In my hometown there was a spot near the main square that was just far away enough that to go there you really had to go out of your way.
For years there used to be a pozzeria there and after they closed it down, a kebab decided to open there. It only lasted about two months before the owner gave up because literally no one would go there when there were already three other kebabs on the square, and in far more convenient places.
That didn’t deter a bunch of other geniuses from opening their shop there, because throughout the next two years five different kebsbs opened there, before finally the barber nextdoor bought it out and integrated that space into his barbershop.
That’s not at all necessarily a bad business move. Restaurants close for a ton of different reasons, location being just one of the possible ones.
In my unfortunately extensive industry experience, the main reason for beloved restaurants closing down is that their rent gets jacked up. That or the management is just flat bad at finances, but that usually gets you in the first 6 months to a year.
So if you have a business plan to tolerate the rent in a location of a formerly-closed restaurant… shrug. You’ll probably be fine until the landlord jacks it again.
Another thing that kills businesses is not enough startup capital.
It takes time to build a customer base and you have to be able to operate in the red until that happens.
I’d say you’d need enough to survive for one year without earning a penny, although I personally would do 2 years.
Yeah the damned real estate market is a mess. Home ownership is rough, but being a small business owner seems impossible now. At least if you’re trying to get into somewhere popular like downtown.
My favorite coffee shop just got closed down. Owner told me the landlord basically told her the rent would have another 0 in it starting 2024. Maybe she was exaggerating, but that’s just so frustrating to hear.
Lack of infill development is a huge part of the blame. My city is growing fairly fast and is way above average in urban design compared to most US cities (thanks, largely, to just being plain old and dodging a lot of the mid-late century “redevelopment” by blind luck). But even still it is VERY hard to get through city permitting and all that to get a construction project done and they have all sorts of very dumb rules that make spaces for businesses VERY expensive (such as minimum parking requirements that make not one shred of sense. For example, any “new” bar or cafe trying to reno a building to set up a location would basically need to buy and level the building next door to build a surface parking lot, to satisfy minimum parking requirements, in spite of it being a medium-dense and fairly walkable midtown area.
It means the buildings that are already approved for commercial are HUGELY valuable. And the quantity of them only goes down over time, even as demand goes up, since they occasionally get converted to residential which is a one-way street. Residential infill is its own disaster, but the commercial properties are particularly fucked by the MPO.
Totally agree. If the restaurant closed down due to lack of interest in that cuisine in the area, then it’s probably not a good idea to try again.
I’d say the same if the last one just had really bad food or made people sick; it’s hard to make people separate that from the physical location rather than brand. This happened to a Chinese place where I grew up. Health department shut one down, so someone opened a new one at the same location. It was really good and had a spotless health record, but most people assumed it would still have the same issues so it failed.
That would be a far smaller issue now with so many orders being through apps.
There was this one site in a town I used to live in that was like a serial restaurant graveyard. In 10 years at least 5 different restaurants opened there and closed, usually in 1-2 years. It was a cool building but the reason seemed fairly clear to me: it was downtown, in a city with poor public transportation, off the main strip, and had no parking other than a pay garage 2 1/2 blocks away and around the corner. People tried an Italian restaurant, a sports themed dinner place, fine dining, a Chinese restaurant, another Italian restaurant, and a bar and grill.
When interviewed he said, “how hard can it be, it’s just burritos, this is my retirement business.”
Why is it always some terrible chain burrito restaurant? It’s time to stop.
