1 in 4 Restaurants Could Die This Summer

There have been harder hit industries than restaurants, especially those with active takeout and delivery angles to keep serving customers during the shelter-in-place phase of this pandemic. However, the casualty rate among eateries will be high in the coming months.

Reservations specialist OpenTable put out a sobering forecast last week, predicting that one in every four U.S. restaurants will not reopen as a result of the pandemic-fueled quarantines.

OpenTable books tables at trendy independent eateries, so it's not necessarily representative of how the major publicly traded chains will fare during the shutdown. It's hard not to see many established chains going down here. We've already seen salad buffet concept Sweet Tomatoes throw in its croutons, and other well-known concepts will inevitably follow suit.