Oh, SNAP! Now, Trump Is Shutting Down Grocery Stores

The effects of gutting the SNAP program reach further downstream than you might realize

Image licensed from Adobe Stock

It seemed like a good idea at the time. The city of Chicago awarded a $13.5 million grant to Yellow Banana, a Cleveland-based grocery logistics company, to reopen six shuttered grocery stores.

The grocery stores served food deserts¹ on the city’s south and west sides. Folks in places such as Chicago’s Auburn Gresham neighborhood on the city’s far south side were finally getting an opportunity to satisfy a long-term hunger for real food in real grocery stores.

The food deserts appeared when name-brand stores, including Whole Foods, pulled out of these neighborhoods. Whole Foods pulled out of a much-ballyhooed location in Englewood four years ago. It was replaced by a discount grocer named Save A Lot under a separate program set up by the city (one that is also in trouble).

After receiving its grant, Yellow Banana then contracted with Save A Lot to bring the six other shuttered supermarkets back to life.

All of these stores have one thing in common: They serve communities in Chicago in dire need of reliable, reasonably priced grocery stores. These are communities containing neighborhoods with a heavy dependency on the federal SNAP program, formerly known as food stamps.

But now, all six Save A Lot stores under the $13.5 million grant will be shut down on Saturday (July 25) unless an investing angel or other bright light swoops in to save them. The Save A Lot that replaced Whole Foods is also reportedly closing.

The primary reason?

The Save A Lot stores have lost 26 percent of their SNAP sales since the Trump regime gutted the SNAP program through the “One Big Beautiful Bill” of death (aka: One Big Bill of Death) passed on July 4, 2025.²

It all started with the decimation of the SNAP program

The One Big Bill of Death cut an almost inconceivable $186 billion from the SNAP program, affecting approximately 42 million people.³

The MAGA Congressional Republicans who wrote the bill then developed an onerous set of new requirements for receiving benefits:⁴

• Expanded Work Requirements: The bill raised the age limit for “able-bodied adults” expected to work to qualify for receiving benefits, from 54 to 64 years of age. Even veterans were affected. Anyone with four working limbs is now required to work 80 hours per month. Single mother? Too bad. Off you go. Chances are, you won’t make enough to cover child care. New rules now also apply to veterans, adults with children over 14, and the homeless.

• Food price inflation is no longer taken into consideration. The MAGA Republicans used the Orwellian term “Restricted Benefit Calculations” to establish cost neutrality in future benefit adjustments. In plainer English, this means that when prices soar like they have under the regime’s insane Hormuz Insider Trading War, there is no adjustment made for inflation.

• Legal immigrants and refugees seeking permanent residency and/or asylum, victims of domestic violence, and human trafficking victims were cut out of the program.

• State Cost-Sharing: The bill requires states to pay up to 15% of their residents’ SNAP benefits. This, in turn, has forced many states to look into imposing stricter requirements from its struggling citizens to minimize their costs. Red states, of course, were already eager to do so.

• Elimination of SNAP-Ed: Federal funding for SNAP nutrition and education programs was also eliminated.

Republicans warned us of these changes with their manifesto of hate, Project 2025, long before the election that saw 78 million people reject yet another overqualified woman as their president. [Page 300 of Project 2025]

If you need to refamiliarize yourself with Project 2025, check out this early report on its devastating effects:

Acknowledging that the extreme MAGA cuts to SNAP benefits have severely impacted these stores, Save A Lot spokesperson Sarah Griffin then hid under the standard corporate dodge of “financial headwinds” to explain the company’s exit from neighborhoods that desperately need grocery stores:⁵

“As a result of this [the SNAP reductions] and other financial headwinds, Save A Lot made the difficult decision to end our arrangement with Yellow Banana. Yellow Banana is exploring alternatives in order to keep the stores open. If they are unable to find an alternative, the stores will cease operations, effective July 25th.”

You might be wondering, “Hey, what about that nice grant they received from the City of Chicago? Aren’t there obligations?”

