(The Epoch Times)—I have lost multiple restaurants over the past few years. The final two closed last year in California.
At first, it was easy to explain. COVID-19 hit, and everything changed overnight. Then came the actor strikes, the writer strikes, and the fires that swept through Los Angeles. One by one, these events reshaped the economic and cultural landscape. The city felt different. People moved differently. They spent differently.
Restaurants, especially the kind I built, started to struggle in a way that felt deeper than a temporary downturn. I operated in what I would call the middle, casual, sit-down, mid-priced restaurants. Not fast food, not fine dining. The place where families gather, where people linger, where community happens over a meal.
That middle is disappearing.
I watched a shift in behavior, in real time. The customer who used to go to a casual sit-down restaurant is now ordering at the counter in a fast casual setting, while the person who used to go to fast casual is pulling back even further, choosing fast food because it fits their budget. Those who regularly eat at fine dining establishments can continue to do so. There was no fall down into the middle from the top. Instead, everyone stepped down a rung, leaving the middle hollowed out.
At the time, I thought this might be a California story, but it wasn’t. It was an early warning.
Now, in 2026, we are seeing major chains, fast food and fast casual alike, announce closures, bankruptcies, and restructurings. Names that once seemed untouchable are shrinking their footprints:
- Wendy’s ~300 locations closing
- Pizza Hut ~250 locations closing
- Papa John’s ~200 locations closing (restructuring)
- Jack in the Box ~50 to 100 locations closing
- Red Robin up to ~70 locations closing
- Outback Steakhouse ~40 locations closing
- Denny’s ~150 locations closed or closing
- Red Lobster dozens of locations (bankruptcy)
- Noodles & Company ~30 to 35 locations closing
- Popeyes franchise group dozens of locations (bankruptcy)
- Bahama Breeze all remaining locations closing
- TGI Fridays dozens of locations (bankruptcy or restructuring)
This is not a recovery. It is a continuation.
And it’s not one dramatic collapse. There is no single moment you can point to and say, “That’s when it all fell apart.” Instead, it’s thousands of quiet closures, a lease not renewed, a location that simply doesn’t reopen, a family deciding they can’t keep going.
Those closures feel subtle. They happen without headlines, without press releases, without national attention. But the list above tells a different story. When hundreds of locations are closing across major national chains, when bankruptcies and restructurings are happening at scale, that is not quiet, not subtle, and not just background economic noise. That is something breaking in plain sight.
When you place those two realities next to each other, the quiet disappearance of family restaurants and the very public contraction of major chains, it becomes harder to dismiss this as a normal cycle. It begins to look less like churn and more like a system under strain.
The data is harder to track for small, independent restaurants, but the picture is clear. In 2025, the United States saw a net loss of roughly 9,500 restaurants. When you account for new openings, that suggests closer to 15,000 closures in a single year, the vast majority of them independent, family-run establishments.
If you ask why, you will hear the same answers, leases are not being renewed, margins are too tight, owners are burned out. All of that is true. It was true for me.
I closed my flagship restaurant, one I never wanted to close, while it was still technically profitable, but we were barely making it and the trajectory was not improving. When I went to renew my lease, the landlord demanded a significant rent increase and an additional personal guarantee. This was after 10 years of never missing a payment, 10 years of being an anchor tenant in that plaza.
I believe he thought I was bluffing, that I would blink first. But once I made the decision to close and began dismantling the restaurant, the offers started coming, concessions, flexibility, terms that would have kept us open. By then, it was too late.
Anyone who has owned a restaurant understands burnout. It is a business that never closes, long hours, thin margins, constant pressure, and almost no room for error. When something goes wrong, your customers feel it immediately, and you spend more time apologizing than celebrating.
You get into it because you want to cook, to nourish people, to serve your community. Instead, you end up buried in compliance, legal issues, taxes, and regulation. For years, my assistant in Los Angeles would tell people she worked in compliance. When they asked what that meant, she would explain that she was a personal assistant to someone running multiple businesses in California. In that environment, compliance is a full-time job.
The regulatory burden is real, and in my case, it became too heavy to carry. But this is no longer just a California problem.
When even the cheapest, most standardized, most heavily optimized food models in the country can’t make the numbers work, we are looking at something much bigger. When major pizza chains and fast food giants can’t figure out the formula, it is not a brand problem. It is a system problem.
From the farm all the way to the plate, the cost structure is breaking down. Regulation, labor, input costs, and debt are stacking in a way that makes it increasingly difficult to operate a viable food business.
So what do we make of it?
I wish I could say this was happening because people are eating better, that consumers are rejecting processed food and moving toward healthier, more intentional choices. That is not what I see.
Where I live now, in central Texas, fast food drive thrus are still full. Processed food is still dominant. The demand is there, and yet both ends of the food system are under pressure.
On one end, farms are closing at alarming rates. On the other, restaurants are disappearing just as quickly. In between, we are told that food has never been more abundant or more affordable.
These two realities can both be true. Cheap, abundant food that farmers are losing money to produce on one end, and food that is contributing to metabolic dysfunction on the other, is not a win for anyone. There is an expression about burning the candle at both ends. It is clear now that the food system is doing exactly that, burning down at both ends while only the middlemen seem to be surviving.
Behind every restaurant that closes is not just a failed business. It is a family that lost its livelihood, employees who lost their jobs, and a community that lost a gathering place. Multiply that by thousands, and the ripple effects become impossible to ignore.
Economists tend to focus on the stock market, GDP, and macro indicators that suggest stability or growth. But what does it mean when tens of thousands of food businesses—farms and restaurants alike—are disappearing? What does it mean when the people who actually grow food and prepare it can’t make a living doing so?
This is not a single shock. It is a slow squeeze, and the question is not just what caused it, but where it leads.
If we continue down this path, where the middle disappears, where small operators cannot survive, and even large chains struggle to stay profitable, we are left with a food system that is more consolidated, more fragile, and more disconnected from the communities it is supposed to serve.
I have lived this from the inside. I have closed the doors, paid the final bills, and walked away from something I built over years. What I see now is not a temporary contraction. It is a restructuring.
Unless we start asking harder questions about the underlying economics of our food system, we may wake up one day to find that the places we gathered, the businesses that fed us, and the people who made it all possible are simply gone.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
