These five charts tell us restaurants are not going to be OK for a long time.
If you’ve read any recent dispatches from states that have begun to reopen their economies, you might be under the impression that restaurants are quickly filling back up as diners cast away concerns about the coronavirus for the sake of a meal out.
Here’s how the Washington Post,, recently described the packed scene at a luxury development in Alpharetta, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. “Along Avalon Boulevard, people were clustering at restaurants for their first dinners out, and at one of them, every table inside and outside was full, and people with done hair and done nails gathered hip to hip at the entrance to put in their names.” These sorts of vignettes make it seem like the reopening process is turning into a mad rush. If you’re worried about public health, they give you something to tear your hair out over. If you’re rooting for a quick business recovery, they give you reason for hope. But these stories are also misleading, at least if you believe the real-time industry data that are available right now, which suggest that customers are only gradually returning to dining rooms. They also point to a long, gloomy slog ahead for restaurants, one that many probably won’t survive., which tracks how many people eat in every day at a sample of 20,000 establishments that use the booking platform. In the dozen stateswhere foot traffic has recovered most, the number of diners on Saturday was still down by between 84 percent and 65 percent , compared with the same day a year ago.Jordan Weissmann/Slate Part of the reason restaurants are still relatively empty is that state and local governments are capping the number of customers they can serve at a time for the sake of social distancing. In turn, many restaurants have decided it still isn’t worthwhile to reopen because they’re it will be profitable. In most of the 12 early-bird states, between 18 percent to 25 percent of restaurants remain shuttered, according to the marketing software firm Womply. The notable exception is Tennessee, where only 11 percent are totally closed.Womply’s figures come from a database of credit and debit card transactions at millions of small businesses, including 48,000 restaurants. It considers an establishment “closed” if it hasn’t processed any payments in at least three days. In other words, these restaurants areshut down. They aren’t welcoming diners. They aren’t selling takeout. At about a quarter of restaurants in places like Georgia, the lights are just off, even if the rent is still due.open in these states? They do seem to be serving more people with each passing day—at least if you judge by the number of credit card transactions they’re processing. But there are big gaps between states. In Nebraska, the restaurants are charging 15 percent fewer customers than on March 1, according to Womply. But in Georgia, they’re charging 32 percent fewer, and in Florida they’re charging 39 percent fewer. And keep in mind, those numbers include all the takeout orders restaurants are filling, as well as customers who dine in.That brings us back to the question of how many people are actually dining in at restaurants that have opened their doors. To answer it, we can use numbers from Toast, a point-of-sale software vendor that has been publishing data from of its customers, including both full-service and fast food establishments. First, overall sales within its network are still down by 44.2 percent, year over year—and that only includes restaurants that are actually recording sales.Second, on-premises orders currently make up about 57 percent of sales, when normally it’s closer to 85 percent. If you do a little bit of arithmetic, you can work out that restaurants in these states are doing just over one-third of the dine-in business they were before. Even that number is probably high, since Toast’s “on-premises” figures include orders for pickup, just not delivery . But it at least gives you a sense of the low ceiling we’re talking about.
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