Indeed, there are. According to Peter Strazzabosco of Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development, the former Whole Foods store must remain open until the middle of this year, but that is covered under a separate program than the bigger grant. The six stores covered by the grant must be reopened within a year, although it’s unclear who is responsible for that and what the enforcement mechanism is.⁶

That Yellow Banana might be rotten

Unfortunately for people residing in Chicago food deserts, Yellow Banana appears to be part of the problem rather than the solution. Yellow Banana contracts with Save A Lot to run its stores, but it appears to be doing a terrible job.

How bad? Bad enough that Thomas Lys, a Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management professor, took a look at its balance sheets and said way back in 2024 (ancient history in our current beleaguered timeline):

“When I look at this balance sheet, it’s a company that’s not good at doing whatever it’s doing. I don’t see anything here that would give the people on the South and West sides any hope. Understand, all I know is what’s been conveyed to me. But this is a company that can’t pay $800 for its utility bill.”

The Chicago Sun Times identified this and other problems with Yellow Banana almost from the moment the grocery company entered the Chicago market.⁷

SNAP cuts affect every grocer in the United States

It’s fair to say that in the case of Chicago’s Save A Lot, the 26% drop in income generated through SNAP was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and that camel was probably going down anyway thanks to Yellow Banana mismanagement.

But grocery stores not named Kroger and Albertsons often run on paper-thin margins anyway. That 26% loss of SNAP income would be substantial even for them. And the drop in SNAP income has affected every grocery and supermarket in the country. The biggest among them will respond by raising prices, if they haven’t already.

$100 billion in SNAP benefits go to 250,000 food retailers, comprising five percent of sales nationwide.⁸

The One Big Bill of Death has stripped the SNAP program down to a husk of its former self. The largest retailers can survive the hit. Smaller grocers can’t, especially if they’re running damaged balance sheets the way Yellow Banana does.

Say hi to your Walmart greeter

Walmart collects 24% of all SNAP spending, much of it from its own employees.⁹

In 2018, before the One Big Bill of Death, the nonprofit organization Big Hunger calculated that 202,500 Walmart employees received SNAP benefits, amounting to $618.4 million in corporate welfare annually.¹⁰

According to the Government Accountability Office, in 2020, “Walmart was one of the top four employers of SNAP and Medicaid beneficiaries in every state.”¹¹

Although there are no reliable numbers in the wake of the One Big Bill of Death, we can assume that a good chunk of these employees will no longer be eligible, given that between 2 and 4.5 million Americans have lost their benefits, including one million children.¹²

For example, Arizona saw a 55 percent drop in food assistance from July 2025, just after the One Big Bill of Death was passed, to April 2026.¹³

I guess that’s one way to beat corporate welfare: Just cut everyone off.

I (and others) call it corporate welfare because SNAP has traditionally provided the side benefit (for Walmart and other large companies) of subsidizing their policy of paying workers low wages.

Walmart has since raised its hourly wages, but anyone who has fought with the welfare system knows that being knocked out of the pool of SNAP recipients with a somewhat higher wage has its drawbacks and can sometimes feel worse than before the wage hike.

Even the big chains are closing shop

Well, we’ve established that it’s just the smaller grocery stores that are affected by all this, right? Maybe a few food deserts get a little bigger? No big deal.

Apologies for misleading you, but that’s not the case.

Profit margins at even the big box stores are tiny. Overall, profit margins sit at around one to three percent, depending on which article you read.

Big grocery stores are disappearing, too:¹⁴

• In June 2025, one month before the Big Bill of Death passed, Kroger announced it would close 60 stores, 5% of all Kroger brand stores, during an 18-month period. These guys aren’t stupid. They read Project 2025, too, and they’re paid to anticipate government policy.

• Discount grocery chain Grocery Outlet announced 36 store closings in March 2026.

• Albertsons announced this year that it is shutting down about a dozen stores in several states and Washington, D.C. The megachain has 2,000 stores that it plans to evaluate now that a merger with Kroger has fallen through.

