This year’s myriad restaurant bankruptcies make it possible to draw many individual lessons about tactics that burdened balance sheets.
But if the filings of bankrupt brands and operators elucidate specific, flawed business practices, like Thai Union Group’s sale-leaseback process at Red Lobster, are there generalizable lessons, given the sheer number of bankruptcies?
2024 offers a surplus of brand cadavers to would-be corporate pathologists: TGI Fridays, Bucca di Beppo, One Table Restaurant Brands, Rubio’s and Tijuana Flats, among many others, all filed for Chapter 11, while Mod Pizza narrowly avoided the same fate.
So what happened?
The short answer is rising prices….
