Right now, at this very moment, Walmart is preparing to shut down more than 250 stores across California.

Not because of consumer demand, not because of competition, but because the math no longer works.

And while Governor Gavin Newsome scrambles to control the narrative, families across the state are waking up to empty shelves, longer drives, and the slow collapse of the retail infrastructure they’ve depended on for decades.

This is happening in real time and what you’re about to hear should concern every single American regardless of where you live.

My name is Megan Wright and this is where we investigate the stories the mainstream media won’t touch.

If you value independent journalism that follows the money, exposes the decisions, and holds power accountable, then subscribe to this channel right now.

Hit that like button.

Share this video with everyone you know.

And here’s my question for you.

Drop a comment below and tell me how far do you have to drive to reach your nearest grocery store? Because for millions of Californians, that distance is about to get a whole lot longer.

Let’s talk.

This isn’t a story about corporate greed or free market failure.

This is a story about incentives, mandates, and economic gravity.

Over the past 18 months, California has implemented a cascade of regulatory policies, wage mandates, and enforcement actions that have fundamentally altered the cost structure of operating large-scale retail in the state.

Walmart, the largest private employer in America, has done the math.

And the math says leave.

What you’re witnessing is not a sudden decision.

It’s the inevitable result of policies that ignored basic economics, punished employers, and assumed that businesses would simply absorb infinite costs.

They won’t.

They can’t.

And now, the people who can least afford it are going to pay the price.

I’m going to walk you through exactly how we got here, who made the decisions, what the consequences are, and why this matters far beyond California’s borders.

Let’s go back to April of last year.

That’s when California’s new minimum wage law for large retail and grocery workers took effect, pushing the hourly wage floor to $22.

On paper, it sounded compassionate.

In practice, it was a financial grenade.

Walmart operates on razor thin profit margins in grocery, typically between 1 and 3%.

When labor costs, which already represent the largest operating expense for any big box retailer, jump by 35% overnight, something has to give.

Within days of the law’s implementation, Walmart’s corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, began receiving store level profitability reports from California.

The numbers were brutal.

Stores that had been marginally profitable were now bleeding cash.

Stores in rural and lowincome areas where sales volumes are lower and theft rates higher were posting losses that couldn’t be offset by price increases alone.

Translation: The very communities the wage law was supposed to help were the first ones marked for closure.

Then came the compliance costs.

California didn’t just raise wages, it also expanded enforcement mechanisms.

The state’s labor commissioner’s office, already one of the most aggressive in the nation, received additional funding to conduct surprise audits, investigate wage theft claims, and impose penalties for scheduling violations under the state’s predictive scheduling law.

Every Walmart location in California was now subject to unannounced inspections, and any deviation from the new standards, intentional or not, could result in fines starting at $10,000 per violation.

Let that sink in.

A single scheduling mistake, a missed break documentation, and incorrect overtime calculation.

Any of these could trigger five figure penalties multiplied across hundreds of stores.

Walmart’s legal and compliance teams did the analysis.

The cost of maintaining full regulatory compliance across California’s complex and constantly shifting labor code was projected to add an additional 43 million annually to the company’s operating expenses in the state.

That’s on top of the wage increases.

That’s on top of rising theft losses, which in California alone had jumped 62% year-over-year.

And that’s on top of skyrocketing commercial property insurance premiums, which had increased by an average of 48% for large retailers operating in high-risisk counties.

By June, Walmart’s regional vice president for the West Coast convened an emergency strategy meeting.

Internal documents from that meeting, later reviewed by industry analysts, outlined three options.

Option one, absorb the costs and accept significantly reduced profitability in California.

Option two, raise prices across the board to offset expenses, risking customer flight to competitors and online platforms.

Option three, close underperforming locations and consolidate operations into fewer, higher volume stores.

The decision wasn’t immediate, but the direction was clear.

Within 6 days, the company’s real estate and operations teams were given a directive.

Identify every California store that couldn’t achieve a 5% profit margin under the new cost structure.

The list came back with 264 locations.

Now, here’s where the dominoes start falling.

First domino, Walmart announces an initial wave of closures.

52 stores spread across Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Fresno counties.

The company frames it as routine portfolio optimization.

The governor’s office releases a statement calling it a corporate decision that doesn’t reflect California’s strong economy.

