We wish DoorDash would buy and rescue a restaurant chain

Different stacks of pancakes... Last month, food delivery leader DoorDash raised ~$3.4B in fresh cash during its IPO. After a splashy public debut on the NYSE, DoorDash now has a hearty market value of $45B — nearly 3X its June valuation. But while food delivery has it sweet, brick-and-mortar restaurants have been served a different fate:

• 17% of US restaurants have closed due to the pandemic. That's more than 500K restaurants of every type — from independent, to franchise, and chain — that have gone under.
• All those closures represent millions of jobs lost in the food services industry, which is one of the largest employers in the US.

Something to Fribble over... The list of 2020 food chain bankruptcies is long, from Ruby Tuesday, to Chuck E. Cheese. Franchise operators weren't immune: NPC International, which owns over 1K Pizza Hut and Wendy's franchises, filed in July. CFRA Holdings, which runs 50 IHOP locations, went under in May. But bankrpucty doesn't necessarily mean closure...

• Ice cream legend Friendly's filed for bankruptcy in November and sold itself for just barely $2M — but it's expected to keep nearly all of its 130 locations open.
• Sizzler, which went bankrupt in September, also said it doesn't intend to close locations. So we had an idea...