Rite Aid stores are closing 58% in Ohio and 49% in Michigan, totaling over 600; in Pennsylvania it is still 20%

HARRISBURG, Pa. (WHTM) – Rite Aid will soon have closed more than six of 10 of its stores in Ohio and nearly half of its stores in Michigan – by far the biggest cuts in one of its once largest markets – after closing 31 more stores identified in a court filing Friday.

The closures – 13 more in Ohio and 18 in Michigan – mean Rite Aid will have closed 58% of its 184 stores in Ohio and 49% of its 232 stores in Michigan before filing for bankruptcy in October 2023, according to an analysis of the new closures by abc27 News, aggregated with data from Scrapehero.

Michigan and Ohio were the pharmacy chain’s fourth and fifth largest markets, respectively, after California, Pennsylvania (where the chain is still headquartered – now in Philadelphia, previously in Camp Hill) and New York.

With the 31 newly announced closures, Rite Aid has now announced a total of 604 store closures since filing for bankruptcy, or 29% of the 2,063 stores it closed before filing, based on abc27’s count using Scrapehero data. That’s at the high end of analyst estimates early in the process.

Before the latest cuts, abc27 News reported last week, Rite Aid in early June had deviated from its previous bankruptcy-era practice of closing stores more or less proportionally to the size of the existing count (more stores in the states with more stores, fewer stores in the states with fewer stores, but about one in four to five stores in most markets were closed). Now Rite Aid is focusing almost exclusively on Ohio and Michigan.

In other states where Rite Aid operated 50 or more stores, the company has closed or will soon close 22% of its 449 stores in California, 20% of its 440 stores in Pennsylvania, 24% of its 240 stores in New York, 14% of its 115 stores in Washington state, 40% of its 102 stores in New Jersey, 19% of its 63 stores in Oregon, 45% of its 58 stores in Virginia and 9% of its 54 stores in New Hampshire.

The company did not respond to a request for comment. Experts speculated that the chain might focus on markets where it can compete for second place in pharmacy retail – such as Pennsylvania, where Walgreens is relatively weak, or the Pacific Northwest, where CVS is relatively weak – rather than Ohio and Michigan, where Rite Aid ranks a distant third behind the larger chains.

Under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, a company has the opportunity to get out of unfavorable store leases that can typically last 10 years or more. In other filings, Rite Aid has indicated that it is preparing to emerge from bankruptcy soon.