The American Restaurant Industry is Trying to Survive

I'm a good cook, but I don't necessarily like to cook. I like restaurants better. They are closed in Michigan, either permanently, or open only for take out, where the food is not so good by the time you get it home and warm it up. The good news is without restaurants to eat in, I lost 40 lbs. And my blood pressure declined 40 points. Don't worry, there's still plenty of me left 

New York City, San Francisco, and Honolulu"seated diners", at the better restaurants that take reservations, are still down over 80% from a year ago. In nearby Birmingham, Michigan outside dining is busy at some restaurants, but dead at others. My seasonal allergy season just started, so eating outdoors is not an option for me. And the social distancing is not that good. Soon it will be too cold for most outside dining in Michigan.

In many states, dining outside has been allowed for weeks or months. If there is lots of room outdoors, and the weather is good, a restaurant could be pretty busy, even with social distancing. In other places, indoor dining is allowed, at reduced capacity. No restaurant can make a decent profit at 25% or 50% maximum capacity with social distancing.

It's okay to sit two inches from a stranger in the air, on a plane, with both of you eating lunch with face masks off ... but you can't sit two feet away from strangers, on the ground, at the next restaurant table!

75% of the restaurants that took reservations before the pandemic are now taking reservations again, up from zero in April, according to OpenTable data. They provides online reservation services for 60,000 restaurants. On July 1, 65% of those high end restaurants were taking reservations again, but then new COVID outbreaks led to state rule changes.

“Seated diners,” is a measure of the business volume restaurants are doing. OpenTable provides data on seated diners, whether they’re walk-ins or had made reservations online or by calling, based on a broad sample of 20,000 restaurants that shared that information with OpenTable. It compares daily “seated diners” on the same weekday in the same week last year.

For the US, there was the plunge to zero seated diners.  Six months into the Pandemic, “seated diners” on August 27 were still down 47% from the same weekday in the same week last year (year-over-year, seven-day moving average).

 Here are some charts: