A Fred Meyer grocery store, which sits on a busy street in Seattle’s Lake City neighborhood, serves as the area’s primary grocery store and pharmacy. Now, residents are preparing for it to close in October.
The loss of the store will reverberate across the community, forcing locals to travel more than a mile to the next-closest full-service supermarket, which has amenities like a bakery. Some community advocates are raising the alarm that shuttering the Lake City store will transform the area into a food desert.
Down the street, people lined up on a sunny morning in mid-September to collect groceries from North Helpline’s Lake City Food Bank. The nonprofit serves a diverse mix of people, including immigrant communities, the elderly and low income households. The group has seen demand for their services rise in recent months. The nonprofit’s food access director, Louren Reed, estimates between 300 and 500 new households are registering with the food bank each month.
The local Fred Meyer has donated about 20,000 pounds of groceries to the food bank annually. Faced with the store's closure, Reed said the food bank is working to figure out how to meet growing demand.
Without the Fred Meyer, Reed said, people might struggle to get healthy food — especially for those who have mobility issues or don’t have access to a car. She believes this will force more people to turn to North Helpline for its services.
“We’re preparing for a lot more visitors,” Reed said. “We’ve already seen huge numbers skyrocket over the last six months. We’re seeing the highest levels we’ve ever seen."
Reed pointed out that with the closure, the community will also lose its only pharmacy. This comes at a time when Rite Aid has closed Seattle pharmacy locations including Bartell Drugs.
“It’s going to make it a lot harder for people to have the medications they need,” she said.
Safeway, the nearest full-service grocery store with a pharmacy, is over a mile away from Lake City’s Fred Meyer. The North Seattle neighborhood does have a Grocery Outlet, which is a smaller supermarket. However, according to Reed, it does not offer enough fresh food to make up for the loss of Fred Meyer. Once it shuts down, locals will have to walk, take a bus or drive to do their shopping.
Dolly Jones, who lives in Lake City, is prepared to take the bus to a different store. Still, she said losing the Fred Meyer will dramatically change the area.
“It’s just kind of becoming like a ghost town,” Jones said. “Just seeing everything on the shelves becoming empty, it’s pretty sad.”
Along with the Fred Meyer in Lake City, the store’s parent company, Kroger, is closing at least four other stores in the Puget Sound region, including in Tacoma and Everett. This follows a failed merger attempt last year between Kroger and Albertsons, under which the companies planned to sell off stores.
The Lake City Fred Meyer is slated to close in mid-October. According to a spokesperson for the Fred Meyer & QFC divisions of Kroger, employees will be offered a position at one of the company’s other stores.
“Due to a steady rise in theft and a challenging regulatory environment that adds significant costs, we can no longer make these stores financially viable,” said a company spokesperson in an email.
Kroger has received pushback in response to these claims.
UFCW 3000, the union that represents staff at the Lake City Fred Meyer and other Puget Sound locations, issued a statement in early September saying the closures are due to “years of underinvestment in stores, chronic understaffing, and funneling billions of dollars to Wall Street instead of reinvesting in workers and communities.”
Thomas Reynolds, the CEO of a major supplier for food banks across the state, Northwest Harvest, said these closures could have a large impact on communities and the people who live there. That’s because traveling farther for groceries could add to shoppers' expenses.
“When you lose a supermarket, you lose time, you gain costs in terms of fuel, and you also might gain costs in terms of how much you're paying for your food,” he said.
The closure of the Lake City Fred Meyer — and other Kroger stores — has also drawn the attention of local leaders.
The Everett City Council declared the shuttering of the community’s store “an act of corporate neglect” that will create a food and retail desert for southwestern portions of the city.
In a September press conference held at the grocery store, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell proposed dedicating around $12 million in additional funding towards programs that address food insecurity in the city’s 2026 budget. Those initiatives include increasing funding for food banks across the city by $3 million and extending the Lake City Farmers Market by 15 weeks.
Katie Wilson, Harrell’s opponent in Seattle’s upcoming mayoral election, also made an appearance at the North Seattle grocery store. Standing outside the store and flanked by members of UFCW 3000, Wilson said that as mayor, she would explore the idea of the city subsidizing grocery stores. The union has endorsed Wilson.
But even if these initiatives are adopted, they won’t immediately address the issues people in Lake City will face after Fred Meyer shuts down. Donnie Frost, who lives near the store, is worried about his neighbors — especially those with mobility issues.
“A lot of people depend on it around here, and a lot of people can’t get up to Safeway or QFC,” he said. “It’s going to be hard on a lot of people.”
