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Fans of Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant will be disappointed to learn that the beloved restaurant and pub chain has abruptly closed all of its locations across multiple states. Heres why and what you need to know about Iron Hill Brewerys closure. Whats happened? Yesterday (Thursday, September 25), Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant made several announcements. Effective immediately, it was closing the doors to all its locations, the company revealed. Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant was founded nearly 30 years ago. Its first location opened in Newark, Delaware, in 1996. Since then, it had expanded to multiple states along the countrys eastern coast, including Georgia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and South Carolina. According to Nations Restaurant News, Iron Hill Brewery had 19 locations as of the end of 2024. That same year, the companys sales increased by 4% to $104.1 million. Yet the modest sales growth apparently wasnt enough to keep Iron Hill Brewery going. Last week, the company announced it was closing three of its locations, including its original Newark location. At the time, an Iron Hill Brewery spokesperson told NRN that the three closures were part of the companys ongoing efforts to adapt to a changing business landscape while focusing on strengthening its long-term growth and success. But just a week later, Iron Hill shocked customers and employees by announcing that its remaining 16 locations would be closing as well. Iron Hill Brewery notifies employees of bankruptcy via email On September 25, Iron Hill Brewery sent an email to employees notifying them that the business would be closing all locations for good. In the email, which was obtained by the website Breweries in PA and also shared on social media forums like Reddit, Iron Hills leadership said, It is with a heavy heart that I must announce the closure of all our restaurant locations effective immediately. The email went on to explain that it had made the difficult decision to file for bankruptcy. It cited ongoing financial challenges as the reason for its decision. The company went on to explain that it had been trying to secure new funding to keep the chain going, but presumably, that funding was not achieved. The same day of the email to employees, Iron Hill posted a brief notice on its website, letting customers know of the developments. USA Today reports that this same notice was posted to the doors of some of the shuttered Iron Hill restaurants. After many wonderful years serving our communities, all Iron Hill locations have closed, the notice read in part. It has been our pleasure to serve you, and we are deeply grateful for your support, friendship, and loyalty over the years. The notice ends by noting that the company sincerely hope[s] to return in the future. Full list of closed Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant locations With the three closures on September 18, and the additional 16 closures on September 25, Iron Hill Brewery has now closed all of its 19 locations. Here is the list of those locations: Delaware Newark Rehoboth Beach Wilmington Georgia Atlanta New Jersey Maple Shade Voorhees Pennsylvania Chestnut Hill Exton Hershey Huntingdon Valley Lancaster Lehigh Valley Media Newtown North Wales Philadelphia West Chester South Carolina Columbia Greenville A busy time for restaurant bankruptcies Unfortunately, Iron Hill Brewery isnt the only restaurant chain that has announced bankruptcy recently. Since 2024, several established chains have announced bankruptcy plans, including Buca di Beppo, Hooters, Red Lobster, Roti, BurgerFi, and Tijuana Flats. Many of these bankruptcies have resulted in store closures. While each company will have different factors influencing its decision to file for bankruptcy, many restaurant chains have been experiencing similar problems in recent years, which often contribute to their bankruptcy. These problems include higher costs, inflationary pressures that lead diners to cut back on their discretionary spending, and foot traffic that has yet to recover to its pre-pandemic norms.
Category:
E-Commerce
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Fast Companys Plugged In. Our new print issue features How YouTube Ate TV, an oral history of the video-sharing sites impact on entertainment, culture, and business as told by dozens of eyewitnesses past and present. As we stitched sound bites together into a story, it became clear that our interviews had provided an embarrassment of riches. Indeed, we had too many great stories and insights to cram into one magazine article. So we expanded the online version of the article into five oral histories. Two are live on our site now, covering the companys earliest days and acquisition by Google. Three more will roll out next week, bringing the story up to 2025and, in the case of AIs sweeping impact on the platform, beyond. One of the joys of working on this project with my colleagues and fellow interviewers, María José Gutiérrez Chávez, Yasmin Gagne, Steven Melendez, and David Salazar, was having an excuse to think back to what the web was like 20 years ago. Its not just that YouTube was brand new and rapidly becoming a necessity of everyday life. At the time, the whole proposition of being able to easily watch videos on the internet at all was a novelty. The technology that made itand sites like YouTubepossible at all was Macromedias Flash. By the time YouTube came along, Flash was more than a decade old. Initially known as FutureWave SmartSketch, it morphed from a drawing app for pen-based computers into a browser plug-in that allowed websites to offer more motion and interactivity than the early web could muster on its own. Flash jazzed up the internet without requiring much in the way of bandwidth or computing cyclesa critical virtue back in the days of pokey dial-up connections. A whole universe of Flash-enabled animations and games sprung up. Flash was so manifestly useful that Netscape and Microsoft bundled it with their browsers. Eventually, the plug-in added support for video playback, dramatically simplifying a process that had formerly required clunky software such as RealPlayer. Instead of video being something you watched in a separate app with its own interface, it