Nearly 140,000 U.S. businesses that closed since March 1 remain shuttered, and just over 40 percent of them have closed for good.
Yelp’s latest report on businesses listed on the platform show that more retailers closed than any other businesses during the coronavirus pandemic, but a higher number of restaurants are closing permanently, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Nearly 27,700 retailers closed and 35 percent of them marked themselves as permanently closed. While just under 24,000 restaurants have closed since the beginning of March, 53 percent of them are considered permanently closed.
Around 175,000 Yelp-listed businesses were closed in April, meaning about 35,000 have reopened since then.
Some of those businesses could soon close again as the number of positive COVID-19 cases rise nationwide. Texas, California and Arizona account for nearly half of the almost 40,000 new cases reported Thursday.
Texas Governor Greg Abbot on Friday ordered bars to close at noon except for delivery and takeout and limited restaurant capacity to 50 percent, but stopped short of ordering any businesses to shutter completely.
Meanwhile, searches surged for black-owned businesses across the country in the weeks after the late May police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. There were 222,000 searches for black-owned business compared to 9,000 in the three weeks prior.
Yelp also created a function to search for black-owned businesses. [WSJ] — Dennis Lynch