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Comment by hourislate | Hacker News Reader

I have read some of the restaurants along that stretch of road in Toronto have closed or will be closing. They have said business has fallen off the cliff.

https://www.blogto.com/eat_drink/2018/07/pearl-king-street-t...

https://torontosun.com/news/local-news/king-st-pilot-forces-...

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2018/01/22/king-st-business...

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King street restaurants have high turnover anyways - most of them have not been open that long to begin with. The area has a lot of competition so you really can't get away with being mediocre for very long.

Lots of business were crying foul at the start of the pilot, but credit card transaction data the city has hasn't borne that out.

Pearl King Street in particular was an overpriced restaurant with poor positioning. Chinatown is a few minutes away and offer much much better food at 1/3 of the price for each dim sum dish. Right beside are some better dining choices and no one ever went in there even when cars were allowed on King St.

I think either way Pearl was destined to close.

It’s important to not conflate cited causes as some of those owners also blame increases in the minimum wage.

You simply cannot trust the reasons people give for going out of business. If there is a visible villain they can blame, they will. Nobody ever says, "look, we just weren't that good," or "we spent too much money," or "we didn't understand the market very well," or "my wife has a cocaine habit and put us in debt," or "we didn't differentiate very well" or any of the thousands of other banal reasons small businesses fail.

If they can say, "it's because of that big new development over there!" or, "it was the street closure!" then that's what they're going to say. It's the story they'll tell their great-great-grandchildren. But who honestly knows? Companies go out of business all the time. That's the default. Keeping a restaurant open is very hard.

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