Overview
We were undercounting.
In April, Coresight revised its projection for 2026 U.S. store closures upward to more than 15,000 locations, with the majority happening in the first half of the year. That is close to twice the number that was being cited in industry write-ups as recently as late winter. Over 30 million square feet of retail real estate is on track to leave the market this year alone.
The volume part of these stories is familiar by now. Pizza Hut is closing 250 underperforming locations in the first half of the year. Kroger has named 60 unprofitable stores for closure. 7-Eleven has put 645 locations on the list. JCPenney is rolling closures through the spring. Saks OFF 5TH is wrapping up a 57-store wind-down. IKEA closed its Memphis location on May 3. Walgreens continues working through the Sycamore-led restructuring.
Plenty of analysis on what is driving it. Tariffs, leverage, e-commerce erosion, balance sheet stress, post-COVID consumer behavior. All of it real.
What has been getting less attention is what happens in the trenches when this volume hits the people who actually run the closing sales. And specifically, what happens when something goes wrong on a deal that ends up in court.
A Public Case Study
A high-profile Canadian liquidation that began in 2025 is still working its way through the courts. In court filings, the retailer's CFO has alleged that the lead liquidator's own projections for furniture, fixtures, and equipment sales came in at roughly $17 million, while actual recovery landed at $10.7 million. On top of that shortfall, the company is now estimating an additional $7.9 million in cost to physically remove the unsold inventory. Roughly $14 million in disputed performance, in one piece of one deal.
The CFO's affidavit attributes the shortfall to delayed start times, poor discounting, and failure to secure bulk buyers. The liquidator's response is essentially that the retailer should have known these risks were possible when it agreed to the process. Both sides are arguing based on internal records, recollection, and the testimony of people who were there.
The case is more complicated than a simple buyer-seller dispute, because the same firm is acting both as the lead liquidator and as one of the lenders providing the debtor-in-possession financing. When one party is operating in multiple roles inside a single restructuring, the question of who has neutral data about what actually happened on the ground gets a lot more pointed.
This is a public case. The numbers are in court filings. The lesson is not specific to this deal.
What Happens When Nobody Has the Receipts
A retail liquidator leading a 254-store joint venture between three firms cannot easily verify that sign walkers showed up at every intersection with standardized precision. A regional manager verifying coverage across 60 stores cannot concurrently verify every shift with text messages and phone calls. The vendor providing the walkers self-reports based on regional manager input. The regional manager self-reports to the consultant. The consultants report to their district leads and eventually the lead liquidation firm.
At each level, the person above is taking the word of the person below, usually supported by a phone call, a text message, and a spreadsheet that gets reconciled on Monday morning. That worked ok when the biggest deal was 200 stores and the people involved had known each other for fifteen years. It worked less well when retail deals stack upon each other and there are now 1500 stores closing in any given week, when three firms share a 254-store JV, or when a five-firm syndicate runs a national wind-down on a 90-day timeline.
When a dispute eventually surfaces, and at this scale and pace it eventually does, there is no independent record. Both sides are working from internal documentation handwritten and produced by people with a stake in the outcome.
It is not that anyone is doing the job badly. The tools just have not kept pace with the scale. And that tooling gap is now showing up at the top of the industry, where it has real consequences.
The Industry Response So Far
The liquidation firms have been steadily building capacity to handle this kind of complexity on the business side.
One of the major firms acquired a full investment banking and restructuring advisory shop earlier this spring, deepening its pre-bankruptcy advisory bench and giving it more visibility into deals before the formal filing even starts. Another is now serving as integration agent on a $175 million asset-based financing for a national pet distribution acquisition, providing real estate optimization, footprint assessment, and lease transition planning alongside the capital. A third has built out a dedicated investigations, dispute resolution, and monitorship practice with senior hires, signaling that disputes inside restructurings are now common enough and material enough to staff for permanently.
This is what an evolving industry looks like. The firms running these deals are not standing still.
The pattern is consistent with what I wrote about the capital and advisory layer in earlier pieces this spring. Sophisticated modeling, investment banking, direct lending, dispute resolution - the business side has been adding receipts.
What has been slower to arrive, in public, is an equivalent build-out for the field side. That is the next phase.
What Field-Side Verification Actually Looks Like
The field side of a retail liquidation produces a specific kind of data that, until recently, has not been captured in any structured way. A sign walker shows up at an intersection. The walker is at a specific location at a specific time, holding a specific sign for a specific store. None of that is in dispute when it happens. It is only in dispute later, when someone has to ask a soon-to-be-unemployed assistant store manager to reconstruct what happened on a Saturday in April from memory, text message threads, and maybe a spreadsheet.
Over the last couple of years, this data has become available to capture at the moment the work is happening, without asking the walker to download anything, log in, or learn anything. A link is sent to the walker's phone before the shift. The walker taps the link, GPS is captured at submit time, photos of the sign and the store are uploaded with timestamps and location data, ongoing GPS data is recorded on demand, and a shareable proof page is generated that any authorized party can view.
The walker is in and out of the interaction in less time than it would take to send a text - they receive notifications about their shift and sign in links automatically. Their regional manager gets the notification. The liquidation consultant gets the notification. All automatic. No downloads. No installs. Summary hours and audit reports for any shifts over any period of time are available on demand. The friction reduction is instantaneous. The record exists because the work was done, not because someone remembered to enter it later.
A handful of operators are running this in small test markets right now. The volume is modest. The structural change is not modest.
The thing that makes this kind of data useful at the counterparty level is that it is captured the same way regardless of who is asking. A regional manager sees the same proof page that the liquidator sees that an auditor would see. Nobody is producing custom reports or editing spreadsheets. The record is securely what it is.
That is what counterparty data means. It is data that exists independent of who needs it next.
Where This Is Heading
The retail closing waves and volume in this industry are not the bottleneck anymore. Coresight has revised the closure projection up by nearly twice what was being cited five months ago. The deal flow is here, and it is going to keep coming through 2026 and into 2027.
The capital and advisory side of this industry has been building for years to handle that flow. The dispute resolution and monitorship capacity now being staffed up at the top firms is a reasonable response to the kind of complexity that produces $14 million court fights.
The more durable response is upstream of that. When the field-level record exists in real time, the conditions that produce those fights start to dissolve. Verification at the moment of the work is not just a clean-up tool. It is a prophylactic.
A neutral, counterparty-grade field record is becoming standard equipment in this industry the same way the analytics platforms became standard equipment ten years ago. It will not be optional much longer.
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