keep shifting, because it tells investors whether recent pullbacks reflect a real change in the business.

What everyday investors should watch next

The BofA note is a useful signal for investors holding or considering these stocks. The short-term drivers remain the same ones that pushed the stocks higher in the first half of the year, but the risk has changed.

Local opposition can delay projects even when demand and financing are in place, and a single development pause in a hub like Loudoun County can delay backlog conversion by several quarters.

That means the pace at which orders become revenue may become uncertain. Companies with flexible production and modular equipment are better positioned to adjust if the situation shifts toward smaller edge data centers closer to end users.

Newer investors should keep two things in mind. Valuations across the group have already climbed, and Vertiv in particular trades at a premium multiple that leaves less cushion for a missed quarter. AI capital spending also still depends on a small group of hyperscalers whose plans could shift as they compare capacity with revenue. 

Vertiv’s CEO has raised concerns about how tight construction timelines have become. This means allocating your capital carefully and having a clear view of your holding period matters more now.

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Allyson Felix has already won 11 Olympic medals and is now attempting to make the U.S. Olympic team at 42 and compete at the 2028 Los Angeles Games.

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When you operate a business, it costs you money to not be open. You still pay rent and utilities even when you’re closed.

Because of that, back in my toy store general manager days, I tried very hard to keep the store open profitabliy as much as possible, That didn’t just mean opening the doors more, but finding an audience for those dayparts.

On Friday nights, for example, we kep part of the store open for people to play Magic: The Gathering. That meant paying someone to officiate the games and having a front desk person to sell candy and snacks.

We easily sold enough food and drinks to make the time profitable, offsetting the added employee, and utility costs.

During Christmas seasons we opened two hours earlier most days and on Easter, I opened by myself, selling few thousand dollars worth of items, mostly to older customers with nowhere to go.

Still, it would make no sense for us to be open late night or early morning, but I tried hard to maximize our hours, while balancing costs.

That same basic calculation helps explain why breakfast can be attractive to a restaurant chain. Wendy’s began offering breakfast nationally in May 2020, giving its restaurants a way to generate sales during hours when many locations had previously been closed.

Those efforts initially showed promise, but the numbers have fallen, and now the company has quietly dropped breakfast at a number of restaurants, cut back hours at others, and a recent franchisee Chapter 11 bankruptcy will see another 120 Wendy’s locations drop, or limit the times it sells the morning meal.

Wendy’s breakfast sales have slowed

Wendy’s, which has closed hundreds of underperforming stores, has seen its sales slow.

“Global systemwide sales declined 6.5% on a constant currency basis, primarily driven by U.S. same-restaurant sales, which declined 7.0% and the impact of 289 U.S. restaurant closures in the first half of the year,” CFO Steven Cirulis said during the chain’s second-quarter earnings call.

A drop in breakfast sales was part of that.

“The decline in U.S. same-restaurant sales was driven by a 12.5% decrease in traffic, which included the impact of less discounting and reducing or eliminating breakfast operating hours at certain locations, partially offset by a 5.6% increase in average check,” he added.

Breakfast, in Q2, accounted for 5.5% of overall sales. That’s down from 8% in the second quarter of 2020.

CEO Robert Wright admits that the company has not fully figured out the morning daypart.

“Breakfast is important to us, and it’s a complex topic that, frankly, we’re still analyzing very deeply. It can’t be disconnected from the broader strategy and the work that we’re doing there,” he said.

Wendy’s has tried various promotions to drive breakfast sales. Shutterstock

Wendy’s lets franchisees drop breakfast

Wendy’s has allowed franchises to opt out of breakfast sales.

“The large majority of the system continues to serve breakfast. We did have some opt-out activity. And frankly, it was very helpful for some of the franchisees that took advantage of that opt-out because it was a drag on their business,” he said.

He has not committed to allowing chains to permanently drop breakfast.

“For some franchisees, the opt-out was really helpful and provided a little bit of a relief valve, but it’s still a key area that’s under evaluation for us. And as I said, we need to get our footing on the remainder of the strategy before we start deciding exactly where breakfast fits into that,” he shared.

Meritage Chapter 11 bankruptcy impacts breakfast sales

And now, major Wendy’s restaurant franchisee Meritage Hospitality Group Inc., which operates over 350 locations in 15 states, which includes some non-Wendy’s restaurants, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy to reorganize its business and restructure its debt, almost 11 months after defaulting on its franchise agreements for failing to remit payments.

Meritage Hospitality and 14 affiliates filed their petition in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Michigan on Sept. 17, 2026, listing $10 million to $50 million in assets and debts, TheStreet’s Kirk O’Neil reported.

The franchise operator ran 314 Wendy’s locations, about 5% of the brand’s total U.S. restaurants.

“Meritage closed 60 underperforming stores that helped strengthen its system and exited breakfast or altered that daypart in about 120 underperforming locations,” Retail Dive reported.

Wendy’s has struggled with breakfast

Wendy’s breakfast sales reached 8.5% of the total in the fourth quarter of 2021, when the company changed how it reported breakfast sales.

“We transitioned away from disclosing breakfast sales mix targets as we measure the success of the breakfast business by sales volumes,” a company spokesperson told Nation’s Restaurant News (NRN).

At the time, the company stated its goal as reaching $3,000 to $3,500 in breakfast sales per restaurant per week.

In a March 2024 interview with NRN BTIG analyst Peter Saleh said he believed the daypart is sufficiently filling a “big hole” in Wendy’s business and the approach this time around better positions the brand in the morning daypart.

“The way they had done it in the past was more market-by-market. They really hadn’t done it nationally all at once and that gave competitors, predominantly McDonald’s, the chance to come into their markets and coupon like crazy,” Saleh said. “The national strategy they have now is better.”

Saleh did note that changing breakfast habits is hard, and that Wendy’s made a mistake by not making coffee part of its focus.

“You’ve got to get people to switch from what they’re used to, which is really hard to do, especially if you’re not promoting coffee. Customers will come in for coffee and, at the very least, get that coffee which is high margin, and the best case get a coffee and sandwich and drive real incremental sales. I’m surprised they didn’t focus on coffee out of the gate,” he said.

RTM Nexus CEO Dominick Miserandino understands what Wendy’s is doing.

“While it is an economic reality, it’s a sad moment because so many people remember the chicken biscuit sandwiches,” he told TheStreet.

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