From what I have read, margins are so thin in the restaurant business that doing an energy audit and tightening up costs that way can be the difference between running in the red and profitability. That doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room for a greenhorn to learn the ropes, to figure out this isn't working and pivot, etc. I imagine that's part of why franchises are so popular in this space.
The source I am remembering is specifically about catering, not restaurants per se:
The energy used in catering facilities typically accounts for 4-6% of operating costs. Many caterers work on a profit margin that is within this range, so it is obvious that saving energy can directly increase revenue and profitability without the need to increase sales.
I often wonder how these things are calculated. I just don’t know that there is enough time in a year and enough buildings in a city for there to be 100 times as many attempts as there are successes, unless you include everyone who has ever thought, “I’ll open a restaurant!” And goes back to watching TV. Put another way, if 10 restaurants were successfully launched in a year, that implies 990 failures.
I've thought the same thing, I think it's a national stat and there is a lot of stuff opening in markets that make no sense for a restaurant in the first place. It's invisible to me, maybe you, because we live in and frequent urban/suburban places of middle+ class economics where seemingly most restaurants succeed. The rural and <middle class areas is where a lot of the failure comes from. That's my hypothesis anyway.
There are a number of sources of statistics, and while they vary a bit, they all show that the popular story of a ludcirously high failure rate for new restaurants is not true.
That said, the majority do either fail or get sold within three years, which (given that owners generally aren't building them for an exit) suggest a high combined rate of failure or burnout. But nothing like the 90, 95, or 99% short-run failure rates often tossed around.
I would be surprised if every single novice restauranteur tells themselves that before starting a venue.
Most of them are probably tell themselves something like "If I build it, they will come".
Still, 1% seems to me very low, we are not talking about startups, are there actual statistics on it ?