Popular Chain Restaurant In Amarillo Bought Out. Could It Close?

It's been a crazy run lately of restaurants closing in Amarillo. We've seen at least 4-5 different places shut their doors for good over the last month or two, and quite honestly it's a bit concerning. How many more restaurants could we potentially lose?

When it comes to the chain restaurants, they look at the places that are bringing in the highest amount of profit, and if they're successful in big cities, they will bring in a boatload of profit. Smaller cities like Amarillo? Sure, they could be profitable, but HOW profitable are they?

So when new like what I'm about to tell you comes out, it gets a little bit scary. Chuy's recently sold off their stakes to Darden Restaurants, one of the biggest restaurant owners in America. They have restaurants such as Olive Garden, Longhorn Steakhouse, and Cheddar's in their portfolio just to name a few.

What's scary about all this is we've heard news about Olive Garden struggling a bit and could be closing some restaurants, and I'm sure the others they own are in the same boat. Every company is looking for ways to stay cost-effective in the current state of the economy.

Well now that they've added Chuy's to their portfolio, it stands reason to believe they could be looking at closing some of those locations as well to make sure they maximize their profits from the acquisition.

Amarillo is always going to be one of those cities that companies look at. Not because it isn't a good place to have a restaurant, we love to eat out here as evidenced by the amount of places we have to go. It's all going to start with the size of the city and how much true profit is coming in.

Do we bring in less profit daily than some of the other restaurants? Are they losing money or simply breaking even here? We're no different from the other cities. There are nights that we tend to eat out more often than others, and every restaurant will have slow nights.

However, a slow night in say, San Antonio compared to Amarillo is very different, and San Antonio could still turn a profit on a slow night, whereas Amarillo may not. You have to account for staff costs, utility costs, etc.

So while there's no official word on anything related to Chuy's other than they've been sold, we may want to start the clock on seeing whether or not we'll get to keep ours.