Albertsons North Texas Layoffs – 138 Workers Losing Jobs as Two Tarrant County Stores Go Dark

A grocery store closing has a subtle, devastating quality. It’s not a corporate office park or a tech campus. It’s a place where people buy milk on a Tuesday night, where the produce section smells authentic, and where the checkout employees know regular customers by name. 138 employees will lose their jobs when two Albertsons-owned stores in Tarrant County, North Texas, close by late April 2026. The neighborhoods surrounding those stores will also lose something more difficult to measure.

What local reports had been circulating for days were confirmed by the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filings that companies are legally required to submit before mass layoffs. Within a few weeks, both Tarrant County locations—which are a part of Albertsons’ larger network of brands—will go dark.

When questioned about it, the company used standard corporate language, such as “continuously evaluating regional market dynamics and making changes when needed.” However, when you’re one of 138 people told that your position no longer exists in a market that the company is simply retreating from, that framing feels flimsy.

The situation in North Texas is not isolated. The Federal Trade Commission’s blocking of Albertsons’ $24.6 billion merger with Kroger was the first step in a much bigger and messier picture. The deal was presented as the company’s best way to compete at the scale that contemporary grocery retail increasingly requires.

The idea was that a combined Albertsons-Kroger business might finally have the purchasing power and distribution muscle to push back against Walmart, which has been squeezing everyone for years with food prices that traditional supermarket chains truly struggle to match. The FTC declined. Albertsons is currently managing its existence as a stand-alone business in a market that wasn’t really intended for it to do so.

From there, the closures have been spreading outward in a pattern that resembles a slow bleed rather than deliberate pruning. 135 jobs were lost when Vons stores in Redlands and Escondido, California, closed in April. 75 more employees lost their jobs when an Albertsons store close to Riverside closed in March.

76 workers were impacted by the closure of a Safeway in Northern California earlier this year. 87 jobs will be eliminated when a Safeway in Washington, D.C., closes in May. The total from recent rounds alone surpasses 400 jobs when you include the numbers from North Texas. In 2025, the company had already closed about 20 stores. The math continues to go in a single direction.

The tension in Albertsons’ public discussions of all of this is difficult to ignore. A 21 percent increase in digital sales in Q3 2025 is proof that the company is making wise adjustments, according to CEO Susan Morris, who has discussed leaning into automation and artificial intelligence. The official stance is that technology should complement workers rather than replace them.

At the executive level, that might be sincerely believed. However, one could forgive the Tarrant County stockers and cashiers who will lose their jobs by the end of April for reading those words with some skepticism. Increases in digital sales typically call for fewer employees in physical stores rather than more, and those stores are closing.

Investor concerns about Albertsons’ competitive position and its capacity to produce the kind of margins that justify its size are reflected in the company’s stock decline of about 22% over the past year. Even though the exact nature of the trouble is still unknown, there is a feeling that the market has already factored in additional difficulties.

The legal ramifications of the unsuccessful Kroger merger remain unresolved, with California and a group of states requesting over $10 million to cover the expenses incurred in preventing the merger. That kind of continuous legal drag is the last thing the balance sheet needs for a business that is already struggling financially.

The larger message that the Albertsons North Texas situation conveys about which markets the company is willing to abandon and which it is choosing to defend makes it especially noteworthy. The North Texas corridor surrounding Fort Worth and the nearby Tarrant County communities is highly populated and economically active, and Texas is a competitive grocery state. Eliminating that market is a strategic retreat from a market that healthier competitors will almost certainly enter, not a small cost-cutting measure.

This pattern has previously been observed in the grocery industry. Before declaring bankruptcy, A&P, which was formerly the biggest retailer in the US, slowly withdrew from markets it couldn’t profitably serve for decades. The current round of closures may be a deliberate trimming that actually stabilizes the company’s overall position; Albertsons isn’t there and may never get there. However, as store after store closes in California, Texas, and Washington, it’s hard not to question whether the blocked Kroger merger was actually the pivotal moment or just the point at which an already-existing issue became unavoidable.

For the 138 employees in North Texas, those more significant issues are probably less important at this time. When a store closes, a job is lost, a routine is disturbed, and income needs to be replaced. Many impacted employees were reassigned to jobs at different locations, according to Albertsons, which is at least something. The WARN filings and the company’s official statements don’t fully address the question of whether that is true for all 138.