Good News for Main Street: America's New-Business Pipeline is Running a Third Above Pre-Pandemic

Here is a cheerful number from the world of small business. Americans filed about 1.72

million business applications in the 12 months to June that the U.S. Census Bureau judges

most likely to hire and open their doors, roughly 31% above the 2019 level, and the figure is

still rising rather than levelling off.

The finding comes from an analysis of Census Bureau Business Formation Statistics by Mandoe Media, a digital signage platform used by restaurants, cafes and shops. These likely-employer filings, which the Census Bureau calls high-propensity applications, rose 2.3% on the prior 12 months, so the pipeline of genuine new premises has kept building well

after the pandemic-era spike.

The measure is weighted towards consumer-facing businesses on purpose. Accommodation and food services and retail are among the sectors that qualify an application as high-propensity, so the count reflects the cafes, shops, gyms and salons opening across the country rather than companies that will never trade. Put another way, the likely-employer pipeline is running at roughly 143,700 filings a month, a steady stream of new cafes, salons and independent shops reaching for a lease and a shopfront. The sectors doing the heavy lifting are the visible ones: in the latest single month, retail drew about 77,200 applications across the country and accommodation and food services about 26,800.

"The encouraging part is that the number of businesses likely to open their doors and hire

is still climbing, not levelling off," said Paul Madden at Mandoe Media. "These are cafes,

shops and gyms, and every one of them has to introduce itself to customers from day one."

There is a sober footnote for the optimists. Applications of every kind reached about 6.02

million over the year, but the share likely to become a staffed business has slipped, from 37.6% in 2019 to 28.6% now. So the honest good-news line is the narrower one: not the raw

total, but the 1.72 million filings that look set to become real, hiring shopfronts. Mandoe Media put the study together from public Census Bureau data retrieved through the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, using no private figures. For anyone who prefers their economics with a bit of optimism, a pipeline of new shops and cafes that is still growing three years on from the pandemic is a cheering place to start.