But inside those 52 stores, 11,000 employees are suddenly facing unemployment.

And because California’s unemployment insurance system is already strained with a fund balance that’s been in deficit since the pandemic, those workers are entering a benefits queue that’s backlogged by 8 to 12 weeks.

Second domino.

The closures create retail deserts in communities like Barstow and parts of East Los Angeles.

The shuttered Walmart was the only fullervice grocery option within a 15mi radius.

Residents who don’t own cars, primarily seniors and low-income families, now face a choice.

Pay for ride share or delivery services they can’t afford, or rely on corner stores and gas stations that charge 30 to 50% more for basic staples.

Public health experts have a term for this, food insecurity, and it’s now spiking in exactly the neighborhoods that California’s progressive policies claim to protect.

Third domino, small businesses that depended on Walmart foot traffic start closing, too.

A hardware store in Hemet, a nail salon in Compton, a taco stand in Bakersfield.

These weren’t corporate chains.

They were familyowned operations that had built their customer base around the anchor traffic Walmart generated.

When the anchor leaves, the entire strip dies.

Commercial landlords now staring at vacancies they can’t fill begin missing mortgage payments.

And the property tax revenue that cities like San Bernardino and Fresno depended on to fund police, fire, and road maintenance starts to evaporate.

Think about that for a moment.

A policy designed to help workers ends up costing them their jobs, cutting off their access to affordable goods, and starving their local governments of revenue.

That’s not unintended consequences.

That’s predictable failure.

But Governor Nuome didn’t back down.

In July, he held a press conference in Sacramento flanked by labor union leaders and doubled down.

He called the closures an attack on working families and promised to investigate whether Walmart was violating California’s War Act, which requires 60 days notice before mass layoffs.

The state’s attorney general opened an inquiry.

Subpoenas were issued and Walmart’s legal team, already stretched thin managing compliance across the state, was now forced to divert resources into defending against a politically motivated investigation.

Here’s the irony.

The investigation found nothing.

Walmart had followed the letter of the law, but the process itself cost the company an additional $8 million in legal fees and delayed the closure timeline by 6 weeks, which meant the company was legally obligated to continue paying wages and overhead for stores that were losing money every single day they stayed open.

In plain language, California’s attempt to punish Walmart for leaving only made leaving more expensive and more urgent.

By September, Walmart had enough.

The company announced a second wave.

112 more stores.

This time, the closures weren’t limited to rural or lowincome areas.

They hit suburban middle-class communities, too.

Stores in Orange County, stores in the central valley, even two locations in Sacramento County, less than 20 miles from the state capital.

The message was clear.

This isn’t about targeting vulnerable populations.

This is about survival.

The total employee count affected by the second wave, 21,000 workers.

That’s 21,000 families trying to figure out how to pay rent, how to keep health insurance, how to explain to their kids why mom or dad isn’t going to work anymore.

and the governor’s response, another press conference, another promise to hold corporations accountable, another proposal for a new task force to study the situation, but no acknowledgement that the policies his administration championed had directly caused the crisis.

Let me take you inside one of those families.

Maria Gonzalez, a single mother of three in Stockton, had worked the overnight shift stocking shelves at her local Walmart for 7 years.

She wasn’t getting rich.

Even at $22 an hour, she was living paycheck to paycheck.

But the job was stable.

The hours were predictable, and the employee discount helped her stretch her grocery budget.

When her store closed, Maria applied for unemployment.

It took nine weeks to receive her first check.

In the meantime, she burned through her savings, maxed out a credit card, and fell two months behind on rent.

Her landlord filed for eviction.

Maria now works two part-time jobs, one at a gas station, one at a fast food restaurant, earning less combined than she made at Walmart.

With no benefits and no predictable schedule, she’s one of thousands.

Or take Robert Chen, who managed the automotive service center at a Walmart in Modesto.

Robert had worked his way up from entry-level cart pusher to department manager over 12 years.

He was three years away from qualifying for the company’s pension plan.

When his location closed, he was offered a transfer to a store 68 miles away.

The commute would have added 3 hours to his day and eaten up most of his wage increase in gas costs.

He declined.

Robert is now 47 years old, back on the job market, competing with people half his age for positions that pay less than what he earned a decade ago.

He’s not lazy.

