by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
Running a restaurant is tough even during the Good Times. But the strain put on restaurants now was beyond imagination not long ago.
The number of “seated diners,” a daily measure with which OpenTable tracks walk-ins and diners with reservations, in the week through January 20 in the US was down on average by 57% from the same period last year. But it was up from the multi-month low of -67% just before the Christmas holidays.
The calendar shifts in 2020 of Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Eve – holidays in 2020 were matched with regular weekdays in 2019 – make for some peculiar year-over-year comparisons around those holidays, as the spikes and troughs show. The “-100%” in April indicates that there were essentially no seated diners due to the lockdowns. And this has been showing up again in some cities that we’ll get to in a moment: