Fast food chains may be all that survive lockdown, with fine dining and casual sit-down restaurants unable to adapt to new regulations
The restaurant industry lost $25 billion in sales and left 3 million employees jobless last month, according to Business Insider.
More than 30,000 restaurants have already closed their doors forever, with 110,000 expected to give up within the next month, according to a survey by the National Restaurant Association.
That’s 10% of the 1.1 million restaurants in the country, and many of those expected to survive are replications of a fast food chain.
For example, there are 16,000 McDonald’s restaurants alone, that will likely have no problem staying afloat.
Fast food chain sales are only down 50%, while casual sit-down restaurants have lost 75% of their revenue and fine dining has lost 90%, according to the survey.
That’s because laws in much of the country only allow for drive-thru, delivery or curb-side service during what will likely be a minimum of 2 months of quarantines.
Obviously sit-down restaurants don’t have drive-thrus and most are not set up for delivery.
There are a handful downtown offering curbside service, but given social distancing rules, people aren’t flocking to parking garages to go stand in crowded lines on city sidewalks.
Rather, the epicenters of fine dining, including local, organic and farm-to-table restaurants, are like ghost towns.
“Any pundit who thinks they’re going to use a recent history — and by recent history, I mean the last 100 years, including the Depression — as a template for what is going to go on here? They’re kidding themselves,” restaurant investor Roger Lipton told Business Insider.
The restaurant industry will look entirely different in 2021 Lipton says, with venture capitalists deciding which bankrupted franchises they want to buy up.
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