It’s more than just lunch that is dying when it comes to restaurants
The U.S. restaurant industry is in a funk. Blame it on lunch.Americans made 433 million fewer trips to restaurants at lunchtime last year, resulting in roughly $3.2 billion in lost business for restaurants, according to market-research firm NPD Group Inc. It was the lowest level of lunch traffic in at least four decades.While that loss in traffic is a 2% decline from 2015, it is a significant one-year drop for an industry that has traditionally relied on lunch and has had little or no growth for a decade.“I put [restaurant] lunch right up there with fax machines and pay phones,” said Jim Parks, a 55-year-old sales director who used to dine out for lunch nearly every day but found in recent years that he no longer had room for it in his schedule.
Source: Going Out for Lunch Is a Dying Tradition – WSJ
We’d like to think that the Wall Street Journal staff are listeners to our weekly podcast, Cocktail Investing, but we’re realists here and we let the data speak to us so to speak. Nevertheless, just last week Chris Versace and Lenore Hawkins dug into this very issue as we could be facing “restaurant-mageddon”. Have a listen to this excerpt below, and if you like what you hear, download the full episode on iTunes .
