How many Boston Market locations are left is anyone’s guess. But one thing is for certain: A lot of them have closed.
The rotisserie chicken chain has been closing locations over the past year amid a flurry of lawsuits and evictions. That includes recent closures in Massachusetts, Florida and Connecticut.
To get an idea of how many stores have closed, we sought help from Restaurant Business sister company Technomic, which uses multiple sources to determine how many stores are open right now.
Based on Yelp pages, the company has 190 locations. But Yelp pages rely on consumers to report whether stores are closed or not, and often those customers get it wrong.
It likely has a lot less than that. For instance, when you want to leave feedback about a store on the Boston Market website, it lists 79 units. The location count on the website lists more than that. And the company’s online ordering system currently lists 108 active locations.
But many of those listed in the online ordering section are confirmed closed, such as seven locations in Connecticut, which were shut down after a landlord evicted the brand. And many of the locations listed in the online ordering section note that they do not have online ordering.
Either way, the numbers suggest the extent of the freefall Boston Market is in right now.
According to Technomic, Boston Market finished 2022 with 300 locations, itself down 12% from the previous year and down by one-third since 2018. In fact, Boston Market has been in a steady decline since the late 1990s.
At the very least, Boston Market has closed more than a third of its locations this year, and as many as three-quarters of its units.
Boston Market has been closing locations this year amid accusations of unpaid bills, including landlords, vendors and employees. The company is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor over wage and hour violations. All told, at least 140 lawsuits have been filed against the chain since 2020, when owner Jay Pandya bought the company from Sun Capital.
Former employees of the company have accused it of refusing to pay bills and demanding often steep discounts before agreeing to pay anything. The company fell behind on such bills as garbage pickup and dishwasher rental. And it didn’t pay rent on a lot of locations, leading to numerous lawsuits from landlords, not to mention eviction.
The biggest lawsuit has come from giant distributor US Foods, which sued Boston Market in July, accusing it of reneging on an agreement to pay nearly $11 million in overdue distribution bills.
Pandya and his wife Mital filed for personal bankruptcy last month, not listing themselves as business owners, but including business debts in the filing such as $10 million to US Foods.
A U.S. bankruptcy trustee on Thursday filed a motion to dismiss the bankruptcy case, citing flaws in the filing. The trustee said that the Pandya’s have failed to provide proof of insurance on a pair of personal properties, one in Pennsylvania and a second in Vadodara, India, despite “numerous” requests over the past two weeks.