Busy isn’t the same as profitable

I eat out a lot, and a full dining room always feels like proof that things are working. For a lot of restaurants right now, it isn’t.

In the US, 42% of restaurant operators said their business was not profitable in 2025. That’s from the National Restaurant Association, which published the figure in July 2026. A restaurant can be full every night and still be one of them.

The reason is in the costs. The same NRA analysis found wholesale food prices up 35% from before the pandemic, and average hourly pay for restaurant staff up 41%. Total expenses for an average restaurant rose 36% between 2019 and 2026. Before the pandemic, a typical restaurant kept about 5 cents of every dollar as pre-tax profit.

So a restaurant charging 2019 prices on 2026 costs is working hard to lose money.

Menu prices have gone up too, by 36% between February 2020 and May 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But an average hides the detail. Some dishes get repriced and some don’t. A supplier can raise a price by a few cents a case, and nobody connects it to the dish it ends up in.

That’s the gap we care about. The information to catch it usually exists already: it’s on the invoices, in the recipes and in the till. It just never sits in one place long enough for anyone to look.

Three questions worth asking this week

• Which supplier invoice went up the most in the last three months?
• Which dishes use that ingredient, and when were they last repriced?
• Is your busiest dish also one of your most profitable?

If you can’t answer them in five minutes, you’re not alone. It’s the reason we’re building Dynamic.ly.