He’s not unqualified.

He’s a casualty of policy.

These aren’t statistics.

These are lives.

Meanwhile, back in Sacramento, the governor’s office was dealing with another problem.

Uh, tax revenue.

California’s budget relies heavily on sales tax.

And large retailers like Walmart are among the biggest contributors.

When you shut down 250 stores, you don’t just lose the sales tax from those locations.

You lose it from the customers who now drive across state lines to shop in Nevada or Arizona, where prices are lower and selection is better.

The state’s Department of Finance quietly revised its revenue projections downward in October, shaving $800 million off expected sales tax collections for the fiscal year.

That’s money that was supposed to fund schools, healthcare, and infrastructure.

The governor didn’t announce that revision in a press conference.

But it gets worse.

Walmart’s closures triggered a clause in the state’s corporate income tax code that allows businesses to claim losses from discontinued operations as deductions.

Walmart’s tax liability in California, which had averaged $230 million annually, dropped to 64 million.

The state didn’t just lose revenue from sales tax, it lost revenue from corporate tax, too.

And because California’s budget was already projected to run a deficit of $32 billion, those losses meant cuts.

Cuts to public transit, cuts to affordable housing programs, cuts to the very social services that displaced Walmart workers were now depending on.

Let that sink in.

The state passed a law to help workers, drove their employer out, and then cut the programs those workers needed to survive.

By November, the third wave hit.

100 more stores.

This time, Walmart didn’t even bother with a press release.

The closures were announced via internal memo, and employees found out when they showed up for their shifts and saw the notices taped to the doors.

The company had stopped pretending this was about optimization.

This was a retreat.

The total number of closures now stood at 264.

The total number of jobs lost, 38,000.

and the total number of California communities left without a nearby full-ervice grocery store, 147.

The governor, facing mounting pressure from both labor unions who were angry about job losses and business groups who were warning about broader economic collapse, finally agreed to a meeting with Walmart’s government relations team.

The meeting held in late November was tense.

Walmart’s representatives laid out the numbers.

The cost structure under California’s current regulatory environment made it impossible to operate profitably in most of the state.

They offered a compromise if California would grandfather existing stores into a wage schedule that phased in increases over 5 years instead of overnight.

And if the state would agree to cap liability for scheduling violations, Walmart would halt the closures and reconsider some of the shuttered locations.

The governor’s team said no.

They called the proposal corporate blackmail and insisted that any changes to labor law would be seen as a betrayal of workers.

The meeting ended with no agreement.

Within two weeks, Walmart announced it was suspending all new store development in California indefinitely and closing its regional distribution center in Shater, which supplied 112 stores across the state.

Another 600 jobs gone.

Now, here’s the legal angle.

In December, a coalition of city governments in Southern California filed a lawsuit against Walmart, alleging that the closures violated municipal agreements related to tax increment financing and economic development zones.

The cities argued that Walmart had received millions in tax breaks and infrastructure subsidies over the years and couldn’t just walk away.

Walmart’s legal team countered that the subsidies were performance-based and tied to specific revenue thresholds, none of which could be met under California’s new cost structure.

The case is ongoing, but legal analysts expect it to drag out for years, which means even if the cities win, the stores aren’t coming back.

The buildings will sit empty, the parking lots will crack and fade, and the communities will lose either way.

Here’s what nobody’s saying.

This isn’t just about Walmart.

Target has already announced it’s closing 11 California locations and putting 23 more under review.

Kroger, which operates Ralph’s and Food for Less in the state, has suspended plans for eight new stores and quietly shuttered six underperforming ones.

Albertson’s is in merger talks specifically to gain the scale needed to survive California’s regulatory environment.

And Amazon, which doesn’t have to deal with physical store overhead, predictive scheduling mandates, or in-person labor audits, is expanding its grocery delivery footprint across the state at record pace.

Translation: California’s policies didn’t help workers.

They helped Jeff Bezos.

Independent grocery stores, the kind owned by families who’ve been in business for generations, are going under, too.

They can’t compete with Amazon’s prices.

They can’t absorb the wage increases and they can’t afford the legal teams needed to navigate California’s compliance maze.

In the past 14 months, 72 independent grocerers in California have filed for bankruptcy.

That’s 72 families who lost everything.

