The physical retail footprint story of 2026 was supposed to be about cautious optimism — fewer closures than in recent years, selective expansion by value players and category winners, and a broadly stabilizing store count. That narrative is getting harder to sustain.

Coresight Research's Weekly US Store Openings and Closures Tracker for Week 13 of 2026 — the most recent data available — shows store openings down 47% year-over-year. That is not a rounding error. It's a collapse in expansion activity that reflects real decision-making at the retailer level: leases not signed, locations not finalized, timelines pushed back while tariff and trade policy uncertainty continues to cloud cost structures.

Who Is Still Opening

Not everyone has gone quiet. The chains that are opening stores in 2026 tend to share a few characteristics: they have clear value propositions, domestic supply chain exposure that limits tariff risk, or long-term strategic commitments made before the current uncertainty began.

Dollar General, Aldi, and Tractor Supply continue to lead on the opening side, according to CNBC's earlier analysis of the full-year opening and closure landscape. BJ's, Burlington Stores, and Abercrombie & Fitch were also active through Week 10, though Week 13 data shows that momentum has significantly slowed.

The common thread among the openers: they are expanding into markets where they see sustainable demand drivers that transcend the current macro uncertainty — grocery-anchored locations, value-oriented demographics, or branded category dominance that doesn't require foot traffic to be perfect to work.

The Closure Side Has Its Own Momentum

As we've covered in recent weeks — including Zumiez's 25-store reduction and Nordstrom's continued full-line pullback — the closure side of the ledger has its own inertia. Coresight's Week 13 tracker flagged several chains including CVS Health, Designer Brands, Neiman Marcus, Saks Global, Shoe Carnival, and Winn-Dixie among companies with recent closure activity during that period.

The full-year projection — roughly 7,900 store closures — is actually below recent peak years and was initially described by analysts as a sign of normalization. But "normalization" in a year with openings running 47% below year-ago levels isn't the same kind of normalization. A retail market where closures are slowing but openings are also vanishing isn't stabilizing — it's contracting at both ends.

The Tariff Paralysis Theory

Real estate decisions in retail are long-lead. A location that opens today was typically committed to 12 to 18 months earlier. That means the current opening deficit partly reflects decisions made in late 2024 and early 2025 — when tariff uncertainty first began escalating significantly.

Retailers who might otherwise have green-lit expansions instead chose to wait. The calculus was straightforward: if your product costs might rise 15 to 25% due to tariff pass-through, opening a new location to sell those products requires different unit economics than you modeled under prior conditions. The lease terms don't flex. The labor costs don't flex. Only the merchandise margin does — and it's moving in the wrong direction.

CRE Daily's analysis of the opening/closing dynamic noted earlier this year that openings were "edging up" — a conclusion that Week 13 Coresight data now puts in question for at least the early spring period. The year-over-year comparisons will get easier as 2026 progresses, but the first quarter of 2026 is shaping up as one of the weakest for net new retail square footage in recent memory.

The Selective Expansion Playbook

The retailers still expanding aren't ignoring the environment — they're responding to it differently. Dollar General and Aldi can open stores at price points that work even in a cost-elevated environment because their formats are inherently lean. Tractor Supply serves a rural consumer base with limited competitive alternatives. These are not expansions based on optimism about the macro; they're expansions based on specific structural advantages.

For retailers without those advantages — mid-tier specialty, apparel, home goods — the rational move is exactly what the data shows: wait. The problem is that waiting has its own cost: competitors who don't wait gain market access and real estate position in locations that won't be available again for years.

The opening count for Week 13 is a data point, not a verdict. But it's the kind of data point that, if it persists into Q2, will prompt a significant revision to the year's expansion narrative — and to the assumptions being made about what retail looks like in 2027.