Wendy’s to close 140 ‘poor-performing’ restaurants by end of year
Wendy's is closing 140 "poor-performing" restaurants by the end of the year, the company announced Friday.
Wendy’s is closing around 140 underperforming restaurants by the end of the year, the fast food giant announced Friday.
The Dublin, Ohio-headquartered restaurant chain didn’t offer a list of cities or states where the closures will take place, but Kirk Tanner, the company’s president and CEO, said they will be spread out across the country, rather than concentrated in a single region.
Wendy’s has 7,292 stores around the world, and more than 80% of them — or 6,011 locations — are in the U.S., according to data released by the company on Thursday.
The restaurants that will soon have to shut down “are quite out-of-date” and “don’t build our brands,” Tanner said Thursday in a conference call with investors.
“Our focus is on building new restaurants because we know they deliver well over the average of these poor-performing restaurants,” he said, according to a transcript of the call by The Motley Fool. “We, overall, want the best restaurants for the customers and that customer experience we want to deliver.”
The upcoming closures, which join the 100 restaurants the company said it would close earlier this year, will be offset by new restaurants, which will open “in better locations with significantly improved sales and profitability.”
“We built 500 new restaurants over the last two years,” Tanner said. “We’ll build almost 250 to 300 restaurants this year.”
Wendy’s is the latest high-profile restaurant chain to adjust to what appears to be a new landscape in the service industry in the US, as rising menu prices continue to turn off customers.
In May, seafood restaurant chain Red Lobster Early filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after closing dozens of its locations. And early last week, the diner-style restaurant chain Denny’s announced it would shut down 50 of its underperforming restaurants by the end of 2025.
TGI Friday has closed approximately 100 restaurants across the country so far this year — several of them in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
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