Mass closures became a lot more common last year

We’ve written a lot about mass closures and systemwide shutdowns of late, certainly more than we'd like.

We’ve also unpacked, at length, the factors creating a macroeconomic environment driving many of these closures, from higher food costs to suffocating (and expensive) debt.

But is it worse today than it was before the pandemic? Or is this just recency bias?

The answer: Yes and no.

We gathered Technomic data showing the number of Top 500 chains that have closed 10% or more of their systemwide units on each of the past three years’ worth of lists. Last year, 33 restaurant chains closed 10% or more of their locations, nearly double the 17 that did so in 2023.

Go back further, however, and last year’s data looks a lot closer to the norm than the exception, despite recent headlines about significant retrenchments at legacy brands like TGI Fridays, Rubio’s, Hooters, Red Lobster, and Buca di Beppo.

We chose 10% because it represents a significant rate of closures at a brand large enough to earn a spot on the ranking of the country’s largest restaurant chains.

The 33 chains that closed 10% or more of their system was actually lower than the 35 that did so in 2019.

If we remove 2020 from the graphic, when 75 chains went through mass closures, the graphic shows that both 2019 and 2025 were anomalous—but they were also on the upswing.

The two years after the pandemic, the industry stayed relatively afloat thanks to government relief loans like the Paycheck Protection Program and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan. In 2021, 27 top 500 chains experienced a 10%-plus retrenchment, while that number dropped to 21 in 2022.

As those programs ran out, restaurants started to run out of cash and closures increased again. In 2024, 27 chains reported mass closures.

Yet the same trend was also evident before the pandemic, as chains averaged 25 mass closure events from 2016 to 2018 and then the number jumped to 35 in 2019.

What does this mean? This industry ebbs and flows. It’s always ebbed and flowed and in the few years leading up to the pandemic, it was flowing pretty heavily.

It’s easy to forget, but restaurants were having challenges before the pandemic. The industry was experiencing weak traffic in 2018 because it was simply too full. The space, fueled by hungry investors and the rapid emergence of the fast-casual category, overcorrected and oversaturated after downsizing during the Great Recession.

The pandemic was supposed to correct the industry’s oversaturation, and it did to some extent. But once sales returned, restaurant chains started building again, more than recovering units lost in 2020.

Yet new challenges emerged, like third-party delivery, massive inflation, and consumer cutbacks. And once again, a large sector of the chain restaurant industry finds itself having to retrench.