Kroger Announces Closure Of 60 Fred Meyer, QFC Stores
As many as 60 Fred Meyer and QFC stores will be closing over the next 18 months.
The parent company of the two regional grocery store chains, Kroger, announced its plans to shutter the stores on Friday.
The announcement came in the wake of first-quarter earnings reports from the company which indicated it had identified a $100 million reduction of assets at five dozen of its retail locations.
Kroger officials said they expect to see a "modest financial benefit" from the closures and will do their best to offer employment opportunities at other stores for workers who will be impacted.
The Cincinnati-based company operates over 2,700 stores in 35 states, including 132 Fred Meyer stores in the Pacific Northwest and 59 QFC locations in Washington and Oregon.
Kroger has reportedly declined media inquiries regarding the specific locations of the stores it intends to close, and would also not confirm if any of the planned shutterings would be in Eastern Washington, where it has eight Fred Meyer stores, including one each in East Wenatchee and Ellensburg.
The planned closures also come on the heels of a failed attempt by Kroger to purchase rival supermarket chains Albertsons and Safeway, which it mounted in 2022.
That deal, which was nixed in court last year, would have seen the company sell its duplicate locations to help preserve competition in overlapping markets.
Kroger reported a slight downturn in overall profits from Q1 2024, with $866 million in the first three months of 2025. The figure was generally pleasing to investors on Wall Street however, who sent the company's stock price surging by 9.8% to close at $71.97 per share following announcements of the earnings report.