• In addition to stores carrying the Albertsons name, the chain has closed an Acme store in New Jersey, a Balducci’s in Connecticut, a Randall’s store in Texas, Safeway stores in Washington, D.C, and California, and two Vons stores in California. There are more on the horizon, as Albertsons is always fighting for its life.

• Dollar General ran a nice little “optimization review” (I love corporate speak!) in 2025. The conclusion? Close 96 stores, all of them by January 2026 (in other words, hurry!). It also planned to shut down 45 PopShelf stores. The company has announced that it plans to keep expanding, too, but the trend for them, like all retail, has been away from the food deserts that gave life to the chain in the first place.

• Texas’s beloved HEB is reviewing the status of all 440 of its supermarkets in Texas and Mexico. It recently stunned Austinites by closing the doors on a location in Austin’s Spicewood Springs neighborhood that had existed since the 1980s.

• Amazon is closing every single one of its 70 Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores, ending what it once called a grand experiment, saying in its corporate announcement, “While we’ve seen encouraging signals in our Amazon-branded physical grocery stores, we haven’t yet created a truly distinctive customer experience with the right economic model needed for large-scale expansion.” Amazon, for now, is saying that most of these stores will be reopened or rebranded as Whole Foods stores.

• Southern grocery giant Piggly Wiggly recently closed a store in Phenix City, Alabama, leaving that small southern city’s 38,000 residents with one less decent-sized grocer to choose from. The company has announced the closure of stores in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Sumter, South Carolina, too, without explanation (oh, SNAP!).

• Winn-Dixie, claiming a rebranding strategy, slammed the doors shut on almost all its stores outside Florida and Southern Georgia in late 2025, including, according to mashed.com, “seven Harveys Supermarkets in Georgia and one in Florida, 12 Winn-Dixie locations in Louisiana, 18 in Alabama, one in Georgia.” Winn-Dixie says it plans to sell some of its closed locations to other grocery companies.

• Even Aldi is closing stores. One store, in Peru, Indiana, the heart of MAGA country, shut without warning, with customers finding out when they drove into the parking lot only to see a “closed for business” sign. Another store, in a north Milwaukee food desert, abruptly closed in January 2026, leaving many local shoppers without a reliable grocery store. The company had already shut down 30 stores in 2025, the first year of the One Big Bill of Death’s draconian SNAP cuts.

I’m not silly enough to claim all these store closings are because of federal SNAP reductions. Some of them are just standard comings and goings based on corporate whims.

But we know for certain that the decimation of SNAP has led several Save A Lot stores in Chicago to the verge of collapse. The company told us so in a rare belch of truth before smothering it with corporate-speak.

Other grocery companies, which also operate on profit margins thinner than a crazed president’s lies about reflection pools, are less likely to be as forthcoming. Instead, they’ll keep shutting their stores and blather about things like “market conditions.”

So it’s up to us to give them no benefit of the doubt, and evaluate the facts on the ground as they come in using our set of standards instead of theirs.

My set of standards is based on one thing: The vast majority of corporate CEOs are still, even after all we know about the child-rapist in chief, willing to give him cover as long as their bottom lines are protected by the massive tax breaks the One Big Bill of Death gave them.

Late-stage capitalism has drawn the battle lines clearly. Retail grocers will continue to build out ever-slicker stores with higher markups, in an effort to end the scourge of low profit margins. During this process, we will all keep paying more for groceries. And some of us will simply do without any real groceries at all, living on canned “food” products that are little more than ladles of corn syrup and food dyes.

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Notes

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Footnotes

1. Wouldn’t it be funny if I had written “served food desserts” to throw y’all off? Also? That would be such a typical typo for me.

2. Soglin, Talia. “Save A Lot Grocery Stores Could Shutter Abruptly This Week.” Chicago Tribune, July 21, 2026.

🎁 Ruminato Gift Link https://www.chicagotribune.com/2026/07/21/save-a-lot-yellow-banana/?share=iiuist7ccla620oialya 🎁

3. Congress.gov. “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Related Nutrition Programs in P.L. 119-21: An Overview,” 2026. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48552.

