The October 2026 Store Count

Published October 28, 2026 · The Store Count

This is the first monthly report from The Store Count. It covers the store-locator runs of September 19 to October 17, 2026, and the first full grading of the 81 chains we track. 35 of them passed our quality gate: 31 still trading and 4 that have closed.

The short version

• The fastest verified growth over the past year belongs to Dutch Bros: +192 locations (▲ 17.7%). Cava grew at the same rate from a smaller base (+76).
• The biggest verified decline is Outback Steakhouse: −24 restaurants (▼ 3.5%).
• Pizza Hut is the clearest closure story of 2026 so far. Its locator count is down 211 since early January, close to the roughly 250 closures announced in February.
• Wendy's reported 245 fewer US restaurants in the first half of 2026, but its store locator barely moved.
• Across the 15 chains where we publish store-level lists, 78 stores appeared on the locators this month and 23 are no longer listed.

Who grew and who shrank over the past year

Only 13 of the 31 chains have a 12-month change we can call verified: one where the locator count at the start of the period matched a count the company itself published. The rest are shown on their pages as estimates.

Growth is concentrated in drive-thru coffee and fast-casual restaurants. Dutch Bros has 1,274 shops on its locator, up 192 in a year. Cava is at 505. Among retailers, Costco (+25 warehouses) and O'Reilly Auto Parts (+187 stores) are the steadiest openers.

On the other side, Outback Steakhouse has 24 fewer restaurants than a year ago, and Grocery Outlet’s own filings show 547 stores in July against 570 in January. Several of the largest chains barely moved: Dollar General (+12), AutoZone (−1) and Kohl's (−3).

Pizza Hut: the announced closures are showing up

Yum Brands said in February that about 250 underperforming US Pizza Huts would close in the first half of the year (Nation’s Restaurant News). Pizza Hut’s store locator listed 6,468 restaurants in the first week of January and lists 6,257 now, 211 fewer. We mark that change as an estimate because Pizza Hut doesn’t publish its own US count often enough for us to anchor it. Its direction and size match the announcement.

Wendy’s: the filings and the locator disagree

Wendy’s 10-Q for the second quarter says it had 5,724 US restaurants on June 28, down from 5,969 at the end of 2025. Its store locator counted 5,863 in mid-October, and the number has been almost flat all year (+1 since January). The two numbers are still within 5% of each other, so Wendy’s keeps grade A, but the gap is growing. Either closed restaurants are still listed on the locator, or the locator includes restaurants the company counts differently. We’ll compare again when its third-quarter filing comes out.

New and gone, store by store

For 15 chains we now compare the store list from about four weeks ago with the two newest runs. A store counts as no longer on the locator only if it is missing from both runs and nothing of the chain is within 50 metres. That isn’t the same as closed, and we don’t call it closed.

The biggest net additions were at Dollar Tree (31 new, 12 no longer listed) and Dutch Bros (13 new, 0 no longer listed). Aldi added 56 stores to its locator in the month, more than any other chain we track. Aldi said in January it would open more than 180 US stores in 2026 (Axios), including conversions of former Southeastern Grocers supermarkets. Aldi’s count isn’t anchored to a company number, so it isn’t in the store-level chart.

What we didn’t publish, and why

Some of the most-searched chains have no page yet, because their store locators aren’t reliable right now. Walmart, Target, Lowe’s, Macy’s, McDonald’s and Five Below each had half or more of their last eight weekly runs rejected by our cleaning rules. A run is rejected for coming back empty, partial, or far from the chain’s usual level. We show those chains’ own reported counts in the tracker as estimates and will publish pages when the locators recover.

The cleaning also caught two partial Walgreens runs this month, on Oct 3 and Oct 17, which returned about 6,504 and 3,744 stores against a steady 7,883. Both were rejected, and the published Walgreens count didn’t move. Earlier in the year, a three-month dip in Wingstop’s locator to about 1,315 restaurants was rejected once the count came back.

What’s next

Most store closures are announced from January to March, after the holidays and around fourth-quarter earnings. Our page for 2027 closures goes up in mid-December. The November report will add the third-quarter filings, due in the coming weeks from most of the public companies we track.

All counts are as of each chain’s latest clean weekly run, up to Oct 17, 2026. The data behind this report is in the Oct 17, 2026 dataset.