And the communities they served are now dependent on online platforms that prioritize wealthy zip codes and leave poor neighborhoods waiting days for delivery.

Let me be very clear about what’s happening here.

This is not a market failure.

Markets respond to incentives.

California changed the incentives and the market responded exactly as economic theory predicted.

When you make it more expensive to do business, businesses do less business.

When you punish employment, you get less employment.

When you ignore math, math doesn’t care.

It wins anyway.

And the people who pay the price are always the ones who can least afford it.

Not the governor who still has access to private security and personal chefs.

Not the state legislators who shop at specialty stores in wealthy districts that will never lose a grocery option.

Not the union leaders who got their photo ops and their political capital.

But Maria Gonzalez in Stockton.

Robert Chen in Modesto.

The single mom in Barstow who now pays $8 for a gallon of milk at a corner store instead of 350 at Walmart.

The elderly couple in Fresno who can’t drive and can’t afford delivery fees.

These are the people California’s government claims to represent.

And these are the people California’s government has failed.

So, where do we go from here? Uh Walmart has made it clear it’s not coming back under current conditions.

Other major retailers are following the same playbook, and California’s political leadership shows no sign of reversing course.

If anything, there are already proposals in the state legislature to increase minimum wage again next year, this time to $25 an hour and to expand predictive scheduling mandates to include even more industries.

The spiral continues.

Some California communities are trying to adapt.

A few city councils have approved zoning changes to allow smaller format stores and mobile grocery trucks to serve retail deserts.

Some nonprofits are organizing food co-ops and community buying clubs.

These are noble efforts, but they’re band-aids on a bullet wound.

You can’t replace the scale, efficiency, and supply chain infrastructure of a Walmart with a farmers market that’s open 3 hours on Saturday morning.

Other communities are just giving up.

Families who can afford it are leaving the state entirely.

U-Haul reported that one-way rentals out of California increased by 41% in the last year with the highest demand coming from workingclass and middle class neighborhoods.

These aren’t tech executives cashing out stock options.

These are ordinary people who’ve done the math and realize they can’t win.

They’re moving to Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Tennessee.

States where the cost of living is lower, where grocery stores aren’t disappearing, and where policymakers haven’t declared war on the businesses that employ them.

And here’s the final domino.

As California loses population, it loses political power.

The state has already lost a congressional seat after the most recent census.

If the outflow continues, it will lose more.

Federal funding formulas are based on population.

Fewer people means fewer dollars for highways, schools, and emergency services.

The state that once defined the American dream is now exporting its residents and importing its problems.

So, let’s recap the chain of events.

California passes a wage mandate designed to help low-income workers.

Uh, the mandate makes it unprofitable for major retailers to operate in much of the state.

Retailers close stores and lay off thousands of those same workers.

Communities lose access to affordable goods.

Small businesses that depended on retail traffic go under.

Property values drop.

Tax revenues collapse.

The state cuts services.

More people leave.

The cycle accelerates.

And through it all, the governor holds press conferences, blames corporations, and proposes more regulations.

This is not governance.

This is willful blindness.

Here’s my final warning.

Um, what’s happening in California will not stay in California.

Progressive lawmakers in New York, Illinois, Washington, and Massachusetts are watching closely.

Uh some are already drafting similar legislation.

They see California as a model, not a cautionary tale.

And if they succeed, the retail collapse you’re seeing in California today will spread to every blue state in the country.

Millions more jobs will be lost.

Hundreds more communities will become food deserts.

And the only winners will be the massive online platforms that don’t have to deal with physical locations, in-person employees, or state level labor mandates.

So, here’s my question for you, and I want you to answer this in the comments.

Who benefits when small and midsized retailers are regulated out of existence? Who gains power when communities become dependent on a handful of tech monopolies for basic necessities? And who pays the price when politicians prioritize ideology over reality? If this story makes you angry, good, it should.

Subscribe to this channel so you don’t miss the next investigation.

Hit the like button to push this video to more people.

Share it on every platform you have access to and drop a comment below answering my question about how far you have to drive for groceries because I guarantee that distance is about to get longer for more people than you think.

This story is still being written right now in real time in communities across California.

And the decisions being made today in Sacramento will determine whether this crisis stays contained or spreads nationwide.

I’m Megan Wright and I’ll see you in the next