4. Sources for these bullet points:

Konish, Lorie. “At Least 3.5 Million People Have Lost Food Stamp Access as Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ Cuts Take Effect, Analysis Finds.” CNBC, May 30, 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/30/snap-food-stamps-big-beautiful-bill.html.

Coffey, Amelia, and Heather Hahn. “SNAP Cuts in One Big Beautiful Bill Act Leave Almost 3 Million Young Adults Vulnerable to Losing Nutrition Assistance.” Urban Institute, August 6, 2025. https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/snap-cuts-one-big-beautiful-bill-act-leave-almost-3-million-young-adults-vulnerable.

11 Alive: The Take | SNAP Cuts Explained: How the “Big Beautiful Bill” Impacts Food Assistance (7/18/25) YouTube

Long Island Cares | The Harry Chapin Food Bank. “The Big Beautiful Bill Explained - Long Island Cares | The Harry Chapin Food Bank,” July 30, 2025. https://www.licares.org/the-big-beautiful-bill-explained/.

‌PBS: 4 ways SNAP benefits will change after Trump’s big policy act YouTube

5. Chicago Tribune Gift Link, ibid

6. Chicago Tribune Gift Link, ibid

7. Rush, Mariah, and Lauren FitzPatrick. “Discount Grocer Yellow Banana ‘Can’t Pay’ an $800 Utility Bill.” Chicago Sun-Times, August 30, 2024. https://chicago.suntimes.com/the-watchdogs/2024/08/30/yellow-banana-savealot-supermarket-grocery-save-a-lot-food-deserts.

8. Bosso, Christopher. “Walmart, Kroger and Big Food Love SNAP Dollars—But Won’t Lift a Finger to Save Them.” Ms. Magazine, July 2, 2025. https://msmagazine.com/2025/07/02/snap-walmart-hunger-food-corporations-grocery-stores/.

9. Numerator. “Walmart Captures 24% of SNAP Shoppers’ Total Consumer Spending, Numerator Reports.” Numerator, June 16, 2025. https://www.numerator.com/press/walmart-captures-24-of-snap-shoppers-total-consumer-spending-numerator-reports/.

10. Fisher, Andy. “Corporate Welfare and SNAP in Ohio.” Big Hunger, January 17, 2018. https://www.bighunger.org/blog-1/2018/1/17/corporate-welfare-and-snap-in-ohio.

11. Senator Bernie Sanders. “Walmart and McDonald’s Have the Most Workers on Food Stamps and Medicaid, New Study Shows » Senator Bernie Sanders,” November 18, 2020. https://www.sanders.senate.gov/in-the-news/walmart-and-mcdonalds-have-the-most-workers-on-food-stamps-and-medicaid-new-study-shows/.

12. Stein, Jeff. “Senate GOP Tax Bill Includes Largest Cut to U.S. Safety Net in Decades.” The Washington Post, June 29, 2025. Paywall: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/06/29/trump-tax-medicaid-snap/ Apologies, I had a free link for this via another source, but I lost it.

‌Also:

Rosenbaum, Dottie, Joseph Llobrera, Catlin Nchako, and Luis Nuñez. “SNAP Tracker: People Are Losing Food Assistance as the Harmful 2025 Republican Reconciliation Law Is Implemented.” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, July 21, 2026. https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/snap-tracker-people-are-losing-food-assistance-as-the-republican-megabill.‌

13. Rosenbaum, Dottie, Joseph Llobrera, Catlin Nchako, and Luis Nuñez. “SNAP Tracker: People Are Losing Food Assistance as the Harmful 2025 Republican Reconciliation Law Is Implemented.” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, July 21, 2026. https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/snap-tracker-people-are-losing-food-assistance-as-the-republican-megabill.

14. Kostolni, Isabella. “These Major Grocery Chains Are Closing Locations In 2026.” Mashed, July 8, 2026. https://www.mashed.com/2206518/major-grocery-chains-closing-locations-2026/.

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