What You Can Learn From Chicago's Businesses Lost From The Pandemic

The Chicago Tribune recently released a list of businesses that closed their doors during the past year. Unsurprisingly, the two categories that fared the worst were restaurants and retail. The loss of some businesses, like City Lit Books, were a real community tragedy. Losing a few cell phone stores, probably not so much.

Buried at the start of the article was a far more interesting statistic to put the story in context. Across Illinois state in that same time frame, nearly 200,000 new businesses were started.

While experts guess most of these were solo entrepreneurs, it does signal a developing trend borne from necessity where we have many more first-time entrepreneurs trying to make their ideas work in 2021.