could be rendered right inside sites. Thats why YouTube was so easy to use. It also permitted the fledgling site to make its videos embeddable on any web page, spreading them all over the internet. If you were online back then, you may recall all this. But Im afraid Flashs reputation was tarnished by what happened well after it helped YouTube become, well, YouTube. A couple of months after YouTube was founded, Adobe agreed to acquire Macromedia. Once Flash came into its portfolio, the software giant aggressively stuffed the plug-in with new features. What had begun as a complement to the plain-vanilla web became a platform unto itself. As Flash got more powerful, it lost its original spritely nature. Increasingly, it was a bloated resource hogsomething you reluctantly allowed onto your computer because a sizable percentage of the web wouldnt work without it. In 2011, I wrote about how Flash had mucked up my MacBook Air, and how much better the laptop worked with the plug-in disabled. Did I mention that Flash also had some pretty significant security issues? By the time I banished Flash from my Mac, the PC-centric web that had given us Flash in the first place was receding into history. Apples introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and iPad in 2010 had put browsers onto new classes of gadgets with smaller displays and touchscreen interfaces. But Apple didnt give Adobe the kind of technical access it needed to put Flash on an iPhone or iPad. On those devices, Flash content showed up as empty boxes. In 2010, Steve Jobs published an open letter, Thoughts on Flash, that argued that Adobes software was rife with problems and Apples platforms were better off without it. Adobeand a fair percentage of technology enthusiastssaw Apples exclusion of Flash as being about locking out competition, not enhancing the user experience. Now, Googles Android mobile operating system could run Flash. And for a time, makers of Android devices considered that a major advantage. BlackBerry, the maker of the PlayBook tablet, even ran TV commercials trumpeting Flash support as a defining feature. The only problem was that mobile Flash was awful. It taxed the devices of the period beyond their breaking point. Even if it had been more efficient, much of the worlds Flash content simply didnt work well on a tiny touchscreen. In 2011, Adobe gave up on mobile Flash. Then a suite of open web technologies known as HTML5 largely replicated Flashs features as part of web browsings basic functionality, no plug-in required. Many big sites started abandoning Flash, period. Adobe decided to wind down the technology in 2017 and stopped supporting it altogether in 2020. Todays internet is entirely Flash-free. I dont miss Flash in the sense of thinking we were better off when it was central to our computing lives or fantasizing about it coming back. Even in the days when Flash was quite pleasant, a single company bearing so much responsibility for how websites worked was never ideal. That became painfully clear when Adobe lost track of the values that had made Flash popular in the first place. When it finally died, I was able to reallocate the brain cells Id dedicated to wrestling with it to happier pursuits. Nevertheless, it was nice to remember the days when Flashs impact on the web was largely positive. As a startup, YouTube got a lot of things right, such as seeing its users as a community, not just a morass of eyeballs. But none of that would have mattered if the internet had still been stuck in the RealPlayer era. As Billy Biggs, a software engineer whos been at Google and YouTube since 2006, put it when I spoke with him for our YouTube history, Flash video is what made this all possible. It was the right technology at the right time. Thats as much a part of its legacy as its later regrettable evolution and descent into obsolescence. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on FastCompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company This interactive AI-generated podcast app from ex-Googlers blew my mindHuxe makes podcasts almost uncannily personaland even lets you talk to their AI hosts. Read More Inside Amazon’s ‘Iliad Flow,’ the deceptive UX at the center of its federal trialWe unpack the FTC’s claims that Amazon used design to trick customers into buyingand keepinga Prime subscription. Read More A Facebook dating app hopes to be the cure for ‘swipe fatigue’The AI-powered bot can even suggest pickup lines. Read More AI tools aren’t making much of a difference for companiesChat GPT, Copilot, and their competitors are boosting productivity without moving the needle on profit and loss. Read More 5 time-saving Outlook features you’re probably overlookingOnce you know these gems, you can’t go back to not using them. Read More I gave ChatGPT $500 of real money to invest in stocks. Its picks surprised meI told ChatGPT with GPT-5’s ‘Thinking’ model selected that I would give it $500 to invest however it saw fit. Read More
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E-Commerce
Whats the biggest company in the world? Apple? Amazon? Microsoft? No. Its Nvidia, which in early August became the worlds first $4 trillion company, overtaking both Apple and Microsoft. Last weeks results were eagerly awaited by the worlds markets and actually helped push the S&P 500 and Dow Jones to all-time highs. By the end of August, Nvidia accounted for more than 8% of the S&P 500, the largest weighting for a single stock in the indexs history. Yet, Nvidia isnt a household name. It doesnt make the devices in your pocket or the apps you use every day. Nvidia makes chips. Excellent chips, yes, but not unique in the way we tend to assume a $4 trillion product must be. Its success is not just a product story; its also a brand story. B2B is often treated as B2Cs poor relation. When budgets are tight, brand is first to be stripped back, reduced to a logo refresh or a new color palette. Nvidias rise proves thats a mistake. Its transformation from graphics chipmaker to the engine of the AI revolution shows how brand strategy can create enormous value. Here are six lessons B2B brands can take from Nvidias playbook. 