Fast food trends in 2024: Expect more restaurant franchises to close

The restaurant industry was one of the most impacted by the covid-19 pandemic. While the disruption it caused like supply chain bottlenecks and labor shortages has mostly disappeared, in its wake many have struggled to fully recover, if at all.

2023 has seen several familiar name-brand chains scale back their footprint, closing locations across the country, especially those who were encountering difficulties prior to 2020.

Fast food trends in 2024: Expect more restaurant franchises to close

While some closures are a culling of underperforming locations in order to redirect resources to other franchises, loss of customer base or structural financial difficulties have been behind others. Here’s a rundown of some of the major restaurant franchises that have made significant reductions in the number of locations this year and we could expect to close more locations in 2024.

Applebee’s

The neighborhood bar & grill had close to 1,600 locations in the United States at the end of 2022 after closing around 300 since 2017. This year was supposed to be the turnaround year to start growing again into the future.

However, pressure on margins and rising building costs for new locations has dashed those plans, at least for now. The franchise will accelerate restaurant closures this year to between 10 and 20 according to parent company Dine Brands.

Boston Market

The fast-casual chain that ignited the rotisserie chicken craze has been dying a slow death since its peak in the late-1990s. Plans to breathe new life into the company started in 2020 are basically kaput with Boston Market’s Denver headquarter seized by local authorities and lawsuits piling up for unpaid bills and wages. At the beginning of December, owner Jignesh Pandya filed for personal bankruptcy in the face of hundreds of lawsuits from vendors, franchisors, and employees regarding unpaid bills.

Around couple dozen locations have shuttered permanently this year across the country. In September, 27 Boston Market restaurants were forced to temporarily close by the New Jersey Department of Labor. After the company paid over $600,000 in back wages to 314 employees those locations were allowed to open again.

You might also be interested in: Why did Starbucks close 7 of its stores in downtown San Francisco last month?

Buffalo Wild Wings

By the end of June this year, Buffalo Wild Wings had closed all of its locations in Canada. There is no news on what is in store for the remaining locations stateside, which number over 1,200.

However, the sports bar chain was hit with a class action lawsuit in March this year by a disgruntled customer who alleged the chain “willfully, falsely, and knowingly misrepresented” its boneless wings as actual chicken wings. The company admitted that it uses white meat chicken in a post on social media.

Burger King

While the ‘King’ of burgers typically closes a couple hundred stores in a given year, the fast-food giant said that it expected to close up to twice as many this year. Some of the larger swaths of closures have been the result of financial difficulties of the franchise owners, others that have been open for over four decades shuttered suddenly for no known reasons.

Nation’s Restaurant News reported that the chain had over 750 fewer stores at the end of the third quarter this year compared to the end of 2022 and advised to expect even less locations next year. However, chief financial officer at Burger King parent Restaurant Brands International Inc Matthew Dunnigan told a investors on an earnings call that the company has been prioritizing “the most distressed situations, closing unviable restaurants and cleaning up a number of portfolios.”

“We expect to largely finalize the remainder of those workouts and closures by end of year, resulting in elevated bad debt for Q4 but with the benefit of a much-improved foundation entering 2024,” he added.

Hardee’s

A major franchise owner of Hardee’s restaurants, Summit Restaurant Holdings, declared bankruptcy this past spring after closing 39 stores in several states. Earlier this month four locations were abruptly closed in South Dakota blindsiding customers and employees alike.

Steak ‘n Shake

Since avoiding bankruptcy protection in 2021, Steak ‘n Shake has been undergoing a transformation of its locations from a full-service model with drive-thru to a counter-service fast-food model. Although sales improved recently, the company and franchise owners have continued to cull stores, with another 24 in total closed so far this year. Over the past five years QSR reports that the regional burger chain has over 200 fewer restaurants, nearly a third of the location count the company had in 2018.

Please note this article previously stated that Steak ‘n Shake had filed for bankruptcy protection. We are happy to correct the error.