Which California counties lost the most retail jobs from store closures in 2025?
Executive summary
Available national and state reporting shows California absorbed the largest absolute share of announced U.S. retail store closures in 2025, driving outsized retail job losses statewide, but the public reporting assembled for this briefing does not provide a county-by-county tally of retail job losses; therefore a definitive ranked list of California counties by retail-job losses cannot be produced from these sources alone [1] [2] [3].
1. California was the epicenter of 2025’s retail contraction — in the aggregate
Multiple industry trackers and outlets identified California as the state with the highest number of announced retail closures in 2025, with Coresight and subsequent press reporting citing hundreds of Californian locations among major chains’ downsizings and projecting as many as 15,000 U.S. closures that year; those same reports single out California’s large retail footprint as the reason it tops the raw counts [1] [2] [3].
2. Major chains driving California job losses — company-level signals, not county totals
High-profile announcements from Macy’s, JCPenney, Kohl’s, Big Lots, Walgreens/CVS and others accounted for many of the multi-store closures reported in 2025, and several outlets explicitly said California was among the hardest-hit states in those company plans (examples: Macy’s nationwide closures affecting California, Kohl’s and Big Lots noting substantial California losses) — these firm-level disclosures imply concentrated retail job cuts but do not break employment losses down by county in the reporting available here [2] [4] [5] [6].
3. Job-loss magnitude is clear at the industry level, not geographically granular
Analysts and job-cut trackers documented a sharp spike in retail-sector layoffs in 2025 — Challenger, Gray & Christmas and other compilations showed tens of thousands of announced retail job cuts in the first half of the year and commentators pointed to a 274% surge in retail layoffs tied to store closings overall — yet those datasets, as cited in the public storylines provided, summarize national or state totals rather than producing county-level breakdowns for California [7] [8] [9].
4. Why county-level data is missing from these reports (and where to look next)
The outlets assembled for this review focus on chain-level announcements and state-level maps; commercial trackers like Starcycle normalize closure pressure by state and even promote planning services, which helps explain the state-focused presentation and absence of county-by-county employment tallies in these pieces [3]. For a county-level accounting, public sources would generally include unemployment insurance filings, county economic development reports, Coresight Research raw datasets, or county-by-county company location lists cross-referenced against layoff notices — none of which appear in the material provided here [2] [1].
5. Reasonable inference — and why it is only an inference
Given the reporting that California led the nation in raw closure counts and that major national chains disproportionately close stores in populous metropolitan markets, it is plausible that the state’s largest retail counties (Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Alameda, Santa Clara, San Bernardino, Riverside) bore the largest absolute retail job losses; however, that plausible inference cannot be asserted as fact because the supplied sources do not supply county-level job-loss figures or a verified mapping of each closed location to county employment tallies [1] [2] [5]. Importantly, analysts also remind readers that per-capita closure rates can tell a different story than absolute counts — a point illustrated by prior analyses showing populous states naturally record more total closures even if their per-capita rates are lower [10].