1. More than a logo Nvidias brand identity hasnt changed much since the 1990s. The typography has been updated, but the odd, retro eye-and-square graphic remains. Many organizations would have dropped it long ago, worried it looked dated or alienating. Nvidias decision to keep it reflects confidence in what the brand stands for and in the loyalty of its audience, especially the developers and gamers who value its heritage. Many B2B brands struggle here. A new CMO arrives and the instinct is to refresh the logo. These changes are often driven more by internal pressure than by real market insight. In doing so, companies risk eroding recognition and alienating the very customers that anchor their brand. Companies need to ask: What do our core users value from us? What signals show continuity and confidence? Consistency builds familiarity, and that in turn builds trust. 2. Own a story, not just a product Nvidias two main rivals, AMD and Intel, have longer histories and strong product reputations. Yet Intel is seen as legacy computing and AMD as fast and affordable, while Nvidia is synonymous with the future. This isnt because Nvidia started AI, but because it positioned itself as the essential platform for enabling it, shifting from being a graphics processing unit manufacturer to the company powering the AI revolution, and framing its value in terms of possibility rather than price or speed. That positioning has contributed to a market cap 15 times AMDs and 47 times Intels, despite smaller revenues. Many B2B firms struggle to look this far ahead. Brand vision often gets tied to short sales cycles and annual budgets. The challenge is to set an ambition that stretches beyond the next quarter. Microsoft did this successfully with its cloud-first pivot. Intel seemingly failed to capitalize on the AI growth wave, falling behind AMD and Nvidia. Although it is reportedly working hard on a comeback, will it be enough to make up for lost time? The lesson: dont just describe what you make, own the bigger shift your products make possible. 3. Be more peacock Brands are regularly the victims of trends. The more established and reputationally safe they are the harder it is for them to stay connected to new audiences while remaining true to themselves. However, Nvidia has remained remarkably true to its central vision. It uses its core brand assetsthe logo, the greeneverywhere. This consistency reinforces recognition, particularly among its most loyal audience: a technically minded, brand-aware community that values the companys history. Where some brands tone down their heritage as they grow, Nvidia has leaned into it. Salesforce and Slack have both succeeded by sticking with distinctive, even playful, visual identities in a category prone to beige professionalism. In contrast, many brands caught up in the 2018 blanding epidemic traded characterful logos and flourishes for neutral sans-serifs, diluting their identities in the process. Often B2B brands should have the courage to lean into the brand assets that make them distinctive and unique, rather than feeling they need to follow the latest trend. 4. Make the brand an experience Nvidias GTC (GPU Technology Conference) has been described as the Super Bowl of AI, stadium-scale events wrapped in the brand, bringing together developers, researchers, and business leaders. These conferences position Nvidia not just as a supplier of hardware but as the platform powering whats next. Most B2B brands dont think about experience in this way. Customer experience is often a trade show booth or a sales meeting. Yet experience is where brand comes to life: through service design, digital platforms, physical spaces, and above all, people. Not every business needs stadium events, but every B2B brand can look at the moments where clients interact with them and ask: does this experience reflect who we are? Does it build confidence? Deloitte is a good example here. Its investment in connected digital and service experiences has made it the highest-valued commercial services brand by Brand Finance. 5. Partner for relevance Nvidias partnershipsfrom Tesla to Disney Research to Google DeepMindhave put it at the center of conversations about robotics, art, graphics, and AI. Each collaboration reinforces the companys relevance far beyond chips. B2B companies often fall into one of two traps: chasing partnerships haphazardly without alignment, or avoiding them altogether for fear of losing control. But the right partnerships extend credibility, and relevance. The lesson is to find partnerships that complement your brands value and purpose. Co-branded thought leadership, for example, can build credibility for both parties. Deloitte and Apples collaboration to accelerate enterprise mobility is a good example. The misstep comes when brands partner without clear alignment. 6. Build a human figurehead Nvidias CEO, Jensen Huang, has become a brand asset in his own right. Known for his leather jackets and unscripted keynote style, hes built a followingeven a nickname for his fanswhich is unusual in the world of B2B hardware. His visibility has amplified Nvidias vision while keeping the brand rooted in the community that uses its products. Most B2B leaders arent visible in this way. Either they avoid the spotlight, or they show up only in highly scripted investor calls. Yet charismatic leaders can create strong brand momentum. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce uses his personal platform to advance the companys narrative. Deloitte CEO Joseph Ucuzoglu has also become a recognizable voice on leadership and the future of work. For B2B brands, the takeaway isnt to manufacture celebrity. Its to encourage leaders toshow up authentically, in ways that reflect the brands values and ambitions. Brand is the differentiator From the outside, many B2B products can look more alike than they really are: another chip, another service, another platform. Thats when brand becomes the differentiator. Nvidias rise to the top wasnt just about cutting-edge engineering. It was about confidence: sticking with distinctive assets, claiming ownership of the future, showing up consistently, building meaningful experiences, partnering with intent, and amplifying it all through visible leadership. The lesson for B2B brands is simple. Dont treat brand as decoration. Allow your brand to be vision-led. Nvidia shows that even in categories that seem invisible or interchangeable, brand confidence can drive both growth and value.
Category:
E-Commerce
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