The line graph tracks the number of shops that closed and the number that opened in one country over the eight years from 2011 to 2018. Overall, closures outstripped openings in all but two years, 2011 and 2015. Openings declined markedly over the period as a whole, whereas closures, despite an extraordinary but brief collapse in 2015, ended the period only modestly below where they began.
The period opened with the highest number of openings shown, approximately 8,500, against around 6,400 closures. This picture was reversed almost immediately: in 2012 openings more than halved to under 4,000, while closures eased only slightly to about 5,900. Openings then staged a steady recovery to roughly 6,200 by 2014, almost drawing level with closures, which had climbed to a peak of about 7,200 in 2013 before receding to 6,500.
In 2015, closures plummeted to barely 600, by far the lowest figure for either category, so openings, at around 4,000, outnumbered them by more than six to one. This anomaly was short-lived, however; closures returned to approximately 5,200 the following year and remained close to that figure through 2018. Openings, in contrast, stagnated at about 4,000 for three years before dropping to 3,000 in the final year. By 2018, therefore, closures exceeded openings by over 2,000, almost the reverse of the situation in 2011.