Pizza Hut Closing 500 Restaurants
Pizza Hut has announced that they may be closing as many as 500 U.S. Dine-in restaurants. They are describing the ones targeted for closure as “older underperforming dine-in restaurants”.
Sioux Falls has 4 Pizza Hut and 2 Pizza Hut Express locations across the city. Foodbusinessnews reports that within the United States there are around 6,100 traditional dine-in Pizza Hut locations and another 1,350 are express units.
President and Chief Operating Officer of Pizza Hut's parent company Yum! Brands David W. Gibbs is quoted as saying:
“This will ultimately strengthen the Pizza Hut business in the U.S. and set it up for a faster long-term growth. During this transition we expect a temporary deceleration in the pace of new unit development for the Pizza Hut division as continued healthy international unit growth will be partially offset by a short-term decline in the absolute number of U.S. units. As a result, our U.S. store count could drop to as low as 7,000 locations over the next 24 months, primarily driven by closures of underperforming dine-in restaurants before rebounding to current levels and above in the future. But as far as the numbers and how the math works, it’s hard to estimate how soon the timing of when a store will close and then when the replaced unit will open. There will be gaps on some of those, but certainly, our goal is to try to minimize those gaps.”