If your weekly grocery run involves the Safeway store around the corner, enjoy it while you can. The beloved supermarket chain is quietly closing more stores across the US as its parent company, Albertsons, reassesses its sprawling network - and shoppers in some communities are being left without stores that have served them for decades. The latest closures come as grocery shoppers continue to grapple with stubbornly high food prices and increasingly limited choices. And while Safeway isn't disappearing , a growing list of store shutdowns is raising questions about what the future of neighborhood supermarkets will look like. Safeway's Newport, Oregon, location at 2220 N Coast Highway closed in July after serving the community for around 30 years. It followed the closure of a Safeway at 1601 Maryland Ave. NE in Washington, D.C., which shut its doors on May 16 after four decades in business. The Hayward, California, store at 231 W. Jackson St. also closed in February. For regular customers, these aren't simply empty retail units. They can mean longer drives, fewer choices and another familiar fixture disappearing from the neighborhood.

The closures are part of a wider rethink by Albertsons, which owns Safeway along with grocery brands including Vons, Jewel-Osco, ACME, Shaw's and Tom Thumb. Albertsons had slowed its store-review process while its proposed merger with Kroger was being fought in court - but after the $24.6 billion deal collapsed, the company resumed evaluating its locations. The company has been increasingly willing to make what it calls 'difficult decisions' about stores that aren't performing as hoped. Albertsons closed 35 stores during fiscal 2025, more than triple the 10 it closed the previous year. It also opened nine new stores and completed 94 remodels, showing that the strategy isn't only about shrinking the business.

Instead, the company is trying to move money toward stores and markets it believes have better long-term potential. 'We're continually looking at our store base and making decisions on whether to keep the stores or can we turn them around, can we change the profitability or making the difficult decisions from time to time to exit those stores,' Albertsons CEO Susan Morris said during the company's first-quarter earnings call. She added that the company had not seen a dramatic improvement in store profitability. There is a much bigger corporate drama lurking behind the grocery-store closures.

Albertsons and Kroger announced plans for a merger in 2022, but the deal faced fierce opposition from regulators who argued that combining two of the country's largest grocery chains could reduce competition and potentially push prices higher. The Federal Trade Commission ultimately succeeded in blocking the transaction in December 2024. The failed merger then triggered a legal battle between the two companies, with Albertsons seeking a $600 million termination fee from Kroger and Kroger filing counterclaims. With the merger off the table, Albertsons has been left to chart its own path - and that includes taking a much harder look at its stores. The closures are particularly frustrating for customers who already feel they are paying too much at the checkout.

On Reddit, Safeway employees and shoppers have been debating the chain's struggles, with some pointing to high prices and reduced staffing as reasons customers are looking elsewhere. One commenter claimed Safeway's prices could be '$4-$5 more expensive for the SAME item' than elsewhere, while another simply wrote: 'I don't like Safeway. Too expensive.' A Safeway employee also claimed that sales had fallen significantly and that customers were increasingly heading to cheaper rivals including Aldi and Trader Joe's. Those are individual opinions rather than company-wide data, but they illustrate the pressure facing traditional supermarkets as consumers become increasingly price-conscious. Albertsons hasn't released a complete list of future Safeway closures, so customers shouldn't assume every struggling store is about to disappear.