  Do 9 out of 10 restaurants fail in their first year, as commonly claimed? No.
Survival analysis of 1.9 million longitudinal microdata for 81,000 full-service
restaurants in a 20-year U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics non-public census of
business establishments in the western US shows that only 17 percent of
independently owned full-service restaurant startups failed in their first
year, compared with 19 percent for all other service-providing startups. The
median lifespan of restaurants is about 4.5 years, slightly longer than that of
other service businesses (4.25 years). However, the median lifespan of a
restaurant startup with 5 or fewer employees is 3.75 years, slightly shorter
than that of other service businesses of the same startup size (4.0 years).
