Why do some big successful brands go bust?

Toast is back for a new series, taking a look at the decisions that often left investors burnt.

I'm Sean Farrington, a BBC business journalist. I'll be hearing about the hype.

They're going to do the deal that makes them the most money at that point of time.

And I'm picking what went wrong, talking to owners

and employees to ask, what can we learn? It was being undercut by similar rivals. It just couldn't

survive. Toast. Listen first on BBC Sounds. Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World

Service. We're a programme that examines

and unravels the numbers that underpin the world, and I'm Tim Harford. There's no doubt that

the pandemic has caused a global economic crisis, as well as a public health crisis,

but the impact has varied around the world. The most straightforward way to measure an economic hit

is by looking at GDP, gross domestic product. You can measure GDP by adding up everyone's income,

or everyone's spending, or the market value of everything that's been produced, and in principle,

all three methods produce the same number. In a typical recession, GDP falls by

a percentage point or three, but during the height of the first lockdown, the second quarter of last year,

GDP dropped by nearly 14% in France, 7% in Denmark, 19% in Spain. Economic catastrophe. But one country's economy seems to have

performed worse than almost anywhere else. The UK's. In the same period, its GDP fell by about

20%. I spoke to Simon Briscoe, director of the data science company, the Data Analysis

Bureau. Firstly, it can be put down to genuine economic response. Britain has a disproportionately

large service sector, so arts, cultures, entertaining entertaining sandwiches, pubs, the whole lot,

went into lockdown so money couldn't be spent. And secondly, there was a particularly large hit

from the fall in what is called government output, primarily schools and hospitals.

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