I could not find stats on the percentage of troubled restaurants that fail each year, but I did find what appears to be a much-cited study from a professor of (H.G. Parsa) of hospitality management at Ohio State University circa 2007 showing that about 60% of Restaurants fail within the first 3 years (with annual failure rates of 26% the first year, 19% the second year, and 14% the third year). One point of this study was to dispute an urban myth, repeated on the NBC reality show “The Restaurant” from 2003-04, that 90% of restaurants fail in their first year.
This does not exactly provide the right comparison group for Ramsey's shows - the failure rate appears to decrease after the first year, and presumably is lower for years 10, 11 and 12 than for years 1, 2 and 3. It seems most of Ramsey's establishments have been in operation for a while. OTOH, no doubt the failure rate is higher for establishments that are already in trouble. It seems to me that if 60% of the Restaurants on Ramsey's shows closed over a 7 year period, that must be pretty close to, if not lower than, the failure rate for troubled restaurants in general over that period. Parsa's study was done in Columbus, Ohio - I did read one study that suggested the failure rate was higher in New York City, which may be similar to London. In my area, which is pretty intensive for both tourism and the food and wine industry, there are a number of well established restaurants with good reputations that have been around for decades or longer, and turnover there is very rare (though they do experience more turnover than might be appreciated, since they are sold to new owners but keep the old name). But then there are a number of locations that have had 4 or 5 different restaurant operations in the last ten years. Parsa's suggests that one of the main reasons restaurants fail is that the owners no longer want to put in enough time, or can not resolve conflicts between family and business priorities. Given that one of the inclusion factors for appearing on the Ramsey shows appears to be high levels of drama and conflict in family ownership, that would predict for even higher baseline levels of closure. As a therapist, for the shows I have seen (maybe 2 seasons of the US show and 1 of the UK show) the most unrealistic part always seems to be the depiction of Ramsey resolving entrenched and serious family conflict and dysfunction in a week or less. Having done a lot of family therapy I know that such patterns are very difficult to change, even with long term interventions. http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-04-16/the-restaurant-failure-mythbusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 7:15 AM, PGage <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, Jun 28, 2014 at 6:26 PM, Bob Jersey <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> A scorecard on GrubStreet >> <http://www.grubstreet.com/2014/06/gordon-ramsay-kitchen-nightmares-restaurant-closure-rates.html> >> (link) shows north of 60 % of the eateries the show visited, have since >> closed. >> >> The Easton venue, the last show's subject, survives as a new location of >> DeLorenzo's <http://www.delorenzosrestaurant.com/> (link), which moved >> about 2½ miles north. >> > > > I don't want to be in the position of defending Gordon Ramsey, but > GrubStreet's analysis seems inadequate and potentially misleading to me. A > very high percentage of restaurant's close in any one year, and my > understanding is that the establishments featured on this program are > already in crisis. To meaningfully interpret the 60% closing rate, we would > have to know what percentage of similarly situated restaurants have closed > within a similar time period - I would be surprised if that number was not > at least 60%. > > I guess if Ramsey has made the claim that he has saved all of the > restaurant's that appear on his show (I have seen a small percentage of > these programs, but I can not recall if he makes such a claim) then these > data would be enough to dispute that. > -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
