Mike's Minute: Look further than the headline

Author: Mike Hosking ,
Publish Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2026, 9:53am

Here's the headline: "3000 hospitality businesses close in a year".

That’s what the media not only does, but loves. They would perceive it as bad news and they can't pedal bad news enough.

But in the numbers are the real story.

The 3000 is made up of closures and liquidations. A closure can mean nothing more than a person leaving the country or closing one establishment to open another. That happens all the time.

It's not a sign of anything other than mood or inspiration.

It's important to also remember that there are more openings than closures. That’s the real story, so in essence the hospitality scene is actually growing.

Not that a headline about 3000 closures would ever tell you that.

Ironically, it's also perhaps an insight into the reality of hospitality, which is to say it's a very easy entry into business, given a lot of hospitality is hole-in-the-wall sandwich-type stuff, often by migrants, that comes and goes.

So on one hand we are growing and on the other it's an in-and-out sort of operation that is not really reflective of a wider economy, or its story.

The next part of the stats dump is liquidations. They tell us liquidations are up 42% year on year. That sounds bad, until you hear the next number, which is 1.3%.

The 1.3% is the percentage of businesses that actually end up liquidated, which of course is hardly any.

98.7% are not liquidated, so the 42% is off an extremely low base and not, if you were being honest, worthy of a headline.

But remember the key here; it's all about bad news.

Do you want a worse one?

Takeaway liquidations were up 143%. That's a shocker, except, remember that takeaways is a subset of overall liquidations and the liquidations only represent 1.3%. So imagine how small the actual number of fish and chip shops this actually involves is. So, 143% of what?

So, to the narrative. If a headline is all you ever see you will believe we are a dump, it’s a mess and things aren't improving. And yet the truth is a whole different thing.

In these numbers and the narrative is the modern-day story of news and information; what's real versus what they want you to think is real.

It sadly requires work on your part to get to the real story.

And in this case, it is nowhere near as bad as they make out. In fact, it's almost entirely the opposite.