The Operator7 min readJuly 20, 2026

The Pet Store Count, 2019-2026: Who Opened, Who Closed, Who's Left

Petco trimmed its fleet, Pet Supplies Plus nearly doubled its store count, and one overleveraged regional chain lost most of its stores in a matter of days. Here is what the verified footprint data actually shows.

Photo: Helena Jacoba · CC BY 2.0

Drive past the same strip-mall outparcel for a decade and you'll watch it cycle through banners: a chain sign comes down, a franchise sign goes up, and sometimes the space just sits dark for a season before someone tries again.

The Big Two Are Trimming, Not Collapsing

Petco ended fiscal 2020 with 1,454 Pet Care Centers in the U.S. D.C. and Puerto Rico, plus 125 full-service vet hospitals built into those stores, according to its own fourth-quarter results release. By 2024 the company had shifted from opening stores to trimming the fleet: it closed 25 net locations that year and was running roughly 1,400 U.S. stores by the fall of 2025, Petco confirmed as part of a stated push to "strengthen our operating model." The trend kept going into 2026: Petco closed fiscal 2025 on January 31, 2026 with 1,382 stores, after cutting 7 net locations in the fourth quarter alone, and guided to another 15 to 20 net closures for fiscal 2026.

PetSmart tells a quieter story, mostly because it can. The company went private in a 2015 BC Partners buyout and hasn't filed a store count with the SEC since. It opened its 1,600th North American store in El Paso in November 2017, a milestone that landed the month after a Casper, Wyoming location completed the chain's 50-state coverage. Third-party estimates as of early 2026 put the chain at roughly 1,700 U.S. Canadian and Puerto Rico locations combined - treat that as directional, not filed. PetSmart is the one major chain in this piece that doesn't have to show its footprint to anyone.

The Franchise That Kept Signing Leases

While the big-box chains edited their maps, Pet Supplies Plus added to its. The franchise had "over 460 locations in 34 states" in November 2019, after signing 81 new franchise agreements that year alone. By June 2025 that had grown to over 725 locations, and the company held that pace through year-end, reporting 725-plus Pet Supplies Plus stores and 26 Wag N' Wash locations as of December 2025. The brand has now ranked as Entrepreneur's top pet franchise for 11 straight years, landing at #31 on the 2026 Franchise 500 with unit count up 3.7% over three years and average location revenue near $2.6 million.

That's roughly 60% more Pet Supplies Plus locations in six years, while Petco was shedding stores. Worth sitting with, since both chains sell largely the same category mix. The difference is the franchise model spreads real estate risk across hundreds of individual owner-operators instead of one corporate balance sheet.

When a Parent Company Fails and a Chain Doesn't

Two bankruptcies in this window make an instructive pair. In February 2023, Independent Pet Partners - parent of Chuck & Don's, Kriser's, Loyal Companion and Natural Pawz - filed Chapter 11 and began liquidating 93 stores within days of the filing. It exited the Loyal Companion and Natural Pawz banners entirely, selling the leases and inventory for 20 former Loyal Companion locations to Pet Supplies Plus, another 16 to a buyer called Pet Pros, and 24 more to NP Acquisition - keeping only Chuck & Don's and Kriser's alive, and only across five core states.

Then in November 2024, Franchise Group Inc. - at the time Pet Supplies Plus's corporate parent - filed its own Chapter 11, listing $1.98 billion in funded debt. Not one Pet Supplies Plus store closed as a result. The franchise separated from Franchise Group entirely in December 2025 to, in its own words, chart its own course, and kept opening stores through the transition.

A parent company can collapse without a single store going dark, and a chain can shrink one lease at a time without ever filing for anything.

The Etailer Is Now Leasing Storefronts

One physical move worth flagging from the online side: Chewy, the company independents spent years worrying about, started opening brick-and-mortar veterinary clinics. Chewy Vet Care launched in December 2023, with its first practice opening in South Florida in early 2024. By April 2026, Chewy agreed to acquire Modern Animal, a deal that instantly grows Chewy Vet Care from 18 clinics to 47 nationwide. It's a small footprint next to Petco's 1,382 pet care centers, and it's veterinary care rather than retail shelf space, but it's real square footage from a company that built its business on not needing any.

So How Many Independent Stores Are Actually Out There

Nobody publishes a clean, single number for "independent pet stores in America," and that gap is itself worth noting. The closest widely cited figure comes from IBISWorld, which counts 13,580 pet store businesses in the U.S. as of 2026 - a category broad enough to span big chains' locations down to true one-store operators, which is exactly why no source in this piece claims to isolate the indie count precisely. That total has drifted down just 0.3% a year on average since 2021, and it actually ticked up 0.7% from 2025 to 2026: closer to flat than to a die-off.

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Subtract the footprints we can verify - Petco's 1,382, PetSmart's estimated 1,700, Pet Supplies Plus's 725-plus - from IBISWorld's total, and roughly 9,800 U.S. pet stores are none of the above. That includes surviving regional players like Chuck & Don's and Kriser's, dozens of smaller franchise and co-op concepts, and true one-location independents. It's a ceiling, not a precise independent count, but it says the long tail is still the majority of the map by store count, even as the dollars concentrate at the top.

What this means for the shelf

For the store owner: the base rate for closures right now is a couple of big chains editing their real estate on purpose, not a wave taking out independents - the IBISWorld trend line is nearly flat, which is sturdier footing than the headlines about any single retailer suggest.

For the brand/DTC operator: Pet Supplies Plus's growth means a widening franchise channel with real buying power spread across hundreds of owner-operators rather than one central buyer, which is a different pitch than the one you'd bring to Petco or PetSmart corporate.

For the distributor: the Independent Pet Partners liquidation is a reminder that regional-chain concentration risk is real even when the category is healthy overall - a single overleveraged customer can still go dark inside a week.

How we're thinking about it

The footprint story since 2019 isn't collapse, it's redistribution. Petco is running a smaller, presumably more profitable fleet on purpose, closing stores at a pace it controls and telegraphs a quarter at a time. PetSmart, insulated from public disclosure since 2015, appears to have held roughly steady over the same stretch. Pet Supplies Plus did the opposite of both: it kept adding doors through two different corporate-parent bankruptcy events that had nothing to do with its own unit economics.

The failures that did happen were sharp and specific, not a slow bleed across the independent channel broadly. Independent Pet Partners lost most of its stores in a matter of days once the debtor-in-possession financing ran its course. That distinction matters for how any retailer should read its own risk: an overleveraged regional roll-up is fragile in a way a single well-run neighborhood store, with no debt covenant to trip, generally isn't.

A healthy independent footprint in 2026 looks less like a store count and more like a store mix: services layered onto a curated shelf, in locations a chain wouldn't bother opening. The data here doesn't show independents winning a share war against Petco and PetSmart. It shows them still standing in something close to their prior numbers while the chains above them reorganize around them.

The Bottom Line

The store count didn't crash between 2019 and 2026, it reshuffled: the big chains trimmed on their own schedule, one franchise brand nearly doubled, and the sharpest losses landed on an overleveraged regional roll-up rather than the independent channel at large.

Sources

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