The numbers come first.
The United States has lost a fifth of its movie theaters and nearly a third of its bowling alleys since 2001, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages data tracking business establishments back to 1990. A 2025 study published under the title 'Uneven access to essential services and amenities: Geographic disparities in third place availability across the United States from 2010 to 2021' confirmed the trend extends across 12 categories of gathering spots — coffee shops, libraries, museums, recreation centers, and restaurants among them — with closures recorded in every single category from 2019 to 2021.
The cost structure behind the closures
The economics of running a physical space have become punishing. Restaurants have seen food costs rise 38% and labor costs 35% since 2019. Forty-five percent of operators reported they were not profitable in 2025, even as menu prices climbed 31% since 2020. Bars are absorbing a different hit: liquor liability insurance premiums have jumped between 25% and 40% in some regions.
Movie theaters illustrate the leverage problem most starkly. AMC alone carries more than $400 million in annual interest expense and $850 million in rent — a capital structure S&P Global Ratings has described as 'unsustainable' even as attendance recovers. When Cineworld filed for bankruptcy, it cited a nearly 30% rent increase per theater in the 2019-to-2022 window.
Affordability as a barrier to entry
Jessica Finlay, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder and one of the 2025 study's researchers, told Fortune the closures trace to forces that predate the pandemic: delayed effects of the Great Recession, an oversupply of malls, the rise of online retail, and chain consolidation. 'COVID certainly accelerated it,' she said.
The venues that remain open are increasingly unaffordable to visit regularly. Finlay noted that cost of living and gentrification are 'absolutely' shrinking the pool of people who can still afford to be regulars anywhere.
Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University, offered a street-level example: her son moved to San Francisco for an internship, attended a group dinner, split the bill evenly, and still left hungry. 'It cost me $90 and I was just stressed about the money the whole time that I couldn't even enjoy myself,' he told her. Holt-Lunstad said she is observing students on her own campus shift toward cheaper physical alternatives — roller skating, line dancing, outdoor meetups — precisely because affordability is pushing them out of conventional venues.
What the market is telling us
The closures hit hardest in rural areas and in communities with larger Black, Hispanic, and less-educated populations, according to the 2025 study's Census-based analysis.
The market has already voted. When regulatory burdens — occupancy rules, liquor licensing costs, zoning restrictions — stack on top of already-elevated rent, labor, and food costs, marginal venues do not survive. The result is a consolidation of social life into fewer, pricier establishments, or into no establishment at all.
The free-enterprise reading is straightforward: overregulation and inflationary cost structures imposed by government policy are destroying the very community infrastructure that no federal program can replicate. A local bar or bowling alley is private capital serving a genuine social function — and when the cost of compliance and operation exceeds what working Americans can pay to walk through the door, both the business and the community lose. Washington's answer will be a subsidy. The correct answer is to get out of the way.
