Bottom Dollar stores now closed

All Bottom Dollar Food stores, including 46 in the Philadelphia area, are now closed.

The discount grocery store's parent company announced in November that it was selling the locations to Aldi, another discount grocery chain.

Bottom Dollar's 66 stores in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh regions had been expected to close by Thursday.

The grocery store's website says all of its locations have closed.

The company has said the 2,200 affected employees would be offered severance and career transition help.

Aldi, which is based in Germany, has not said which, if any, stores it would operate as Aldi supermarkets.

Among the stores closing is a new Bottom Dollar in Chester, which opened just seven months ago.

When the grocery store opened in June, it was Chester's first for-profit supermarket in a decade. The closing leaves just one other grocery store - Fare & Square, run by the nonprofit Philabundance - in the city.

The Bottom Dollar chain opened its first store in Pennsylvania in King of Prussia in 2010.

"We want to thank our associates, customers and communities for their support over the past four years," Gene Faller, Bottom Dollar's vice president of retail operations, said in a statement earlier this month, when the business announced that the stores would close by Thursday.

The Bottom Dollar stores had been operated by the Belgian company Delhaize Group.