WARN Feed · layoffs by industry

US retail store closings and layoffs — the actual WARN Act filings, rebuilt every day

4,327 retail layoff and closing notices filed with state labour agencies under the WARN Act, from 1988 to 2026, covering 427,787 reported workers at 1,171 employers in 46 states. Free, CC BY 4.0, rebuilt every morning from the agency portals — no login, no key, no email.

Download every sector-tagged notice (CSV) This industry as its own dataset on Hugging Face

Who is in this cut

Included: department stores, supermarkets and grocers, big-box and specialty chains, apparel and footwear retailers, pharmacies with a retail name, and outlet and dollar-store operators.

What counts as retail here: the employer name reads as a store, chain, supermarket, grocer, outlet, mart or one of ~150 named retailers (Macy's, Walmart, Kmart, Kroger, Big Lots, Bed Bath & Beyond…). Restaurants, hotels and casinos are deliberately NOT here — they are in the sector dataset under hospitality_food_service — and neither are e-commerce platforms, which the tech cut holds. The sector_rule column names the pattern that put each row here.

Why this file exists

Store-closing lists circulate as news round-ups and screenshots. The filings behind them — which store, which town, how many workers, what date, whether the state recorded it as a closure or a layoff — sit on 48 separate state portals. This file assembles them as one retail series, with the closure/layoff split the states themselves recorded.

The employers with the most retail notices on record

Counted per notice, not per event: a company that files in four states files four notices. Employer names are the resolved spelling — the raw agency spelling is kept in the download.

The 15 most recent retail notices

Date is the notice date where the agency publishes one, otherwise the layoff date. 1,876 of the 4,327 notices in this cut are recorded as a closure rather than a layoff.

How the industry is decided: no state WARN portal publishes an industry field, so there is no NAICS column to filter on. The sector here is assigned from the resolved employer name by a published rule table (19 sectors, 3,152 patterns, first match wins), and every row carries the pattern that fired in its sector_rule column so you can audit or re-cut it. The archive holds 61,428 notices; 61,232 of them carry a usable date and are in the sector file (196 have no date in either column), 32,168 come out with a sector, and 29,064 stay unclassified — and are still counted in every total shown anywhere on this site. Manual audit 2026-09-12: 4 of 60 sampled rows were assigned to the wrong sector. Rebuilt 2026-09-24.

How to check any of this

Every number on this page is computed at build time from notices_by_sector.csv (one row per notice, with the sector and the rule that assigned it), and the yearly series from sector_by_year.csv. The free HTTP API serves the whole archive as JSON, NDJSON and per-state CSV with no key. This industry is also published as its own Hugging Face dataset, and the full sector cut as one file. If a number here disagrees with the file, the file is right and it is a bug — tell us and it is fixed the next morning.

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