Yahoo Finance
Sometimes, a business has to get smaller in order to grow, or at least that's what executives, including Wendy's CFO Ken Cook, say when they explain why they're closing locations.
"We're focused on improving restaurant-level economics, taking a hard look at underperforming restaurants in our system from both the financial and customer experience perspective and working with franchisees to improve those, transfer those to another operator or potentially closing them," he said during the chain'sthird-quarter earnings call.
Closing up to 350 restaurants, he said, will improve the financials of those that remain and leave franchise operators with cash to invest in their remaining locations.
Long John Silver's, an iconic fast-food chain like Wendy's, has also been closing locations — dropping from over 1,000 units in 2015 to fewer than 500 currently, based on theConsumer Edge 2026 Restaurant Outlookreport.
At its peak, the chain operated more than 1,400 restaurants, according toFood Republic.
The company's Senior Vice President Tony Ellis, much like Cook, believes that the closures, at least the ones over the past three years, have actually put the seafood chain in a strong position to return to growth.
Tony Ellis toldSeafoodSourcethat Long John Silver's has closed "roughly 110 to 120 locations over the past three years." He said the company now operates 214 company-owned restaurants and about 262 franchised units, which matches the total on the company'srestaurant locator page.
Long John Silver’s Chief Marketing Officer Laura Ellis said that not all of the closures were due to financial performance.
“We want our in-restaurant experience to be as positive as the taste of our food, so we’ve spent a ton of time remodeling our footprint,” she said.
"As you can imagine, our brand has been around since 1969, so some of our restaurants were in dire need of a facelift.
This means some of those restaurants are temporary closures, and some are a departure from historical strategy.” Tony Ellis explained that nearly 70 of the closures came from the chain exiting co-branded locations with Taco Bell, KFC, and A&W, which he said aligns with "broader industry trend of major chains increasingly preferring single-brand locations." The chain also survived a 1998Chapter 11 bankruptcyfiling.
"The company listed liabilities of $457.3 million and assets of $329.1 million in the Chapter 11 filing late Monday in U.S.
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