San Diego restaurants have low survival rate
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San Diego restaurants using DoorDash have among the lowest one-year survival rates in the country, per new data from the company shared exclusively with Axios.
Why it matters: Some churn is normal, even healthy. But especially low rates of restaurant survival in any given city may suggest something rotten in the state of the local industry.
Zoom in: The data looked at the biggest U.S. cities' restaurants that were open in September 2024 and remained open in September 2025.
- San Diego had the 10th-lowest resiliency rate at 91.1% — meaning lots of closures.
By the numbers: Fremont, California (87.6%), Henderson, Nevada (89.2%), and Seattle (89.8%) had the lowest rates.
- Lincoln, Nebraska (97.3%), Anaheim, California (95.7%), and Fort Wayne, Indiana (95.5%), had the best restaurant resiliency rates in the covered period, per DoorDash.
- The resiliency rate across all included cities was 93%.
Yes, but: Some cities with relatively low resiliency rates in the covered period — New Orleans, for example, at 90.8% — also had lots of new openings, the company found.
How it works: The data is part of DoorDash's new State of Local Commerce report, which features a bounty of metrics on restaurant trends and more across the 100 most populous U.S. cities.
What they're saying: The report's data should be considered in full context to get the best idea of any particular city's performance, DoorDash chief analytics officer Jessica Lachs tells Axios.
- "Being high or low on one of these scales doesn't necessarily mean that a city is doing well or doing poorly," Lachs says.
- "When we looked at the data, there really wasn't any city that was, across the board, a lower performer. It really is a mixed bag everywhere."
The bottom line: Running a restaurant is tough even in the best of times — and with rising costs and cash-strapped consumers, this isn't the best of times.