Yelps says more than half of restaurants temporarily closed are now permanently shuttered

It’s tough out there for restaurants and other small businesses. 

Yelp’s Economic Average report out Wednesday shows exactly how tough: 60 percent of the 26,160 temporarily closed restaurants on the business review site as of July are now permanently shut. Temporary closures are dropping, and permanent shutdowns are increasing. 

Yelp’s previous report in April found that more than 175,000 total businesses were closed in some capacity. Just under 25 percent of those closed businesses have reopened three months later. For restaurants in particular, this is becoming the way it goes. Yelp noted a 23-percent increase in permanent restaurant closures from only a month ago. Bars and clubs are also closing forever at high rates: 44 percent (as of July) of 5,454 temporarily shuttered bars and other nightlife establishments are shut for good. 

Yelp broke down which cities and states are experiencing the most closures, both temporary and permanent. Places like Honolulu, San Francisco, and Las Vegas were struggling to keep businesses open as the cities with the highest rate of closures.

Your local favorite may be in danger if these trends continue, and it may have already been lost.

It wasn’t all bad news for businesses trying to make it during the pandemic, though. Black-owned business searches soared compared to this time period last year. Yelp searches from May 25 to July 10 showed more than 2,500,000 searches for Black-owned businesses, a 7,043 percent increase compared to overall searches in 2019. Black-owned restaurants are the most popular search, up 2,508 percent from last year.